What Do You Do With Photos Once You've Captured Them?

And What! playing at the Horse and Groom in Derby. When you have applied for something, or if you are asked to cover an event, then the purpose is entirely clear – or it should be… The brief for this gig was very specific – a small number of edited images to a defined timescale.

I started writing this prompted by a combination of having a series of edits to do against a timescale, after shooting a music evening at a pub, and discovering how many pictures I’ve got in the archives without ever having edited more than a couple from some sessions… The gig stipulation was that there should be two or three edited images of each performer delivered within three weeks, and it made me think about my editing and archives.

Every time I delve into the old negative files and the little fleet of external hard drives in my office, I find pictures I wish I’d edited sooner. A recent dive – I don’t recall what I was looking for – brought up a whole four hours’ worth of pictures of a model who flashed across the sky, briefly, in 2013. There’s now no trace of Victoria Wang on the internet, apart from my pictures of her: there are other, far more famous people with the same name.

Victoria Wang was her modelling name: I know nothing about the rest of her life. I spent four pleasant and creative hours taking pictures of her, a decade ago. I’ve used very few of the pictures for anything until recently.

But, as you can see, she was eminently well worth photographing, and I simply wish I’d taken more pictures on a second occasion, and that I’d worked out what to do with the images sooner.

And that is what this piece is about: what you can (or even should) do with the pictures that you took this week – and the ones from years back that you never printed/shared/posted anywhere.

This may be more of a problem for those of us who claim the title of ‘photographer’ than for others: so many people now use their mobile phones to document their lives and post the images on social media at once. Not wanting to transfer my pictures from camera to mobile to Facebook makes me a dinosaur, and probably more of a diplodocus than a tyrannosaurus or an oviraptor. (Beware, though, the backlash: a big dinosaur lashing its tail has the capacity to create a sonic boom as the tip flails at supersonic speed!)

The drummer’s at the back onstage and often gets overlooked. Get a frame or two of the less-obvious aspects of an event or location to make your images stand out from the rest.  And What! again.

This slowness can create ripples in the Duder household, as my wife expects the same connectivity (I think that’s the right word) as she gets with her iPad. But getting images onto social media requires editing, resizing, and a foray onto a website I use less than Ephotozine, by an order of magnitude or two.

Worse still (for me, with my love of doing things on two big screens with a keyboard and mouse to help me keep order) is the little app (Mixi’s Family Album) that we use in the family to share pictures of our granddaughter. I was able to join the family group on my desktop machine, but I can’t upload from there – I have to send the pictures to my mobile or iPad and upload from there. It’s a shame, and puts me out of step with everyone else in the family! Things have moved on, in a way that tends to exclude… This is a more specialist way to share. My daughter-in-law introduced me (and all the family) to this when young Della arrived on the scene late in 2021, and it provides a family (or group) album shared only by those you want to be involved. There’s real joy in that, as well as my angst at having to follow a more circuitous route than I do to post pictures on this site, and I heartily recommend the app to families.

When you are the groom’s father, taking pictures is a long way from being a major consideration: but you do get a privileged position from which to take some pictures. Much more relaxing than being the tog on active duty for the day.

I’ve always resisted the temptation to try to sell my pictures, for a couple of reasons. First and foremost, if you are selling something, you need to conform to the needs of the market: so you can’t just shoot what you want, unless you are exceptionally talented, and have interests that coincide exactly with a market opportunity. That’s not many people – and the ones who are that lucky always need to spend time on a secondary activity, marketing. This is equally true whichever area of photography you want to work in, from weddings (for which you need fearfully high levels of stamina, and an ability to manage expectations, as well as professional insurance in case of catastrophic failure of your equipment at a crucial point).

Wedding photography is amazingly hard work, and my only recent experience was as a backup for my daughter-in-law when she was heavily pregnant: ten days after this occasion, I became a grandad…

Recently, I’ve met a few photographers whose ambition seems to exceed their experience and knowledge. They know what they want to do with the pictures (in most cases, sell them), but they are short of the understanding of how to deliver the results they need if they’re going to do an honest craftsman’s job. They may be led more by YouTube trends than by knowing their gear and how to use it, and rather than learning from experienced models, they want to sell portfolio shots to newcomers. They’re often well-funded, judging by their equipment!

Maybe, though, they will flourish in an area that I shy away from – the production of ‘Content’ for websites. The tale of Iain Thompson is salutary: I wrote an obituary during lockdown, and my correspondence with him and reading the blog he wrote (which has now disappeared: searching for the name he used brings up someone entirely different) showed that his desire to shoot interesting erotic images was overtaken by the market’s interest in well-lit pornography. I have the impression that he was very tired of shooting well-lit pictures that were, essentially, all the same.

Content Creator:  Ashley Ashton222 has based her career more on sex appeal than her considerable elegance: she told me that she much prefers the relaxed and creative shoots to the down-to-business approach of shooting maximum sets in minimum time.

A model I know who has shot a great deal of ‘content’ (that’s industry jargon for images and video shot for pay websites) explained that the aim is to take pictures that are just right without editing, without cropping, and with no dud frames, so that the ‘workflow’ is trivially simple, and maximally profitable. It’s about flesh, not finesse.

