photographers

Last week I decided to apply at Photoshelter Collection to submit my images. Photoshelter Collection orginally concentrated their business on offering an online storage solution for your images. At the end of last year and the beginning of this year, they started what they call Photoshelter Collection, which offer photographer the opportunity to sell their images. Photoshelter presents themselves on their homepage with these words:“We believe photography is an art and a profession, not a commodity. We are determined to restore diversity and freshness to this industry. We believe photographers deserve a level playing field and the majority percentage of their sales. Our community is open and growing by the hundreds every week.” This is very convincing for me, as is their payment scheme. I put a badge on the left hand side linking to my microsite at Photoshelter. I was accepted yesterday, so you want find that many images yet, but the amount of images on that site will be growing. 

What a week. I sent out invitations to join my Linkedin network to hundreds of people, literally. What’s my experience so far? Well, no I haven’t received any photo jobs out of the extension out of my network so far. This was firstly not intended and secondly, I am thinking long term. There are simply not that many photographers in South Africa, as well connected as I am currently am on Linkedin. That will probably change. What I gathered so far, are lots of great responses and people actually checking my web sites on what I am doing. There are several invitations open for coffee all over the world.

Most importantly, I was able to connect with people, I would not have known existed, who might be of high interest for my work in the future. This is really great, as my focus is on building long term relationships with people I actively network with. There are lots of contacts, who I probably will never meet, but I am determined on staying in contact and not just have people as a name in my network without context.

The stats: 420 people are connected directly to me and about 6.6 million people are in my total network. Of the total, 12200 work in the photo industry worldwide and 5900 users in any industry live in Cape Town. The overall number sounds impressive, but for me it is far more important to connect to the relevant and active users in Cape Town and South Africa. That is the area, where I currently work.

What I found, when I checked many of the profiles is that a) a fair number of users in South Africa only have a minimum profile on Linkedin and b) that these users did not update their profile in a long while, which makes it highly uninteresting to contact them.

There is a direct correlation between, how many people someone has in his/ her network and how up to date a profile is. Someone with only 1 connection has in most cases just entered the bare minimum and hasn’t bothered since.