S15E10 | Demystifying the world of editorial photography with Shelley Paulson
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Despite this interview being with one of the world’s best equine photographers, it’s not about horse photography at all! Instead, Shelley and I dived deep into the editorial world. If you have your own stock library of images, this might just be a great way to add some passive income to your business. Shelley shared exactly how she finds these clients, what it is they’re buying and how her system works to sell images to magazines. In the members half we got into the numbers and then had a little chat about licensing too.
Shelley is truly a wealth of knowledge and what she shared in this interview is sure to get your mind ticking with ideas.
We Covered:
Who is Shelley
When and why Shelley stopped working for private clients
What Shelley thinks is the best training for photographers
The difference between commercial and editorial photography
Why would a magazine order commissioned photography over stock images
Can you make money from editorials
What advice Shelley has for someone wanting to do editorials but without a stock library
How Shelley got into Commercial photography
What is the difference between commercial, branding, and editorial?
Offering video as an edition service
Where does stock imagery fit into your business model
IN THE MEMBERS-ONLY EXTENDED EPISODE
Becoming a member of publications to attend conferences
Connecting with editors at events - what to ask
What these conferences look like (American horse publications)
What will a magazine pay for a stock image and is it worth it
Submitting photo essays and pitching
Portfolios Vs Photo Essays
Shelley’s income
Licensing
Pricing
Documentary equine films - passion or commercial projects?
Shelley Paulson
Shelley Paulson Photography, USA
Shelley Paulson is an Equine Commercial, Editorial, and Stock Photographer and Photography Educator based in Minnesota. She has combined her lifelong love of horses with her passion for photography to create a thriving full-time career.
As an award-winning photographer, Shelley's work has been published worldwide, with her images gracing the pages of prestigious equestrian publications such as Horse Illustrated and Western Horseman and appearing in advertising for major equine brands such as Nutrena and Alltech.
Shelley's talent extends beyond her camera lens. She is also known for her generosity, kindness, and genuine love for the equestrian community. Through her education program, she mentors and helps fellow photographers grow in their skills and confidence.
Transcript
Despite this interview being with one of the world's best equine photographers, it's actually not about horse photography at all. Instead, Shelly and I dived deep into the editorial world. If you have your own stock library of images, this might just be a great way to add some passive income to your business.
Shelly shared exactly how she finds these clients, what it is that they're buying, and how her system works to sell images to magazines in the members'. Half. We got into the numbers and then had a little chat about licensing too. Shelly truly is a wealth of knowledge and what she shared in this interview is sure to get your mind ticking with ideas.
So stay tuned.
Welcome to the Pet Photographers Club. Tune in as experts share their insights to help grow your business with higher sales, creative marketing, and kick arse business strategies. Now onto the show.
Hello and welcome to season 15, episode 10 of the Pet Photographers Club. I'm your host. Kirstie McConnell, and today I'm chatting to Shelley Paulson of Shelley Paulson Photography. Welcome to the club, Shelley. Well, thank you. I feel special that I get to be part of a club today. How cool are you? All right, let's get into the, let's get into the show. So you guys who I'm not aware of Shelly yet.
I'm going to get her to give you a little bit of an introduction. Shelly can you just tell the listeners who you are, where you're based in the world and what it is that you do? Well, I am an equine, well, I'm a commercial and editorial. Equestrian photographer. I never know which of those to put first.
Equestrian, commercial and editorial, commercial and editorial. Anyway I'm based in Minnesota in the USA and we're having a Oh, the weirdest winter ever. It's like I go out in my sweatshirt instead of my snow pants. And but it's I live in a beautiful part of the world, which I think contributes to beautiful photography.
In my commercial work, I've worked with a lot of major equine brands, a lot of feed companies, supplement companies. Pharmaceutical companies within the equine industry, and then I also work with quite a few magazines and even some smaller brands, but with the magazines, I license a lot of images for articles and covers and yeah, so I used to be a portrait, an equestrian portrait photographer for many years, and another part of my business is that I mentor other photographers wishing to grow as.
grow into the equine world or grow their equine skills. And when that grew, I had to give something up. So I gave up the portrait work because there's a lot of portrait photographers out there. And I went all in on commercial and editorial because it's kind of more of a deeper niche and something that I had experience in that not everybody has experience with.
