Maria Piscopo

Starting in the business of fine art photography is not easy. More than anything, there will be a lot of peaks and valleys ahead. In this column, we look at how to navigate some of these issues, find clients, seek gallery representation, and market your work. Thanks to my contributing photographers: Larry Angier, Michael Garlington, Laurie Klein, RJ Muna, and Brooke Shaden.

While branding might not be as sexy a topic as fashion or travel photography, it’s a critical element to making your photography business a success. Fortunately, we have a good group of educated and experienced photographers to help bring us up to date on what branding is, how to create it, mistakes to avoid, and why it’s so important to your business. Bottom line? Marketing your photography with a strong brand message will give you a competitive edge and get you paid what you are worth. I want to thank my patient contributors for sharing their knowledge and lessons with us: Casey Bevington, Matthew Dutile, Andrew Fingerman at PhotoShelter, Karen Hirsch, Giulio Sciorio, Beth Taubner at Mercurylab, and Daniel Waters at Get Pro Photo. They gave so many good ideas and tips that you will want to take notes!

At this moment there are 32,527,830 #travelphotography posts on Instagram. With so many travel images posted online, and available for free, our business concern is that clients may find a great deal of those photos “good enough” to use. All of which makes it harder and harder to get a paying job as a travel or landscape photographer these days.

When you fly commercial airlines these days, they always seem to make a point to say, "We know you have a choice in airlines, thank you for choosing us!" There are a lot of wedding photographers for prospective clients to choose from, but then again there is lots of business to go around. With the low-end wedding market taken over by "Cousin Jerry" with his...