“Going up…!”
I’ve been working as a professional photographer since 2013, and I just thought I’d provide you with some insight into how I make money.
It’s not easy - unfortunately! - but I hope to be able to share some data with you that might help with your own career.
I’m a wildlife photographer, so most of the data relates to images of animals and birds, but there are wider lessons to be learned whatever your specialism.
Overall earnings
First of all, let me make one thing clear: I’m not David Yarrow. I don’t hold exhibitions of my work at Somerset House, and I don’t make millions from photography.
Having said that, we’re in a similar position in that we both had careers in business before turning to wildlife photography.
He just ‘transitioned’ a bit more successfully than I did…!
I turned professional in 2013 after going on my very first safari. I climbed Mount Kenya and spent a week on game drives in Kenya.
When I came home, I immediately signed up to a few stock agencies, and within six months I was seeing my first sales.
As you can see from the chart above, my earnings have grown every year, but my monthly earnings are still only around £1,000.
That’s not really enough to live on - especially in south-west London! - but I’m lucky enough to have a few other sources of income, including property and teaching, that allow me to make two or three photographic trips a year.
The highlight of my career came in 2019, when I was fortunate enough to spend four months as the ‘resident photographer’ at various safari lodges owned by andBeyond and Cottar’s in Tanzania and Kenya, and I ended up taking nearly 90,000 pictures!
As the old saying goes, “If you don’t speculate, you don’t accumulate,” and photography is not a cheap hobby.
This article is focused on the revenue I’ve earned over the years, but the cost of all my long-haul trips to far-flung places on every continent has been so vast that I don’t think I’ve ever made a single penny in profit!
Maybe that will change one day, but at least I can help you avoid all the mistakes I’ve made myself…
Sources of income
I’m still a relatively inexperienced photographer, and I’ve been feeling my way through my career with very little guidance or help from friends or colleagues.
What I’ve tried to do essentially is push at every door I could think of and see whether they opened up to me.
Sometimes that has worked, and sometimes it hasn’t.
On the positive side, I’ve made most of my money from two sources:
downloads through stock agencies
print sales at exhibitions
During lockdown, I also wrote a couple of e-books for Expert Photography, which was a nice bonus.
On the negative side, I’ve made very little money from all the other avenues I’ve tried:
competitions
equipment rental
lessons
photo shoots
greetings cards
talks
wallpaper
To be fair, I have won quite a few national and international competitions, but the prizes have rarely been in the form of cold, hard cash.
I won a £250 gift certificate in the Sunday Times/Audley Travel Big Shot competition and a nice pair of binoculars in another one, but that’s about it.
Kudos is very hard to deposit in your bank account…
Stock photography
Stock photography is the bread and butter of my photography business, so I think it’s worth focusing on that side of things.
Stock agencies are simply online intermediaries that accept work from photographers and then market those images to potential clients such as creative directors of newspapers, magazines and other buyers.
The advantage of using them is that it’s a passive income that you can build over time as you add more and more shots to your portfolio. In other words, it’s ‘making money while you sleep’.
However, it’s important to make a distinction between stock agencies and ‘microstock’ agencies.
Stock agencies work on a ‘high value/low volume’ basis. I have a five-year exclusive contract with Design Pics, and I give them first choice of all my images. They sell individual images for hundreds of pounds, which means my commission on those sales is quite high, but they may only sell a few of my pictures per month.
Microstock agencies offer the same service, but they work on a ‘low value/high volume’ basis, which means I have to accept commissions on individual images of as little as 10 cents in the hope that the sheer volume of sales makes up for it.
On average, I only make around £1 from each download.
Here is the list of the microstock agencies I’ve used (in descending order of sales):
In recent years, I’ve culled the number of agencies I’ve used in order to focus on the most successful ones, and I now only use 13 (including Design Pics).
The Pareto curve (or the 80:20 rule)
What I’ve learned from analysing the data is that the vast majority of my sales are accounted for by a relatively small proportion of my images (and agencies).
I currently have 15,959 images on sale with agencies, and I’ve had 17,172 downloads, but I’ve only ever had sales from 4,642 individual files - the rest haven’t made me any money at all!
Another way of looking at it is to consider my top 10 most popular images:
Adélie penguin jumping between two ice floes: 2,373 downloads
Bear about to catch salmon in mouth: 360
Galápagos giant tortoise crossing straight dirt road: 273
Brown bear about to catch a salmon: 161
Cheetah sitting in grassy plain turning right: 150
Cheetah walks down twisted tree in savannah: 136
Cheetah chasing Thomson’s gazelle among whistling thorns: 122
Jaguar lying by log in dense undergrowth: 108
Mono close-up of Grévy’s zebra in dark: 88
Close-up of baby plains zebra beside mother: 68
The lesson to be learned from this is that sometimes one of your images will just ‘go viral’.
There doesn’t appear to be any particular reason for it, so it’s impossible to tell which one it’s going to be, but it’s nice when it happens!
If you look at the agencies I’ve used over the years, you’ll see a similar picture.
I’ve earned a total of £15,242 over the years from agencies, and as you might expect, I’ve earned the most money from Design Pics, but after that it gets a bit random.
Here are my cumulative sales for all the agencies I currently use plus the ones I’ve used in the past:
Design Pics: £3,330
Shutterstock: £2,282
Adobe/fotolia: £2,243
Getty/iStock: £1,681
EyeEm: £1,151
500px: £662
123RF: £494
PIXTA: £486
Dreamstime: £462
Depositphotos: £386
Bigstock: £205
Alamy: £188
PantherMedia: £136
Former agencies: £840
Other non-agency sources (eg private sales): £722
Animal popularity
One other thing I can do with all this data is to see which animals (and birds) are the most popular.
First of all, let’s see which animals are most popular in my portfolio.
I’ve spent a lot of time in Africa, so obviously the cheetah and lion are pretty well represented…!
Now let’s look at how many sales come from each type of wildlife.
The number of cheetah and lion pictures in my portfolio obviously skews this chart, so let’s have a look at another version, this time one that shows how many downloads per image on sale.
These last two charts seem to show the popularity of penguins, but if I take out the sales of my insanely popular jumping penguin shot, the figure for downloads per image on sale falls to just three…!
What we have left at the top of the table are the Galápagos giant tortoise, the (polar and brown) bear and the jaguar.
Nothing else comes close.
I wouldn’t read too much into these figures, but it does illustrate the trade-off between supply and demand: yes, penguins, cheetahs and lions are popular, but there are so many shots of them out there that you might be better off trying to find the ‘sweet spot’ with images of apparently less popular animals.
Seasonality
When I was starting out as a photographer, I was lucky enough to see fairly steady growth in my stock agency sales.
However, the results did bounce around a lot - which caused me occasional heartache! - and it was only after a few years that I had enough data to be able to see whether there were any seasonal trends that explained such volatility.
The answer is yes, but only really in the month of March.
In terms of the number of downloads, the general trend is upward across all the annual series (which is consistent with a growing business), but look at the sudden jumps in March.
Admittedly, this is partly due to the fact that my year-end is 6 April, so I include 1-5 April sales in the March figures, but that doesn’t explain all of the rise.
This is even more obvious in the value of sales.
I don’t know what’s happening in March, but it’s worth thinking about any seasonal trends that exist in your own niche.
You might at least manage to make yourself feel better when you’ve had a bad month…!
If you’d like to order a framed print of one of my wildlife photographs, please visit the Prints page.
If you’d like to book a lesson or order an online photography course, please visit my Lessons and Courses pages.