Looking for fantastic ideas to generate some money from your photos?

While surfing the net seeking for inspiration, I came across a great photo blog, Photopreneur, and I want to share the discovery with you.

It’s guaranteed you will find interesting ideas to expand on and great tips on starting a home photo business inside the list of 52 ways to monetize your photos.

Got a hard drive full of pictures?

If you’ve got good photos, you’ve got an opportunity to make some useful extra money.

Here are 52 ways to monetize your images.

 

Many of these ideas could very well suit a “stay at home parent” lifestyle.

It’s truly fun to read about stimulating and creative digital photography projects and I am sure to try out a couple of them!

Editors of Photopreneur also published appealing photography books and they are available on Amazon. Just click on the book cover to access more information on them.

99 Ways To Make Money From Your Photos

The Succesful Flickr Photographer

Wedding Photographer

Enjoy and talk soon!

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PS: Do not hesitate to come back and leave a comment on this post about ideas that catched your fancy or others you would like to add to the list .

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In my Inbox this morning was an email promoting the The Helicon Focus Software. I do get many promotional emails but this one grabbed my attention.

Anything relating to digital photography catches my fancy but moreover with this product because it addresses a problem I have of getting ultra sharp close focus with macrophotography shooting.

The topic hit me right on…and..believe me..you gotta check this out !

Helicon Focus Digital Imaging Processing Software

Helicon Focus interpolation technique makes it possible to create one completely focused image from a stack of partially focused images by combining all the focused areas together.

Searching for more information on the product, I found a video on YouTube where Peter Bargh from ephotozine.tv explains how to shoot the images and then use the software to combine all the shots to get ultra sharp close focus.

Let’s watch it together. Just click on the arrow in the middle of the player and the video will start:

The software is designed for  macrophotography (camera + optical microscope), microphotography (camera + macro lenses) and hyperfocal landscape photography ( infinite depth of field) as well.

Seems to be  a great and easy way to manage the shallow depth-of-field (DOF) problem. Don’t you think ?

If you are already using the software do not hesitate to share your experience by leaving a comment below. Also, if any of you are using any other different techniques, I would be delighted to hear your feedback.

Gotta go try out this technique.

Talk soon,

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Custom Search

Canon PowerShot Pro Series S3 IS 6MP with 12x Image Stabilized Zoom

Took Photo below with my Canon PowerShot 3S IS

While researching stock photography sites on the Internet, I landed on ShutterFarm’s website and started reading their submission guidelines.

Inside the Image Requirements section it is said:

* All images must be a minimum 1.92 mega pixels (the height x width of your image in pixels)

* Maximum file size allowed is 100MB * You should always provide the largest size possible

* You may submit photographs and other digital images

* All images must be in .jpg format (vector graphics will be accepted at a later date)

* All work must be owned by you. Adding text or an effect to an existing stock photo does not constitute ownership of an image

(etc…)

Source: http://www.shutterfarm.com

Sounds great to me!  I logged onto my hard disk and retrieved some food related shots taken recently while visiting my friends house in Bordeaux, France, to see if I had some that would meet the submission criteria.

By the way, this juicy cantelope was served as an appetizer with lemon liquor poured in the scooped out receptacle, and then shaped back into a stylized sailing ship. Delicious! That being said.. back to the calculation process.

Here’s a screenshot of Photoshop metadata for the image:

( my software is in french, sorry about that…)

To calculate the size of my image, I multiply the height (2112) x the width (2816), to get 5,947,392 pixels, or approximately 5,9 megapixels of resolution.

It makes sense since I used a “6 megapixel” camera for this shot.

I can therefore submit this image to ShutterFarm as I meet the minimum requirement of 1.92 megapixels.

Do notice that we are talking megapixels here, not megabytes…

Now, let’s try to understand the relation betwen megapixels and megabytes, since Photoshop metadata tells me also that the picture I’m viewing on my screen  weighs 3.01 Megabytes,  (because Photoshop compressed it ) while the original image weight is 17.0 megabytes.

The  original picture I took has 5.9 megapixels and weighs 17.0 megabytes.

