With the tight economy many professional photographers I talk to are still pessimistic about sales.

They shouldn’t be.

As I walk through the lab today, I see more image-based products than ever before: press-printed photo books, photo merchandise, calendars, giant peel-and-stick vinyl wall prints, photographic wallpaper, metallic prints, dry erase boards, and gallery-wrap prints compete for floor space with standard 8×10 photographs.

Never has the professional photographer had a more creative and varied product line to offer to their customers. This is a great time to be in the photographic business.

Imagine you owned a clothing store. You don’t have any inventory, just sample photographs. A customer walks in and spots a photo of a jacket they love, but they need a different size and a darker shade of blue. With a snap of your fingers, the jacket is re-sized and the colors matched.

Why couldn’t you make every sale? In fact, I believe you’d have the most successful clothing store in the mall.

In the same way, once you have captured a great image, any product your customers can dream of can be made, limited only by their (and your) imagination. For example, using Lucis and Nik software, I’ve seen photographers create incredible works of art that would not have even been possible a few short years ago.

You can be pessimistic about the economy, or you can be enthusiastic about your profession. The choice is yours, but I guarantee it will show up in your bottom line.

Tags: marketing in tough times

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This entry was posted on Wednesday, January 6th, 2010 at 12:32 am and is filed under business. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.