Etienne Oosthuizen
Animals in Graaff-Reinet

about Etienne Oosthuizen photography, a wildlife, hospitality and fine art photographer from Southern Africa.

Creating unique wildlife photographs with the use of backgrounds. A Photographic technique to best photograph African wild dogs. Spending time with Dusty Aardvark is photographic gold to those photographers patient enough to weight for the light to change. One of the benefits of walking, is that it did not take me long to habituate a few individual Aardvarks. What wildlife photographers can learn from landscape photography. A lot of photographers are driven to succeed and their success is governed by the amount of hits, likes and follows they can generate on social media. They have a huge following, so they have plenty of sales, so they should have plenty of money. T hey would credit you as the photographer, wait who else took that photo? Frustratingly there are enough young photographers that have not yet gone through the tough times of being a freelance photographer and wanting to get published, they agree to these ridiculous terms. Your time is money, as is the photography equipment used to capture that image. These magazines and publishers are in business to make money (so should you be), so they will be selling a final product, be it a article in a magazine or blog to their readers. You need to see this whole process as a business transaction, you are giving them money (your image is worth money) in exchange that they will market you (the supposed free publicity). Are your going to get a return on that marketing investment to the value of the cost of your image? Bare in mind that you don’t just want to break even, you need to be profitable. Would it not be more worth while to take the value of that photograph and invest it into google ad words or a Facebook marketing campaign. Funny thing is about this whole process, is that these editors, publishers and magazines have found your work in the first place. If this publisher or editor is at all serious, they will state in their first email what their budget is for purchasing your photograph. In my experience its not necessary to ask for this kind of information, its there or its not. Its not necessary to go and write this huge email that belittles them and is rude. Obviously you need to be very careful that you are supporting the right organisations and just double check how the images will be used. Examples is where a website/blog would like to do an interview with me and when my images are the main attraction of the article.