Photography from hobby to business

[deedeemegadoodoo]

A close relative has a mental illness and is currently unable to work. However, she happens to live in a tourist town and is able to take beautiful photographs of the area from where she lives (think of a very popular beach and the sea at different times of the day from an elevated position).

She is posting them on an Instagram account with only family following and I understand they are copywrited automatically and uploading gives those sites a licence. How could she grow this? Using hashtags? And would she need to do something to the pics so they cannot be stolen.

i am sure the local businesses would love some of those photography prints to seek or exhibit (it is a famous arty town). There is a successful business below her which has food / gift shop / cafe and restaurant and I am going to approach them when I visit. How do I get those photos made into prints?

Thanks for any advice. I’m not business minded and work in Education but would love to try and help my niece do something positive with what she loves.

She sounds very talented. The difficulty with photos of a town is that essentially anyone else can take these too, her product isn’t unique. Thar said if photos of the town are often used by the media she could look to upload them to the main media photo selling sites as a contributor - Getty Images for example - but there are others and she’s be paid if they were used.

if they are really good she could get them professionally printed and framed and try and find somewhere to hold a proper exhibition to sell them. The cafe downstairs for example maybe?

Otherwise she ideally needs to find a niche that people want to buy.

in the meantime to protect them she should watermark if uploading them online. This can be removed using AI but protects people using them to some degree. A local artist to us has been sharing his paintings of town on Facebook and has amassed a good following on insta, Worth trying this.

Good luck to her.

Thank you so much, I hadn’t thought of photo selling sites. I’ll discuss that with her.

I thank starting with offering her photos for local businesses to exhibit would be good. Other than having a drone, it would be difficult to get pictures of this location from this height unless you lived where she does.