Unlocking the Business of Travel Photography: From Passion to Profit

In this episode of the Travel & Adventure Photography School Podcast, we dive into the business side of travel photography. Discover how to turn your passion for capturing adventures into a profitable career. We explore the current market trends, discuss strategies for building a unique brand, and share practical tips for monetizing your work. Whether you're a novice looking to start your journey or a serious amateur aiming to go pro, this episode is packed with insights to help you succeed. 
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Transcript

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How's it going everybody. Welcome back. Welcome back to the travel and adventure photography school podcast. As always, I'm your host, Robert Massey. Thank you so much for taking a few minutes to hang out with me and improve your photography skills. In today's episode, we're going to talk about all the things that you can do to turn your passion for travel or adventure photography into a profitable business. Whether you're just starting out or looking to elevate your game. This episode is. Packed with practical tips and advice for how you can create a profitable. Travel creative business, whether that's in photography or videography or writing or anything else. This is really about how you can be come a profitable travel content creator. But first. Just a big, thank you to you. I do this podcast because I love the conversations that starts with folks. I do this because I love to see people grow and succeed. And I honestly think there should be way more art in this world. So that's why I'm out here just creating this for fun. I am so stoked that you have chosen to take a few minutes to listen and to improve your skills. So thanks for doing that. Thanks for taking some time for you today and to improve what you are doing. All right. Let's get into it. The first thing, when you talk about is understanding the market. I'm sure we've all seen the shift in recent years. With travel photography, becoming a very mainstream source of income for some people. With the rise of social media platforms like Instagram and Tik Tok, even Pinterest to a degree there's a growing demand for high quality travel content. Being driven out there, not just by users, not just by people, scrolling Instagram and scrolling Tik Tok, but by destinations. By hotels by tour guides, by trip planners by so many people in the travel industry. And this is because globally teavel and tourism's direct contribution to gross domestic product to the GDP. I was approximately 7.7 trillion us dollars in 2022. That's about a 7% share of the total global GDP. That is an insane amount of money that is out there. And that is why. They want people coming to areas. That is why. Destination marketing organizations exist. That is why tourism demand exists. And that is why they are hiring people to capture travel content. And yes, there's still a dramatic need. For statics in the travel industry. I use them in our paid marketing. I have shot them for people in their own paid marketing. And you see them all over the place, even if you don't necessarily engage with them the same way on social media. Obviously also huge need for short form video for long form video for writing, basically any type of content that you can think about. The tourism industry really, really needs. But how do you get involved in doing that? You first off need to start by understanding the market. Advertising yourself for destinations and for tourism work is not the same as advertising yourself for portraits and weddings. And even to some degree commercial work that you would do for companies to show off jackets or shoes or clothing or whatever. And that's because it needs to target people in a different way. When you're selling a piece of clothing, your selling that clothing, obviously, but you're also selling what that clothing can basically help somebody do. So if your Arc'teryx. You're selling clothing. That shows you can be outdoors. You can be doing these amazing things. You've been going on. These expeditions. If you're selling fashion, where you are selling clothing, that's going to make that person feel better about themselves. It's going to make them stand out in the fashionable crowds. When you were selling a destination. You need to sell people on why they need to see this place on how they're going to feel well, they're here on how it's going to revolutionize them or change them or alter their perspective or allow them to relax or. Whatever it is in each destination. Has its own goals for what they want to achieve and how they want to speak to people in all those different markets. So you really need to start by doing your market research. So to stand out in this crowded space, it's crucial to identify and target a specific niche. Maybe you're passionate about adventure, sports, cultural storytelling, wildlife photography, landscape photography. There are a ton of niches that go into travel and adventure content creation. And finding your niche will really help you focus your efforts in and make it easier for you to attract clients because they understand what it is that you're going to capture for them, how you're going to do it, what you're doing, why they should bring you in. Rather than just a generic content creator. You have a specific skillset. That not everyone is going to want, but the people who do want it, we'll hire you. And we'll probably actually pay you more because they know you will get the job done. And in that vein is actually going to be a lot easier for you to find. Clients that you want to work with as well. Because you can reach out, you can create your media kit, you can reach out to them and you can go like, this is what I do really well. These are the stories I think we could tell together. These are the ways I think I could help you tell it. Or do you have any work that's in this niche year and. You're going to get a lot of nos back or you're going to hear nothing back more frequently. But the people who do hire you are going to be very interested because they know you can do. What you're talking about. Also in terms of market research, you're going to need to understand. What those travel industry professionals are looking for. I've talked about this on a previous podcast episode. Around a year ago now I think. It's really important for you to get an understanding of the audience. That the travel partner you're looking to work with targets. How they talk about things, why they talk about things, the type of content that they create. Everything like that. It's not going to be super helpful if you just reach out