Dear Reader,

Want to sell travel photos to magazines?

Before leaving on a photo trip to Puerto Rico, professional photographer Efrain Padro had an idea. He’d seen articles about lighthouses in magazines before... but never an article about lighthouses in Puerto Rico.

So, he found two publications he thought might buy his idea.  With these in mind, he left on his trip…took some photos…and wrote a paragraph or two to describe each image.  When he got home, he sold both the pictures and the captions to two different magazines – Photographic Magazine and Lighthouse Digest.

Here’s his article/photo package as it appeared in Photographic Magazine…



How to Sell Travel Photographs to Magazines

The trick to publishing your article and photos when you get back from a trip, Efrain tells me, is to think up story ideas ahead of time, so you’ll know what to shoot while you’re there. And to research publications that might buy your idea ahead of time, too.

“Before I leave for any trip,” he says, “I do some research and actively think of possible article ideas. Together with a shooting list of subjects, I write down general ideas for articles, which I will pursue once on location.

“Sometimes my ideas work. Sometimes they don’t. Specifically, as I was researching my trip to Puerto Rico, I ran across a website about a land trust in Puerto Rico that had purchased and remodeled a lighthouse in Fajardo, a town on the northeast corner of the island.

“I then read up on other lighthouses and learned that some were still in very good condition. Since I’m a history buff, I looked into the overall history of all of the island’s lighthouses, and, somewhere along the line, decided that this was the article idea I was going to run with.

” I can’t remember the exact fees, but Photographic paid by the page which worked out between $700 and $800 for the piece. Lighthouse Digest paid less, but they agreed to include a small blurb in the magazine’s table of contents about my business, Padró Images.”

Tomorrow, I’ve asked Efrain to tell us more about how to find saleable ideas before (and during) your vacations and also how to sell them to multiple publications.  If you want to sell travel photos to magazines, stay tuned.


-- Bonnie

Bonnie Caton
AWAI Travel Division

P.S. You don’t have to be a professional writer or photographer to sell travel photos to magazines (in fact, Efrain was neither when he started -- he was a lawyer).

I asked freelance travel writer, Jennifer Stevens for some tips photographers can use to write travel articles with their photos and I included them in our soon-to-be-published guide: The Quick and Dirty Guide to Magazine Photography.  I’ll send you details tomorrow about where you can find a discount for the guide online.

P.P.S. Efrain, you may remember, was also guest-speaker at our Ultimate Stock Photo Workshop last October in Santa Fe. If you couldn’t make it to that workshop, you can still get all of the tips, secrets, and real-world advice that Efrain and our four other professional photographers delivered with the Ultimate Stock Photography Workshop-At-Home Package, on sale for 30% off until midnight tonight.

Or, see our entire catalog, where you can save up to 50% and get free shipping on our best get-paid-to-travel resources during our Holiday Sale.

Further Resources:

Sell travel photos to magazines - more from eHow

Sell travel photos to magazines through stock sites like iStock.com

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