Photographers and Artists: How To Get Your Work Seen
Are you a photographer or an artist? You could be casually doing either, but your work might be good enough to win a prize or make a career from it! What have you got to lose by trying these techniques to get people to notice your work?
Social Media
A good way to store photos even without thinking of promoting them is by creating a Facebook, Instagram or Twitter page dedicated to your photography or art. However, social media is the ideal method of promoting and presenting your work for a potentially huge audience to see too! The more people you connect with, the larger network you’ll create for potentially getting your work out there, to help with any of the suggestions we have below!
Facebook, Instagram, Flickr and Pinterest are great sites to create portfolios and share your work between peers and wider audiences easily. Twitter is a great platform for generating a conversation, with the opportunity to create threads detailing how a certain shot was taken or engaging with other photographers and artists asking for tips. Facebook has thousands of localised groups that you can engage with, asking for tips, giving advice or just posting your favourite photos.
Competitions
Just like our own, Monthly Photo Competition, many businesses, forums, and online groups arrange competitions with a variety of prizes! These accreditations show future potential endorsers for exhibitions that your pieces do have an audience, and they’ll look quite nice on your website too.
Exhibitions
Both photographers and artists can apply to enter exhibitions to portray work! If you think you’ve got a piece that’s very good, or it’s won multiple competitions online and offline, then you have nothing to lose by asking around to present your piece. This does require hard craft, as exhibitors don’t usually come knocking, you’ll have to do the research and put the effort in yourself.
Run a Blog
You could almost treat it like a diary, for your notes and images! This way, you could keep a nice log of the sorts of images you’ve taken before, previous techniques and progress. The development could highlight how far you’ve come in your chosen field, and you could even use this as a portfolio then trying to sway the opinion of the exhibitions or potential website feature.
Website Features
Just like us, many companies and forums like to do photographer features on their site, in return for endorsements or features. This is the same for artists as well. If there’s a certain product you like using whether it be for canvases, printing or camera equipment, to name a few, you could get in touch with the company to see if they’d like to feature you. If you show consistent evidence of being a fan of their product, they’ll love nothing more than a customer feature.
A Website
Much like having a social media page such as Instagram to present your work, a website where you can present and potentially sell popular photos or artwork is a must. It’s the ideal way for people to easily find you if they see one of your pieces or your name. Be sure to add contact details, through an email address or a contact form, so people who are interested in your work can get in touch! You can link all of your social media accounts, and provide the online features you do for businesses a link your website from theirs.
Wallpaper & Screen Backgrounds
Mostly with photography, if one of your images is rich in colour, crisp in clarity and can be scaled for iPhones, iPads or Desktop, you could list, with watermark signature, your work available on some wallpaper websites for people to download and use. This could spark someone being interested in similar images or your unique style, meaning you’ve gained a fan!
Use a Creative Commons License
One of several public copyright licenses, the Creative Commons License allows others to consensually use your work, with your permission, not breaching copyright laws. This would allow organisations to use your images.
This list definitely isn’t exhaustive, there are so many routes you could try to get your work noticed. Creating a website and getting some social media accounts for your work under your name is a great starting point!