with a generic here's my media pitch let's work together. If we can. And that might work. Sure. Send it out to some destination marketing organizations, send it out to some big companies send it. Send it wherever you want. But you're going to have a little bit more luck. If you are more specific about what it is that you want to do with them or how you can partner together. So. To do this market research. You can use tools like Google trends, social media, analytics, photography, forums, to understand what people are looking for and where there's honestly less competition. You can look for great reports from companies like Expedia or Skift who do just amazing work in the travel space and have a ton of extra data. Some destinations will actually have the information right up on their website that you're looking for. Especially if you go into their media kits or if you go into their member kits and the information they make public, you're going to find some information about their audiences and their members. And then companies make it really clear who they are targeting and who they are talking to. And if you match that profile, Reach out to that company. See if you can work together, see what you can do for them. Sometimes you're going to have to do some spec work. Sometimes they might just hire you flat out. It's going to be all over the place, especially when you were doing freelance travel content creation. So reach out. Do your research figure out where you can fit in the market, figure out what type of photography and what type of content creation you can really hone in on and specialize in on. And then find the companies that you can work with to do that. And you're going to become a lot more successful. All right. So in this vein of everything that we were talking about, when you were doing your market research, one of the things you want to look into doing is building your brand. So creating a unique identity is key to building a successful travel photography business. Your personal brand should reflect your style, vision, and the stories you want to tell. So start by developing a distinct style that sets you apart. This could be your editing, the type of subjects you shoot, this could be the stories you tell. This could be how you tell those stories is B camera movements or. Compositions or static shots or you're in front of the camera with a lot more self portrait. There's a ton of options. I could keep listing here forever. But that is critical. You need to have a visual voice for your work and that's part of your brand identity. Now your portfolio is your visual resume. Make sure it showcases your best work and tells a compelling story. Highlight your unique style and the diversity of your skills. And remember your portfolio is often the first impression potential clients will have a view. So make it count. And building out a really good portfolio is a really difficult process. You don't want to have so few photos that. People wonder if maybe you don't know what you're doing, but you also don't want to have so many photos that you're watering down from the best of your best work. And in a lot of cases, it's helpful to have a couple of different portfolios within the niche that you work in. So I've worked with a few photographers out in this area who have amazing ski portfolios. We don't shoot ski. We leave that up to another organization. But. This other person also had amazing commercial work as well. And so when they found that out, instead of sending me their ski portfolio, which is how they started, they sent me their commercial portfolio and their commercial portfolio. Aligned much better with what we need and what our needs were as an organization. So you can set up multiple different portfolios for the different types of photography. You do the different niches, or if you know that you're going to an area and you want to stay at a certain hotel and you've stayed at a ton of hotels and done a ton of content creation for them. Hone a portfolio specifically for hotels. And show how you can show off their hotel. It doesn't have to be generic. I don't think most hotels will really care about. The fact that you went paragliding off a mountain top, or that you have these amazing wedding photos. What you really need to do. And what's really critical in this situation is to show them what you are doing for them and why you are a good person to do that. So build different portfolios for your different niches. Now a strong online presence is also really incredibly helpful. Some people see it as essential. Some people see it as not necessary at all. Really depends on how you want to work and what you are getting up to in the type of work that you want to do. If you want to get into showing short form reels and creating reels for people. Online and basically adding content to their social media feeds. It's going to be necessary for you to have a strong online presence. On the other hand, if you really do specialize in commercial work and building out creative concepts and. Building out things that honestly aren't meant for their social channels, they're meant for their website. They're meant for their paid campaigns. They're meant for billboards and things like that. It may not be as necessary to have a really strong online presence. So you really have to get specific about what you were attempting to do and who you're attempting to reach out to. Now, it is still important to have an online presence. And that's because honestly, a lot of companies, when they're out searching for somebody will find you through Instagram, Tik, TOK. Chat GPT now, which is really interesting. Your website. So when they're out hunting for a photographer or content creator, they might actually find you through these channels. But. You don't necessarily have to hone in on them. If that's not where you are looking to create the work for them, it's important to be there, but it may not need to be your main focus. Now. The one that is actually probably significantly more powerful and that you can do on social, but you can also do in person. And pretty much anywhere in the world is networking. And this comes back to the it's who, you know, Because when I'm thinking of somebody to work with, I do go looking for photographers, but if I need something quick, it's the people I've worked with before. It's the people they trust. It's the ones I know that can get the work done and I don't have to worry about, and I don't have to think about it. I can just hand it off to them. Go great here. Thanks. So networking is still and will always be an incredible and invaluable thing. You want people to think of you when they need work done. So to do that, you could start with