How do megapixels relate to megabytes?

1 megapixel = how many (mega) bytes ?

The size in bytes (or megabytes => a millions of bytes) defines how much space (storage) the image takes on your hard disk and it depends on many factors, but to name just a few:  mainly the bit depth of the image and the file format.

So, to avoid confusion, stock agencies use megapixels when specifying file size needed not megabytes.

Hope this short explanation will help clear up the confusion!

Talk soon.

Following my post about inserting photos in emails, I received the following question from reader Hope H.:

I was just reading your article on inserting photos into email. I use either Yahoo or Hotmail, and have none of those features. I can’t change to another email. I created a newsletter and it includes 2 small photos and a little clip art, none of which show up when I send them. All I get is white boxes with red xs. Any help would be appreciated. Thanks! And, btw, your advice was great and well written. I just wish it worked in my case!

Thanks for your good words Hope. They are greatly appreciated and  I am happy to share with you a way to resolve your problem.

Here’s an easy 3-steps method to insert images in your Yahoo mail:

Step #1. Upload your image to a web server

If you do not have your own hosting service or access to a web server to which you can upload your image, you can use any free image hosting web services such as:

FreeImageHosting.net
PhotoBucket.com

Just google the phrase “free image hosting” if you want to check out more websites offering same  service.

Step #2. Configure your Yahoo email account to “Rich Text”.

To the right of the subject line ( see screenshot below ) set your email composition to “Rich Text”. It is probably by default set up to that format, but in case it is not, just click on the word and it will toggle it between “Plain Text” and “Rich Text”.

Step #3. Copy & Paste from the web-server page to the body of your text.

Go back to the web page where you uploaded your image in Step#1, click on it to shadow same, then “copy [CTRL-C] and paste [CTRL-V]” with your keyboard commands directly into the body of your mail at the exact position where you want it to display.

Et voilà!

You are good to go.

Try it out and do not hesitate to come back and let me know if everything worked out perfectly by leaving a comment below.

Cheers.

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A very popular and fun way to display and share your photography with friends and family is to insert them in your emails. Would you like to try it out ? it’s easy…

There is two ways to include a photo into an email: as an attachment or as an insert.

Photo Attachments

I do not recommend using the attachment method because attachments are often being used mischievously to spread virus and some anti-virus programs or firewalls installed on computers may block them . So let’s skip right away to the insertion method.

Photo Inserts

When the recipient opens the email, they can view the photo(s) along with the text.

Here’s the step-by-step procedure to insert photos in emails:

Step 1.

In your email program, open a new message.

On the top navigational toolbar, click on the INSERT command, and then choose IMAGE from the drop-down menu.

Insert - Image

A window will pop-up.

Step 2.

Click on the CHOOSE FILE button to locate on your hard disk  the photograph you want to send.

Once you found it, click on the photo file’s name. Notice the path to it’s location on the hard disk now displays in the location field of the pop-up window.

Insert A Picture From Hard Disk

Step 3.

Click on the OK button.

Your photo now displays into the body of your message! Isn’t that cool ?

Photo Displays In Body Of Email

You can now type your message. Let’s be creative and add a color background to the email.

Step 4.

On the top navigational toolbar, select the FORMAT command, then, from the drop-down menu, click on the PAGE COLORS & BACKGROUND  option.

Select a color of your choice  and then click on OK.

Colored background

Et voilà !  Your mail can now convey much more emotions along with your message.

Don’t we say that a photo is worth 1,000 words ?

CAUTION !

One thing you must take into consideration when emailing photos is the file size of your photos. Keep in mind that many people are still on dial up systems and it might take forever to download
on their computer !

They won’t stay your friends very long if you bog down their system or fill up their inbox storage capacity.

So, with the help of a photo editing software, be sure to compress your photos before you include them in your emails, otherwise the photos will be so large that the only way to view them on the recipient computer screen will be to scroll up and down and side to side. Not very convenient.

As a guideline, the size of your photos should be around 600 x 400 and the file format extension should be .JPG or .GIF

No matter where they live, make someone’s day by sharing treasured memories through pictures inserted into your emails.