So. Totally makes sense. And in fact, I got you on the show today to talk mostly about editorial, but I'm sure we'll cover some other topics as well. Before we get into that though, you mentioned very briefly then that you did. You know, you did used to offer private portrait photography. Is that how you got started or did you actually start first of all, in the commercial realm?
I actually started as a wedding photographer. That was kind of my bread and butter. Don't we all? I don't know. 13 years, I shot weddings and I, you know, I consider it the very best training ground for craft because you're faced with. unpredictable situations, weather, people, venues, whatever, and you absolutely have to make it work.
And I feel like people who didn't start in the wedding industry start with a disadvantage from people who did start in the wedding industry because like, I know how to do off camera lighting, I know how to deal with challenging people, I know how to Pose people. I know how to, you know, and even in the commercial world, like I know how to plan a day.
I know how to work with multiple vendors. And, and so those skills as a wedding photographer, like I would never go back and say, Oh, I wish I never shot weddings. But and I've told this story quite often, but I had a traumatic brain injury in 2013, not related to falling off a horse. I wish it was a better story like that.
I just fell off the floor. Okay. and landed head first on a concrete floor and, and at that point I had to give up the weddings because I just had such bad chronic headings, headaches from the stress of shooting weddings and, and really went more into the portrait side of things because hey, you know, you can redo a portrait session or you can reschedule if you're feeling really awful.
And so the pressure was less, but now I'm back to commercial photography where the pressure is back on. You have a crew, you have. Models, you know, you have all these people, you can't really do a reshoot. So I kind of ended up there anyway, but I've recovered mostly from that injury. So it was kind of a roundabout way, but I'm kind of really grateful that I had that happen in my life because it drove me to really pursue the thing that I'm passionate about and that's equestrian photography.
Yeah. So, okay. You've mentioned commercial and brand sorry and editorial a few times now. Can you just distinguish between the two for, for us what would you consider commercial and what do you consider is very clearly editorial and not commercial at all? I'd say editorial is really anything relating to a magazine.
Magazine or even an online magazine, but most of the editorial work that I'm doing right now is for print magazines. Some of it's for like digital magazines too, but they would still be considered magazines. Whereas commercial is working with other companies that are selling a product or a service to equestrians.
So, when you say the editorial stuff is purely for magazine Who is paying your invoice? Is it the magazine or is it a company that's putting something into the magazine? Ooh, that's a good, that's a good distinction. Okay. So magazines are paying me for images, but I also have images in magazines that brands have either hired me to take or licensed from me.
But I would, you know, like, and they're putting it in an ad and that ad is being placed in a magazine. I would still consider that commercial. For me, editorial is like images that are illustrating a story or you know, an article of some kind, or it's on the cover of the magazine trying to get people enticed to read the magazine.
But that's a, that's a really good point. There's a little bit of a gray area there. I guess the most gray part would be if there's an Advertorial, right, when it's, it's an editorial, but it's actually somebody is paying for that to be there, but it looks like an editorial that I guess that still falls under commercial, but to the audience, it would look like editorial.
That's true. That's true. So pure editorial is when the magazine pays the invoice. All right. Yeah, I think that's a really important distinction to make before we get into discussing the editorials because. We heard a little bit about commercial, you know, from some other photographers on this podcast, and I'm sure in other podcasts as well, but editorial is something completely new.
So now that we've got our head around what that is, so when a magazine needs images they can come to you if it's an equine related magazine or a story related to horses, I imagine. Why would a magazine choose to commission a, a photographer to do this editorial work and why wouldn't they just use stock images or I don't know, some others that they have on file for some reason?
Yeah, and that is, that is a great question. I would say conservatively 75 percent of the editorial work that's, the editorial work that I do, I guess is coming out of my own custom stock library. And so, there are times, there are several, especially with Horse Illustrated, where I will do what's called a portfolio.
Where I will submit images and a story. And then, usually it's something I've already shot, I didn't shoot for the magazine. But there have been a couple of times when I've written a full, you know, full feature story within a magazine. And included my images. And honestly, these days, that's the best way to get published, is if you're writing.
and taking the photos. Magazines don't have big budgets for stock photos. Even in the years that I've been working with magazines, I've seen them go more and more to Shutterstock or Adobe or wherever for their images. And, or, or really most of the time the person writing the article is taking the photos.