just collaborating with other photographers and other creatives and getting it on their project. But attending travel conferences, attending online webinars with travel professionals. Going on trips and talking to tour guides and getting to know people actually within the industry you want to work in is going to be. Very powerful because that's how you're going to start connecting with people, to be able to start doing more and more of this work. And you have no idea how many of these people know each other and work together and communicate and travel on. Familiarization trips together and everything else. So. It's great to get to know other creatives, but that's a lot easier. But probably won't help you to actually get the work that you want. So instead of doing that, Go attend a travel conference and go as a travel photographer, travel content creator. To learn more about what's happening in the travel industry, the changes that are occurring. And then you can bring that into the work that you are actually doing. And that's going to be incredibly impactful and being able to turn. Your work into a full-time profitable, creative travel business. All right. So you have an idea of the business that you're running. You have your brand built out. You've got your portfolio. You're starting to network. You're doing all these really good things. You're doing your market research. Now let's talk about the really important part here. Monetization strategies. This is how you're going to make money from your travel photography, content creation. One of the most common ways to have done this in the past was stock photography. And there's still, there's still a place for stock travel photography. There's definitely still a place for that. But. With AI generated images being out there. No, it's not going to be a profitable space for a very long time. It's not going to be something that if you're not already doing that, it's worth investing in at this point already, stock photography is taking a massive nosedive. In terms of how much money people can make off of it. So I wouldn't. Honestly, invest your time in doing that. If you haven't already done it, if you are doing it and you're making a little bit of money, that's great. If it's not in travel photography, expand your portfolio, push some travel photography out there, but. With AI generated images, becoming a thing with the fact that stock imagery has just taken a massive hit. It might not be worth your time and effort to go into stock photography. So without the main source of revenue that a lot of travel photographers had before, where are you going to make money? Freelancing. Freelancing offers. Really a very lucrative opportunity. You can reach out to travel magazines. Tourism boards, destination marketing organizations, travel agencies. Travel companies, hotels, like we talked about before all those people who are making money off the travel and tourism industry. Sending your portfolio, your pitch, your targeted portfolio, that's made for them in their industry and highlight how you can work together and benefit them. And you can do this with just pitching. I'll make some photos for you. You can do this with pitching, Hey, here's an entire creative concept. Here's an entire creative marketing campaign. Whatever is in your niche for how you make things. Go with it, run with it. And see what companies will do, and I'll be very, very upfront with you. You're going to get a lot of nos. It's going to be way more frequent than you hear no, from a company than you hear. Yes. So take those yeses with massive enthusiasm. Celebrate them, have fun with them. And don't take those nos to mean anything. Just keep going. A lot of times people are so busy, they can't respond. There's honestly, a few situations where it's like, I'd love to work with you, but I honestly have no budget. So. Don't take a no, as an indictment on your work. You've just got to take it as. Reality of doing business in this kind of space. So celebrate the yes's, forget the no's, keep going. Now that's, if you want to do commercial work. If you don't want to do commercial work, there's also options for you. So you can organize workshops for people to come out and learn about photography. You can take them on photography tours to amazing places. There's a lot of trips going to places like Iceland right now, and to New Zealand that I've seen recently and just all over the world, to be honest, but really popular adventure travel destinations. And you can go with a photographer. You can be the one teaching people how to do this, or you can be there as a photographer's assistant and bring in other amazing photographers who are going to teach the people and you just manage the travel, you manage everything that's going on. You run an organize the tour and you just bring them in as an outside expert. So when you're organizing these tours, the real idea here is that you're sharing your expertise with aspiring photographers by leading them on these beautiful photography adventures. It's really critical that you plan your workshops, meticulously, that you get all the proper permits that you make sure you have backup plans to your backup plans, to your backup plans. That you always have everything in place that you need to do to shoot organizing a tour is. Like organizing a remarkably complicated multi day photo shoot. And you need a lot of that to go on. If you're somebody like me and you're not the most organized person on the planet and you can occasionally forget things and you're not necessarily super detailed orientated. You're going to need some help with doing this. So find somebody you trust, find somebody you want to work alongside. Who's really detail, orientated, and really good at working through those little pieces. And that way you can focus on the photography side, you can focus on. We need to be in this place to capture golden hour. We need to be in this place, do Milky way photos. We need to be wherever, wherever to do the actual education piece. That is your expertise. No one is expecting you to be the expert at everything. You are running a small business doing this. So you will have to be the expert in a lot of things, but no, one's expecting you to be expert in everything in the best way to become great at something is to specialize in and then work with other people who specialize in. So. If you want to run these kinds of tours and you're not super detail oriented, you're in really need an extra set of hands to do this with you. Now also don't forget about those quasi passive income streams. You can create and sell online courses, which is becoming increasingly popular. You can make eBooks that teach about others, about your