If the press-photographer wishes to follow these tactics he may profit, even in a very large city; for staff-photographers go where city-editors tell them to go, and city-editors have much to think about.
The kinds of subjects bought by newspapers from free-lance photographers are those of local interest, brought to the office while the interest in them is still keen. A large number of such subjects are available daily. The news-photographer may glean his tips from a morning-newspaper and sell his prints to an evening-journal. When he becomes sufficiently well known, he may be called upon and dispatched after a photograph just as the commercial-photographer. But first he must impress the editorial mind by giving it, unasked, the very sort of thing it wants.
The free-lance photographer should see possibilities in many subjects:
- A public building burns.
- A corner-stone is laid.
- An illicit still is found.
- A new building is erected.
- A murder occurs.
- A new fire-department truck is bought.
- The governor comes to town.
- Josh Jones finds a hen's egg three-times normal size.
- A park is improved.
- The first baseball-game is played.
- The robber of the postoffice is caught.
- I. Wright, the local author's new book, is published.
- The local inventor again invents.
Any one of these suggestions holds possibilities for photographs useful to a newspaper; and many more events are just as promising.
The types of photographs used by postcard-makers are known to almost every one. The subjects run from famous buildings and historical monuments to artistic human-interest pictures such as a small kitten sleeping with its feet entangled in a maze of thread with which it has been playing.
At that point, merge the demands of the calendar-makers. They use the human-interest type, and run to landscapes, seascapes, and portraits of pretty girls. Usually the demand of both postcard- and calendar-makers is that the picture tell a story. If it can be used without an explanatory caption, all the better. For an example of a picture-told story, glance at almost any cover of the Saturday Evening Post and note how the whole situation is made clear without one word of explanation. It is that kind of photograph that postcard- and calendar-makers want. If you will glance over the postcard- and calendar-illustrations you have at hand you will readily see the types of photograph used.
Sometimes book-publishers send out calls for special kinds of photographs they need in preparing certain books. In that case, they usually advertise in an appropriate magazine and mention the kind of photograph they wish; for example, historical prints if a history is in preparation. The unlimited variety of books published calls for an unlimited variety of photographs. Certain publisher-photo-services make it their business to supply publishers with the photographs they wish; but that is not hurtful to the prospects of the free-lance, for the photo-services must obtain photographs of every kind from every source, and must be stocked with a larger number and variety of prints than any one magazine or publisher could possibly use. Thus, in fact, the news-photographer has an increased market.
The largest field for the free-lance photographer I have left until last; that is, the magazines. There are so many magazines and such a variety of them that almost any print, if it is of interest at all, should find a place with one of them. Besides the large magazines there are many smaller ones; those devoted to almost any conceivable vocation, and others to almost any interest or hobby.
Besides the publications issued for the great mass of the reading public, there are magazines published solely for advertisers, architects, real-estate agents, automobilists, bakers, confectioners, cement-users, drug-stores, dry-goods merchants, electricians, engineers, miners, bankers, financiers, fraternal members, furniture-dealers, millers, grocers, hardware-sellers, historians, hotel-owners, owners of restaurants, jewelers, labor-union members, lawyers, insurance-agents, soldiers, sailors, municipal workers, printers, publishers, railroad men, magicians, fox-raisers, blacksmiths, fruit-growers, undertakers, stamp-collectors, and scores of others, not to speak of almost two thousand house-organs issued by manufacturers as sales-promotion literature or for the benefit of their employees. And each of these uses photographs occasionally, if not regularly. The photographer need not deplore a lack of sufficient markets for his photographs.