And even if they don't have to, Like the art five or whatever, you know, like they're taking decent photos to illustrate what they're writing about. It makes sense. And so most of what I'm doing in editorial is licensing already existing images out of my library. You're, but you're using your own stock library for these editorials, but is that because the magazine wouldn't have the budget to pay you?
To actually commission a new shoot, or is it your own choice because it's more convenient for you? It's a little bit of both. Most magazines don't have the budget to pay for just the photography. And at the same time, whatever budget it would be, would probably not. Be enough for me to go out with my camera and shoot.
I've done that a few times like, Oh, it's winter. I don't have anything going on. You need images for a story of a local thoroughbred breeder. Sure. I'll go make 250 or something like that, you know, and, and get, you know, start open the door maybe with another publication, but mostly it's, it's diminishing budgets with magazines.
It's, it's tough. It's a tough industry. It's surviving, but. It, there's, it's been there's been a lot of magazines go to fewer issues a year or have just shut down altogether because it's a, you know, paper costs are high and people costs are high and it's just, it's a very, very thin margin type industry.
And so for me to be able to just offer stock images that illustrate what they're trying to communicate, but maybe it's not. like a shutterstock image that their competitor magazine just ran last month, you know, that there's a lot of value in my stock library for them. And for editors who I have longstanding relationships with, I actually give them carte blanche access to my library to download anything they want.
And then they just send me money for, they said they pay me according to whatever the usage is for that month. And now I have a number of clients like that. And so I just, you know, they go take what they want. And They pay me and it's very convenient for both of us. They're not having to go to me saying, Do you have a photo of somebody doing a lameness exam?
You know, and then I have to go find all my images of somebody doing a lameness exam and then send them a Dropbox and they go, Oh, we like this one. Okay, now I'm going to go find the high res. There's so much time involved in that. But because I already have a library online with over 12, 000 images. They can just search by keyword and find the image they want, download it, put it in their magazine and just send me a payment for that.
Okay. So I've so many questions here. I'll start, start. Okay. So first of all, let's pretend it's me, right? And that I'm wanting to get into this industry because it's all this. Niche because it sounds really interesting for me, but I'm brand new to pet photography or equine photography. And I don't have a stock library of my own of 12, 000 images.
Would it, would your advice to me be that it's worth pursuing this and having to shoot. On commission or you have to be commissioned, or would you say, build up your library and then come back to this later on and you can earn it as almost passive income. I would say, unless you want to write articles.
There is almost no opportunity for photographers to make much money in editorial. And it, I mean, it makes sense to me. It's sad to me that it's become that way, but it's, it's a tough, it's a, like I said, it's a tough tough industry. But if, if you wanted to get into this, if this was something you're like, oh, eventually I would like to do this, then by all means, It's, you know, building a stock library and it's not, you know, the thing that I've seen people do is they create a stock library and it's girls in dresses standing next to horses, you know, wearing sandals.
And there's, there's a lot of problems with that from an editorial standpoint, the images need to be correct, they need to be safe, they need to be. Model released for this type of use. I have a model released for every single image in my library and that is its own effort. But you know, if you're doing portrait sessions or or, you know, any kind of photo session and you're having people sign a model released by default, you're covered.
And over time, you can build up a library that would have value to, you know, magazines and or brands because my my Library also works the same way with brands who maybe need an image right now or they don't want to commission photography. And that's where real, like a lot more money is to be made is in licensing images to brands.
But yeah, the biggest hurdle is having, you know, creating the library, having a library of images, putting it online, keywording every single image, and then Then we can dive into the whole thing of how I've made connections with all these publications because I belong to an organization called the American Horse Publications and not only a member, but I go to their They're in person conference every year and I am having dinner and drinks with editors of these magazines Marketing people for the brands and I'm handing out, you know, glossy brochures to everybody and so You know having the images having the library having the model releases all that kind of practical stuff Well, I've seen people with all of that But they're not doing anything to actually market themselves to the industry and their library doesn't get much Activity.
Yeah. Yeah. I want to get more into that, into the making the connections and a little bit of marketing as well. I'm going to save that for the members half. Before we wrap up the first half though, I just wanted to ask you a little bit more about the writing for editorials or, or the, you know, writing for magazines part.
