Can you make money from your pictures?

It doesn't seem like a great year for it -- a lot of the pros I know are looking for staff jobs to try and ride it out. My cousin has set up a wedding photography business, but the orders aren't exactly rushing in. Microstock and macro-stock still seem to make some money for folks, but as print media goes belly up, the audience for these things is also going to shrink dramatically.

Do you make money from your pictures, and if so, how?

I don't but I haven't really tried. I got a bunch of images rejected by Crestock and got slightly discouraged (instead of INSPIRED to do BETTER). I've done four or five proper jobs, once of which involved cash changing hands, another was remunerated in the form of a free flight to Chicago and three nights in a hotel! That needs an exclamation mark cos I still can't quite believe it happened.

Microstock and macro-stock still seem to make some money for folks, but as print media goes belly up, the audience for these things is also going to shrink dramatically.

See, I wonder if the opposite is true. I think that online publications are going to need online suppliers like Microstock even more now since their print cousins are losing photographers and to a certain extent, their image libraries.

Of course, most will just go on google image safari first, but that's going to be one of the next copyright frontiers to get nasty before too long.

a couple of random flickr mails have been requests for publication with actual offers of money: thank you, radar mag. i've also done a wedding for cash which i was woefully unprepared for and some jobs for friends' businesses that paid. but mostly they have been things like businessweek's website sending messages saying "we haven't got a budget for photos", which i didn't take well.

i do mainly live music but my efforts to get my act together and run it like a business have been v poor. sorting this out was supposed to be my aim for 2009.