Hi Everyone

Today I am going to look briefly at the decision for fine art and commercial event photographers in Scotland as to how they achieve a good balance between the 2 genres.  That is when to pursue the fine art route and when to aim for commercial event and commercial photography in Scotland.  I am a specialist event and conference photographer in Scotland, who also does wedding photography in Scotland and the North of England.  I also sell landscape and infrared photos, from exhibitions and I am involved in training photographers.

So how do you decide when to pursue the art side of photography and when do you go for the commercial aspect. I thought I would devise a list giving advice for photographers who do both and lets face it very few photographers tend to rely solely on selling landscape or art images and even the ones that do tend to undertake training and or maybe publishing a book on the genre.  So here we go.

Advice for the fine art and commercial photographer.

1. Try to work out the income you will receive from both.  You may have to do more commercial work to pay the bills.

2. Use the commercial photography side of things as a means of funding the fine art photography, if this helps.

3. Combine the 2 areas. I often include infrared photography when I am working as a wedding photographer and the clients always love it.

4. Use commercial photography as a way of promoting your other photography.  I promote my exhibitions by inviting my commercial clients to the events and this often results in sales.

5. Allocate certain times of the year for each.   As an infrared photographer in Scotland, I tend to be more involved in this during the spring and summer months.  Weddings can often be seasonal as is sports photography and other events.  So if you plan things well you can balance it out.

6. Apply your strict commercial business rules to your fine art photography as well as as your day to day photography.  Sometimes we can get carried away when we are overly enthusiastic about a certain subject, often clouding the financial considerations.

7. Finally, ask around and take on board advice from successful fine art photographers as to how they manage to balance the two and how they market their product.

Anyway hope this helps.  In the meantime, here are some fine art infrared photos from this website Colin Wright Photography, Edinburgh and Glasgow conference photographer | Infrared Images
and here are others from my sister website at www.edinburghphotographer.com Infrared Photography - Landscape and Beyond - Colin Wright Photography (edinburghphotographer.com)

Until next time.

Kind Regards

Colin

www.colinwrightphotography.co.uk

www.edinburghphotographer.com