If you are a professional, or an aspiring professional photographer, you rely on your photographic work to bring you financial rewards. Self-satisfaction alone, won’t pay enough. If you want to earn money from your pictures, then you will have to find someone to pay you for them. Here are a few strategies that you can implement to start selling your food photography!

There are many ways to sell your food photos. I’m going to break them down here and give details on each one.

• Food Blogging
• Commissioned Work
• Stock Food Photography
• Commissioned and Stock creating synergy

There are several ways to make money from your blog and the food photography part is just one of them. Here’s a few ways to do just that with your blog.

• Doing sponsored posts for brands where you use their recipe, photography it, and publish it on your blog.
• Doing sponsored posts for brands where you develop a recipe for the client, photograph it, and publish it on your blog.
• Doing social media campaigns for brands where you take photos of their products and they use your image on their social media channels, or they pay you to show them on your social media channels.
• Creating contents for brands.
• Creating your own cookbook ebooks and selling them on your blogs.

Commissioned photography jobs are the jobs where you are hired to take photos for your clients as a freelance artist. There are plenty of clients out there who need beautiful images of their food.

Here are a couple of different types of clients that could hire you to create beautiful mouthwatering food images for them.

Direct Client

you are working directly with the client. There is no one communicating between you and the client.

Here are all the types of commissioned work you can  do with your food photography that typically is client direct:

• Restaurants
• Magazines
• Startup food companies
• E-commerce –  food or meal delivery websites
• High-end grocery stores

Agency Work

You are working with the company who is not the end client. Here are all the types of commissioned work that you can do with an agency client.

• PR firms that specialize in food and beverage and/or restaurants
• Design studios – food packaging
• Ad agencies – ads, packaging, brochures, pamphlets, restaurant menus, website work, social media campaigns, just to name a few

Stock photography is a great concept. Who wouldn’t want to shoot something once and then get paid over and over again from different clients to use that image? The answer is every photographer would! The key to successful stock food photography is to figure out a niche of images that there is a demand for and isn’t over-saturated.

Instead of shooting the food items that are found everywhere, do something unique!  Embrace where you live and create a stock library from that.

Here are probably the best places to try to sell your images for stock.

• Stock Food
• Getty Images
• Adobe Stock
• Shutterstock

Image Courtesy: GlamFlame Studios  Client: OhMyBiryani
Via: Fstopper, Foodphotographyblog