How to Become a Postcard Photographer

Video Transcript

"My name is Anthony Maddaloni, and I'm going to talk about how to become a postcard photographer. Now for the most part, becoming a postcard photographer means taking pictures of landscapes, certain areas of countries that are tourist-related, so you can go, take a picture of a postcard of this place, and then potentially sell it. Think about certain images come to mind, almost automatically. Niagara Falls, Disneyland, Las Vegas. Now, to become a postcard photographer, these are some of the things that I've seen people do, that if you think of a location or specific type of genre, let's say it could be farmhouses, bridges, really it could be anything if you use your imagination. You start to take pictures of these as postcards, you could really potentially open up a market for yourself, for instance in New Mexico this past week there was the balloon festival. Amazing, amazing festival. A photographer I know goes every year and shoots many, many images of these balloons and she sells them all year long as postcards from New Mexico. Makes pretty nice little amount of money doing that. But you also have to research saying like okay, this is where, this is the time of year where the balloon fest is. And then she does other festivals where she knows that a location is going to be where a lot of people go at a certain time of year and they're going to want to take a memento from there. So again, this is a very well thought out plan. She didn't just wake up one morning and say I want to be a postcard photographer. One interesting fact about postcard photography to me is it's sort of historical, and the history of photography, that was really how a lot of photographers street photographers, not really street photojournalists, but actually street photographers made their living, taking portraits of people, that people would use as postcards and send them to family back home. So it really was the genesis of some types of photography. Certain tint types, certain old photos that you may see, actually started out as postcards, it's pretty fascinating. That is how I would become a postcard photographer."