Why We Specialize

The reason photographers specialize in one or two photographic specialties is simply for marketing purposes. You have a better shot at leasing one of your 20,000 dog shots to a dog magazine publisher than you have of leasing one of your 200 dog shots, one of your 210 baseball shots, and one of your 300 auto show shots. Publishers look for, and collect, web sites of photographers who specialize in what they need because they are more apt to find what they need. Anything you shoot outside of your specialty has a much smaller chance of being marketable that your specialty work.

I speak from true experience on this subject. The sites that I now have on the internet show work in several "so called" specialties. This is because my portfolio is not large enough to worry about a specialty. However, I have been told by a couple of editors and photographers that I am at a point where I am probably waisting precious time by trying to sell from my entire portfoio as it is. So, I will soon be narrowing my subject matter down to no more than two specialties that I think will work well together. As my portfolio develops with these two specialties I should be able to one day choose the "one" subject that I would like to specialize in. Hopefully my profit market will turn out to also be the market I enjoy working in the most.