Custom Products from your Photos

Custom Products from Your photos: photos into art, and mugs, and posters, and...

You have some heart-stopping photos in your personal image collection right? You’ve been visiting all the photography websites and have learnt all the tricks - so now what do you do with those head-turning images?

Printing them and leaving them in a shoebox (like I used to do) doesn’t do you any good. It won’t inspire you to improve your photography skills; you can’t show off – it’s hard to impress your friends with a box chock full of random (but beautiful) photography. After dinner slideshows are so passé and will chill your friends to the point of freezing them out of your place! What can you do to show off your talents and new found photographic skills?

You’ve got to blow your own horn to become recognized as a great photographer, seeing IS believeing, afterall!!! And I’ve come to believe that in the absence of gallery exhibitions (which I also recommend), an excellent way to promote yourself is with swag. You know – tees shirts, mouse pads, posters (especially posters), bags, mugs, postcards (I also LOVE postcards – send me yours!!!)...

I’ve been experimenting with some of the “print-on-demand” places where you can create customized products and transform your photos into saleable or “giftable” items. Zazzle and Café Press are the most popular. I admit I was sceptical about these places at first especially about how my images would be reproduced (remember – shoot for show – print for dough!), but I’ve now ordered several products from a couple of these places and I can tell you depending on what you order, you can get some very high quality merchandise!

It’s a business savvy way to brand your self and your photographic capabilities, as well as astonishing your family and friends when you give some of your own photo “products” as gifts.

(I’m going to have to create a distinct and marketable logo for nature photography central so I can create some products for sale! )

But as I said, you have to be careful what you get and from where. Some paces seem to have better output for different products. Here’s a sample of my poster from Zazzle:

My experience so far:

Custom Product Reviews at Zazzle (see next page for other reviews. Coming soon)