Every business needs photos, but some are willing to pay big bucks for you to  take them.
Not all businesses want to simply buy their pictures off of a micro stock photography website because they want a picture that no one else has. Sometimes a photo will be sold on istockphoto thousands of times and the market gets too saturated with that one picture for a business to use it. Or sometimes they just need a very specific picture of the products that they make.

Here is why big and small businesses need your photos:

• for brochures about their company
• for their website
• to show clients what they make
• to use in all forms of advertising
• for ads in the paper
• for putting together user manuals about their products
• for pictures of their workers and executives

When you walk into a business you can use all of the above points to show the company how they would benefit from hiring you to take photos for them.
Show them how having better quality pictures of their products would lead to better sales. Show them how more professional looking photos can make a huge difference from a clients point of view.

So what kind of businesses need you as a photographer?
Here are just a few you can get started on, and then add to the list as you go.

• Restaurants – They need pictures for their menus as well as their
advertisements. Taking pictures of food on a plate is a bit like stock
photography. It’s very simple and you can make any dish look fantastic.
The restaurant will benefit from those pictures in their ads as well. We all
know how amazing a picture of food can look when you are really hungry,
so show the owners of the restaurant that by having some nice pictures of
the food they serve they can get more customers. They can put these
pictures in a flyer or some other form of advertisement to help grow their
business.

• Offices – One thing that most offices need are portraits of their
employees. Executive portraits can be a very lucrative business. For your
first business you can do them for free so you can build up a small portfolio
of executive portraits to show to other businesses some samples
of your work. Just set up a schedule for getting the pictures done in a
timely fashion (as most employers don’t want to waste any of their
employees time) and use the same basic backdrop for each shot. Some
basic lighting techniques would help with this.

• Builders – Every builder is proud of the houses they have built, but they
want some professional photographs to reflect their work. You can take
some exterior shots but get a lot of nice interior pictures as well. It helps
to turn on all the lights and only use your flash if you are bouncing it off the
ceiling or through some sort of diffusion device to give it a natural look.

• Corporate Events – At a corporate event you will have to capture people
speaking behind a podium, activities and use an over all photo journalistic
kind of approach. There can be big big money in photographing corporate
events. The company may want to use your pictures in their brochures or
other forms of advertising so keep this in mind as you shoot the events.

• Corporate Portraits – There are a lot of really pathetic corporate portraits
out there. Show the company the need to have pictures of their “big wigs”
in their working environment so the picture will reflect what they do. This
will give the photos some personality. These can be done in a very
professional manner too. Usually it’s not too hard to improve on the
portraits that the company already has unless they have used a
professional photographer before.

• Website Pictures – Have you ever been on a website and just said to
yourself, “Wow, these pictures are horrible”? Well you want to put it nicely
to the website owner, but show them some of the pictures from your
portfolio and show them how a website is usually the first impression a
person gets of your business. Great pictures on your website can be a
huge step in the right direction to looking professional and increasing
business.

• Architectural photography – Companies that have either huge high rise
buildings or just big complexes all need great images of their buildings.
This goes right along with good branding and companies will pay big
bucks if you can get the perfect picture of their building that really helps
represent them will. If you feel sneaky you can even take some pictures of
the building and then show them to the company and see if they are
interested in buying them.

• Press Release photography – When a business has a press release
they want to make sure they have good pictures to represent them. Most
of the people that see these pictures will only get that one shot to get the
first impression of the business so you can advertise doing some press
release photography to make some extra money. You can shoot some
grand openings as well and then offer to deliver it to the newspaper
company for submission.

Advertising is one of the biggest parts of a companies budget, so why not take advantage of that? You need to be able to take pictures that are both artistic and that carry the concept that the company wants to convey. I really enjoy taking pictures of the products the company makes. You need to take as much pride in your picture of the product as the company has in
producing it. A great picture of their product can be a huge benefit for them in advertising as most of their buyers will make decisions on what they think about the product by
just looking at the picture. Look at the pictures they already have and see if you can improve on them. The list of businesses that are needing photographers can go on and on. If this is a niche you would be interested in, go ahead and start building a portfolio of some business pictures to show your potential clients.

Related posts:

1. Get As Many People as Possible to See Your Pictures.
2. Use Micro Stock as Spring Board to Major Income