Landscape photography from the field

Photography Business

What Actually Makes Money in Landscape Photography (And What Doesn't)
Video Tutorials

What Actually Makes Money in Landscape Photography (And What Doesn't)

Twenty years ago, I was shooting film in the Cascades and telling myself the business side would sort itself out. It didn’t sort itself out. It took years of painful trial and error before I understood which income streams actually fit the way I work and which ones were just noise from people who made their real money teaching others how to make money. That gap between “here are all the ways photographers earn a living” and “here is what actually works for a specific photographer with a specific body of work” is exactly what most tutorials skip over.

Why Selling Prints Kept Me Broke (And What Finally Gave Me Real Freedom as a Photographer)
Video Tutorials

Why Selling Prints Kept Me Broke (And What Finally Gave Me Real Freedom as a Photographer)

I’ve been waking up at 4am for two decades to chase light. I’ve stood in freezing rivers in January, driven through the night to catch a specific angle of alpenglow, and spent entire weekends in the field chasing a single image. For most of that time, I assumed the logical endpoint of all that work was a print shop. Shoot beautiful landscapes, hang them on a virtual wall, and wait for the world to notice.

From Local Landscapes to Local Income: 3 Practical First Steps for Getting Paid as a Landscape Photographer
Video Tutorials

From Local Landscapes to Local Income: 3 Practical First Steps for Getting Paid as a Landscape Photographer

There’s a question I get more than almost any other, usually from photographers who are somewhere in that uncomfortable middle ground: good enough to know their work has value, but not yet sure how to translate that into anything resembling income. For years I didn’t talk much about the business side of what I do, mostly because when I started, I figured things out slowly and quietly on my own. I spent a long time shooting for the love of it before I asked whether the work could also pay.

What Two Decades Behind a Lens Taught Me About Instagram and the Soul of Landscape Photography
Video Tutorials

What Two Decades Behind a Lens Taught Me About Instagram and the Soul of Landscape Photography

Every few months, someone in one of my workshops asks me whether it’s even worth posting on Instagram anymore. They’ve spent hours editing a shot, written a thoughtful caption, and watched it collect fourteen likes while some heavily filtered snapshot of a foggy pier racks up thousands. I never have a clean answer, because the truth is complicated. That’s exactly why I spent an evening watching Mark Denney work through this question in his video, Watch the full tutorial on YouTube.