The idea of making some cash from a hobby, is incredibly infectious. The issue is, like a tumor, the idea can kill the host (the hobby).
This idea took hold of me after I got some prints of my posts made.
The idea of selling prints grabbed hold of me. It’s a logical extension of photography as a hobby. But I have a history with this type of thought.
Old Hobbies
I’ve tried monetizing hobbies in the past. Both drawing, and commercially licensed drone work. Both ended up dying. The hobby grew into a business, and the hobby died in the process, along with my interest in it. I don’t want that to happen again.
Prints
I spent the last week thinking. How can I indulge this thought, while preventing it from getting out of control. I need some strong guardrails.
- All prints needs to be done locally.
- Only do limited runs.
Number one keeps me from going ham with on demand print on anything services. Using a local print service lets me do cheep one offs (great for samples / I just want one for myself), and keeps me in the loop on how the prints look. I’m using my local Walmart’s photo center. Despite the fact that it’s a Walmart, they don’t use a broken HP printer. It’s a full on Fujifilm dry mini lab. So it looks great.
Number two lets me move on. Once a run of a photo is done, it’s done.
I’m hoping these basic rules will be enough for me.
Another Site
I did spin up another website, with just my photos. I wanted a way to share my photos page, without also sharing all my blog posts. ntpics is a mirror of the photos page here. It has a nicer layout, but that’s about it. Photos still get uploaded here first, then a script will copy them to the other site, and deploy it. Yay scripting.
If you want to checkout the prints, here’s the link https://ko-fi.com/ntpics/shop.