So there’s a thing that you will probably not want to do: and even the most laddish ‘guy with camera’ (this is model speak for a completely uncreative person who is only interested in copying scenes from the top shelf magazines of his youth) will probably tire of shooting content. Models who do ‘content’ love the challenge of making more creative images, with photographers who are willing to make mistakes and spend time on lighting, shooting and editing.

A selection of pictures that my father collected during his service as a padre in the Royal Navy, on the now-tatty envelope they were in. I can’t pin down anything about them, except that I think the bottom and middle left prints are my father, and the top centre image is from post-war ditching operations.

Positive things to do with your pictures? Whatever your ability and experience, get some prints done! At best, these will provide lasting joy for family and friends – at worst, they will be a conundrum for your descendants, like the cache of pictures my sister discovered. Our dad collected them during his wartime service in the Royal Navy as a chaplain, but most of the prints have nothing written on the back to indicate who or where…

A more modern take is to work out how to post to social media, even if you do have to email files to yourself on your pad or ‘phone! While much of social media is about showing off and distortion, you can use Facebook as your family album, and share sooner with everyone who wants to look.

eThere are different pressures on Facebook and other sites from those at ePHOTOzine: so I set up a page to put some of my pictures on. I have to confess that I don’t go there terribly often, though.

With a wider audience in mind, Chris Mills not only published a calendar of some of his glamour images but also has aircraft pictures on sale in the café at Gloucester airport. Selling your images doesn’t have to be done on a large scale, and it’s notable that if you have a good working relationship with any person or organisation in a position to put your images on show, they may well agree – if you ask. Getting up the nerve to do something is very much a recurring theme here.

Since I’ve had a high-quality printer, making prints has got a great deal easier. However, my wife and I haven’t yet agreed on an optimum size for prints – putting enprint-sized paper into an A3+ machine seems like an odd way to be going on… However, putting A4 prints on the mantelpiece may also be a little sub-optimal…

Competitions – I know some photographers who are obsessed with competitions… If you have a competitive nature, you’ll probably be doing this already at some scale, possibly just in your own club… But if you enjoy this, and are doing well, it’s worth looking for bigger pools to swim in, and arenas where you can compete with successively more exalted adversaries. You may go for the glory with international exhibitions, which I believe are mostly online these days (the cost of making, packing and sending prints used to be a major factor: these days, there are only entry fees). Alternatively, you might want to look for competitions where there is a solid reward for doing well, maybe in camera magazines, though there are fewer of these than there used to be: I discovered that Practical Photography ceased publication in 2020…

Competitions in print magazines are more or less a thing of the past: the competitions that remain tend to require on-line entry, often with an entry fee. 20 years back, the cost lay in envelopes and return postage costs.

Shortly after I started writing this piece, a friend reminded me of a hybrid between prints and the web, the LCD photo frame. For a while, these were all the rage, and now they seem to have The most basic of these now seem to be very cheap (around £10 for enprint-size), but there’s a lot of upselling, with Wi-Fi connection and other elaborations. This can be a good solution for a load of pictures that you want to display in rotation, but beware the ‘cleverness’ of design: notably, complex menus systems, like the ones that tiny compact cameras have instead of dedicated function buttons, and flashy sequences that dissolve one frame into the next. It can rapidly become annoying to see an image appear in rectangular patches, and I’m not sure there’s anything you can do about it. Even with a deep dive into the menu and instruction book…

Although I understand that rates have fallen to as low as 10p per publication per image, photographers who can deliver good record shots and generic images (for instance, of someone using a computer in an office, complete with model release form) continue to supplement their income through picture libraries. I’ve never tried, myself, lacking the focus to produce enough pictures with no essential spark. That’s my excuse. Jubilee Pool, Penzance.

Picture libraries are a low-key way of making money from your images if you like shooting the sort of thing that picture libraries like to sell. Does that sound a bit backhanded? Well, it’s meant to: like any other sort of commercial enterprise, successful practitioners understand, feed, and anticipate the market. I keep reading that one or another library has cut its rates and that the business is becoming less and less profitable – it’s a good side hustle for someone with the right pictures on file (and plenty of them: there is often a minimum submission quantity).

And then there are various places that you may be able to sell a few images… Etsy might give you an outlet, as might Redbubble – the deal with Etsy is that you supply the goods, Etsy finds the customers: at Redbubble, your images are offered in various forms, including mobile ‘phone covers and T-shirts, which are sourced by the site, with a small percentage of the sales proceeds going to the artwork/photograph provider. If you have quantities of really good images, perhaps Patreon (where you offer images and other goods in return for a subscription) will be a worthwhile place to look. Beware, though, that in many such arenas, there is a minimum pay-out, and your earnings stay firmly with the provider (which takes a significant – but perhaps not unfair – proportion of earnings in any case). My casual, not-really-bothered approach doesn’t work, although choosing and uploading images to Redbubble kept me out of trouble for a while.

Vicki has been gracing my pictures, under different names, for a decade and more. As well as ‘model shoots’ I covered her 30th birthday party, just before lockdown. This might not be a competition winner, or suitable for a magazine cover (it’s landscape format) but I am rather pleased with it!

I hope this has provided a few ideas, and at the least has pushed you towards getting a few prints done to hand around the family. Whether you shoot for art, a record, or simply for the fun of using a camera, see if your pictures can have a second life bringing enjoyment to other people as well as to yourself.