So do you actually, first of all, do you consider yourself. equally a writer as a photographer then? No, I actually have a lot of imposter syndrome around writing. I I actually, I have like won an award for an article I wrote for Horse Illustrated, but I, I relied heavily on editors for that. But. It's so stressful for me actually to write for the magazines that I have kind of set that on the back burner at this point because again, I have so much else going on in my business and things that I have a lot more confidence in.
And so that has meant having a lot less of my images in, you know, like Horse Illustrated and other magazines, but writing is something that I feel like I'm a very good writer. I write, like, A mad woman all day, every day, you know, and that's just part of having a business, especially when a business with an education aspect, you're writing all the time about photography.
And, but, you know, writing for a, for a newsstand level magazine is a whole other level of expectation and skill. And I feel like I would have to get a little bit more education in that in order to, to really feel proficient at it, but it's been fun when I've done it, I, you know, I've, I've had some really, interesting articles that I've been able to cover. There's some, some must blind Mustangs here in Minnesota in a rescue situation and was able to tell the story of the like amazing, I can't believe it all happened kind of story of how they landed here, how they were rescued and how they landed here and, and how they're cared for.
And so things like that, like being able to tell those stories is really fun. It's just a little bit beyond like my. My comfort level at this point, but I think that's great that you're pushing yourself beyond your comfort level. I mean, that's what we should all do sometimes. It helps us to grow as people.
So just before we wrap up this, this part, then how do you, I mean, how do you approach this just submitting the photo essays, I suppose they are, aren't they, I mean, when you're putting your images with your words, how do you go about coming up with those stories? Are they more passion projects for you?
Like the one that you just described, something that you happened to. learn about and you're interested in, and then you formulate the story and submit it, or are you actually actively receiving opportunities and then shooting or, or going to your stock library and and writing for those opportunities?
Which way is that coming about those, those submissions that you've done? Yeah. Magazines want. People to pitch. So they want you to come up with an idea that you're willing to write about and take photos of and then pitch that to the magazine, the editor of the magazine and, you know, any magazine that you read, you should be able to open the magazine and and find out who the editor is and and or go on their website and find an email to submit and, you know, ready made, they love ready made, like you've already written it and taken all the photos, but you can also just pitch ideas to them.
One of my favorite resources for learning how to do all of this is called the Freelance Remuda, and it's run by a couple of friends of mine. It has a bit of a Western, you know, emphasis, Western writing emphasis, but they have they have been in the industry for quite a while and they love to help people like learn how to pitch, to pitch stories to magazines and they have a great podcast that we can check out.
And so I can give you those links and you can put them in your show notes, but that's a good place to start. Perfect. Could you just tell us the name of that again? Sorry. Yeah, it's the Freelance Remuda, R E M U D A. Yeah. Perfect. I will put it in the show notes for everybody anyway, but I just wanted to double check how it went.
Okay, perfect. I want to, yeah, like I said before, I really want to dive into all this stuff a little bit deeper. Especially like connecting with editors, the pitching that you just glossed over very quickly. And then I've got a couple other things I want to ask you about marketing in general in this.
commercial and stock as well, but I'm saving all of that for our members. So let's wrap up part one. Now, before we do that, please, can you tell the listener where they can find you? And of course, a little bit about the education that you offer as well. Yeah. So my main website is Shelly Paulson. com and Shelly is spelled.
S H E L L E Y. Paulson is P A U L S O N dot com. And if you want to learn more about my educational opportunities, it's ShellyPaulsonEducation. com. But you can get everywhere from the Shelly Paulson site. You can get to my socials, you can get to my education site, you can get to my stock library if you want to do a little snooping around there and, So that's, that's where I live on the web.
And as you, as always I will have all the links to those in the show notes. If you miss anything, I've got all that in there too. You just have to head on over to the pet photographers club. com slash the dash podcast, and you can search 15 one zero, because this is. Season 15, episode 10. That is it for this part of the episode.
If you're a member of the club, of course, you can continue listening to part two in the member zone or via your private RSS feed in your favorite podcast player. Don't forget if you're not a member yet. You can join today for just 10 a month. Club membership includes loads of perks and bonus content. So head on over to the Pet Photographers Club slash join to find out more.
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