travel photography. You can create an ebook. Coffee table book. For lack of another term, like it's a book about your travel photography that people can look through on their iPad or on their computer, on their phone. That talks about various beautiful areas and how you captured the images. You can also create actual physical coffee table books. They still are around. They still make a good chunk of money for photographers. You can monetize your blog or a YouTube channel by sharing tips, gear, review, travel stories. Ideas about places to go to that you have captured along the way. The key is to diversify your income sources to create a steady revenue stream that comes from multiple places. So having gesture work all come from commercials or all of your work just comes from. Working through your audience on Tik Tok or everything comes from you creating short form reels or whatever it is. That's not sustainable. You might make a ton of money off of it in a short term, but that's not going to sustain you for longterm. Because if that one avenue goes down, you have no other income coming in. The most important thing is to diversify out and have that blog that's monetized or have that YouTube channel that's monetized, and then also have the Tik TOK channel that's out there. And then also have the commercial work, which is. Maybe the bulk of where your money is coming from, but you also have that sitting in there as well. You also have a course that you're selling and it sounds like a lot going on. And that's because it is a lot going on and to make money as a travel photographer in today's day and age. There's a lot going on. You have to be doing a lot. You have to be all over the place. And you don't have to run yourself into the ground or work yourself to the bone. That's not the idea of this. The idea is for you to get to go and explore and see cool and beautiful places and make amazing art at the same time. But you do have to recognize the reality of it's. A lot of time spent emailing people, building pitch decks, working on websites. Sitting in meetings, calling folks, sitting on airplanes to get to places it's not all. Just grab your camera and go and shoot. It's a lot of admin work and other pieces to really make yourself super successful. All right. A couple of last thoughts for you on this. Some practical tips and ideas from my work within the travel industry. And efficient workflow is super essential for managing and editing all of your content on the go. So Adobe Lightroom, mobile and V S C O. Are great for quick edits, we'll have portable hard drive or cloud source can help you back up your work. Having something like an iPad that you can back up your images to, and really quickly sort on the go. If you don't want to carry a laptop with you while you're traveling anywhere or. If your laptop's just a little too slow or anything like that as a great option as well. You can also back up into something like iCloud or an Android equivalent. And when it comes to gear less is honestly often more. So you want to invest in versatile high quality equipment that can handle different shooting conditions. So I would suggest a really good. Tight mirrorless camera, something like the From Sony a couple of really good versatile lenses and a sturdy tripod are really a great place to start. You're also going to want some circular, polarized filters, some neutral density filters. If you're going to be filming video and a couple of microphones, if you're going to be recording any sort of audio and then a high quality. Vertical content capture device that you can do things on a cell phone. That's really what this is, but if you want to get fancy terminology with it some way to capture vertical video. That's really easy and quick to edit and to turn around. And honestly, it doesn't look too professional if you want to be going into that. UGC influencer sphere. Because we know from research and a ton of data that people don't mind seeing really professional content on like a photographer's channel. They want to see that. But if you're creating reels for hotels, It's actually sometimes better to have stuff that looks like what that person could have filmed. To a higher degree, obviously, because you're the creative professional. But it's not meticulously led. It's not meticulously shot. It doesn't have that insane depth of the field. It has that feeling of being captured on a phone. And so it, it's a really good idea to have a phone that can capture really high quality content. Now. Make sure that you pack smart, stay organized, avoid carrying unnecessary weight. It's the worst thing in the world. When you like go for a hike and you've carried a camera and lens around and you didn't take a single photo. It's the same thing with when you're traveling. Just take the stuff that you know, that you are going to need. And lastly, because I always talk about this and it's, to me, the most important thing in the world, your safety is priority. You should make sure that you know, everything that you can about that destination before you go somewhere, she know how you should act, where you should go, what you can and can't photograph how you can protect your gear and yourself and others. And just make sure that. You are keeping yourself in those with you as safe as you can possibly be while you are doing the things that you want to accomplish and that you want to do in these places. All right. We covered a massive amount of ground today. From understanding the market and building your brand to monetization strategies and practical tips. There's a lot of actual, actionable advice in there for you. So apply these tips, start working on them. And I. Don't by any stretch of the imagination, know everything about this. This is just slowly what I've been learning as I work in the travel industry that I'm sharing here. So if you've got anything. That you love that you want to share that you want to work on or pass along my way. Pass it to me, send me. Your note, send me your thoughts. Let's engage in conversation about the travel industry and how you can get more involved in as a creative professional. So reach out on Instagram. Robert Massey photography. And yeah, send me your thoughts, some of your notes. Let me know how you're applying this, or, you know, if you're going somewhere to travel or anything like that, I'd love to hear about it. And as always, thanks so much for tuning in. I really do appreciate that you are taking time and effort. To grow and expand your photography and make yourself incrementally better. All right. Get out there. Travel. I work on something beautiful. Create something. Yeah. Explore this big, beautiful world of ours. All right, bye. For now.