promotion

A photographer who paid $50,000 to an agency that promised to drastically grow her business by among other things, providing 100,000 Instagram followers, has sued after allegedly seeing no uptick in business.

Even though technology is advancing at an incredibly fast pace, multiple studies show that regardless of the time we spend on our screens, more than 81% of people (at least in the USA) prefer to read or view images on print rather than on a digital screen.

Want some free photography education by top professional photographers? Nikon has got you covered. The brand just made all of its online classes free for the holiday season.

Why do photographers need to market themselves? In a phrase: so that you don't starve to death. No, but seriously. Otherwise, you risk ending up like Vincent van Gogh who (in the words of Steven Pressfield) “produced masterpiece after masterpiece and never found a buyer in his whole life.”

In 2017, GoPro announced a Trade-Up promo to boost the sales of its HERO5 Black -- send in an older HERO camera and you got up to $100 off a new GoPro camera. This year, GoPro has just launched a new and improved Trade-Up: send in virtually any camera and in any condition and you get a hefty discount.

GoPro has announced a trade-up program in which you can get $100 off a HERO5 Black or $50 off a HERO5 Session when you trade-in your older Hero camera. This offer is available starting now, and you can do the swap by going to the trade-up page.

When someone says you need to "think outside the box" when it comes to marketing your skills and getting work as a photographer, Toronto-based photographer Aric Guité's #CollabWithAric campaign is exactly what they're talking about.

Well... this is awkward. No seriously, this is REALLY awkward. In addition to the usual feature promos Adobe releases when Photoshop is updated, Adobe also released a NSFW-ish sex-hotline spoof called 1-900-U-UPDATE.com this morning.

Deal alert: if you use Google's services for your photos, emails, or life in general, you can snag an extra 2GB of permanent storage space for free today. All you need to do complete Google's simple Security Checkup to verify that your account is secure -- it takes just a few clicks of your mouse.

We don’t share deal alerts here very often, but this one is pretty sweet: Canon is running …

Update: This giveaway is now over. Please see the end of this post for details.

We're doing another big camera gear giveaway to promote our new photography podcast: one lucky photographer will receive a versatile Tamron zoom lens worth up to $849.

To celebrate 60 years in Canada, KFC created a new bucket for fried chicken that doubles as an instant photo printer.

The "Memories Bucket" is a new high-tech, limited-edition bucket that helps you print your memories on the go as you're creating them with friends.

President Obama may want to think twice now before casually approving a selfie with a celebrity. A self-portrait taken with Obama by Red Sox baseball player David Ortiz is being used by Samsung as a promotional pic, and the administration isn't happy about it.

In the (slightly paraphrased) words of rapper and former Pimp My Ride host Xzibit, "Yo dawgs, we heard you liked the Nikon D4s, so here's a video about the D4s, shot on a D4s".

Self-promotion is a tricky thing. We all know that marketing is probably more than half the battle when it comes to getting great clients (after all, no matter how good you are, they can't hire you if they don't know you exist) these days.

And now, as the photography market is becoming more and more saturated, the name of the game is "make an impression." There are tens if not hundreds of photographers available pitching your client... how are you going to stand out?

When Adobe officially announced its special Creative Cloud plan/bundle for photographers, there was a catch: you had to own Photoshop CS3 or above in order to qualify for the special $10/month pricing. Well, no more. For a limited time, Adobe is lifting that restriction and making the special bundle available for everyone.

To promote this year's edition of its sports photography competition, Red Bull Illume is sending out a pretty slick promo. It's simply a USB drive loaded with a press media kit, but the presentation is so clever that we thought we'd share it with you (perhaps you can do something similar to promote your own photography business).

If you've always wanted your photography prominently displayed in New York City's Times Square, Google can help make it happen -- as long as you're okay with adding some text to your picture and participating in a marketing effort. To show that its new line of Chromebook laptops is designed for all kinds of users, the Mountain View-based company has launched a new campaign called For Everyone. It's a giant photo gallery that invites the world to upload photos that answer the question, "who are Chromebooks for?"

Leave it up to Samsung to hold crazy promotions for its mirrorless cameras -- at least in the UK. The company recently offered to give a NX1000 mirrorless camera to anyone named David Bailey; 142 David Baileys came forward to claim their camera. Now the camera maker is doing another unique promo, and this time it's open to the general public: it's giving away tablet computers with its mirrorless cameras.

Mailers are a popular way to self-promote as a photographer, but too often the promos go directly from the …

To promote its new One X phone (and the camera on it), HTC came up with the bizarre idea of doing a skydiving fashion shoot with photography student Nick Jojola and model (and professional skydiver) Roberta Mancino. During the photoshoot above the Arizona desert, Jojola plummeted to Earth at 126MPH while Mancino whizzed by at 181MPH, giving the photographer a tiny window of 0.8 seconds to squeeze off the shot.

One of the most important things I’ve learned during my ongoing adventure as a small-town, self-employed photographer is that nothing is more important than the relationships I’m building. So when I decided sometime last year that I was going to do a 2012 promo I wanted to create something that looked elegant, something that the recipients could be a part of and most importantly, something that could start building long-lasting relationships.

Cloud-based photo hosting service Snapjoy launched a clever web app (and marketing ploy) …

Do you use a free Dropbox account for storing and backing up your …

QR codes have become an extremely popular way of linking to digital things from the physical world, and more and more businesses are displaying them in order to direct customers to their websites. Photographer David Sykes (whom we previously featured here) decided to take advantage of the craze to promote his new website and blog. Instead of an ordinary QR code, however, he decided to create an 8-foot square model of the code using things such as boots, calculators, briefcases, boomboxes, and champagne bottles. He then photographed the code on film and mailed out limited edition prints.

We now have an official page on Google+! Add us to your circles …

What has the world come to? Apparently the prestigious Magnum Photos has partnered with Nintendo to promote the Nintendo 3DS as a camera. Photographers Martin Parr, Thomas Dworzak and Gueorgui Pinkhassov used the handheld gaming device to shoot a series of 3D photos that were then put on display in an exhibition held at the Magnum Gallery in Paris.

In 1986, Texaco’s gas stations ran a promotion where you received free Fujifilm film every time you filled up …

There hasn't been much activity in the PetaPixel Store since we launched the Leica Look-Alike skins in September 2010, but today that changes -- we're pleased to announce the new Polaroid Picture Frame and Mirror! It's an awesome picture frame for your desk that looks just like Polaroid 600 instant film, and when there isn't a photo inside it doubles as a mirror.

Free stuff is always nice, and free photo stuff is even nicer. Canon and Ilford have teamed up for …

Vodafone recently ran a pretty creative advertising campaign called “Pixel Hunt” for the purpose of illustrating how many pixels …

Deal of the day website Groupon is the fastest growing companies in web history and a popular way for local businesses to generate some buzz in their areas, but some independent photographers are finding out the hard way that offering special deals through Groupon might be the worst marketing decision they ever made.

Photographer Danny Cohen does things a little differently than most. Wanting to work …

Here’s a humorous introduction to the Arri Alexa digital motion picture camera by …

Photographer Clint Davis was previously the Art Director at a national magazine, so he has first hand experience on the type of photographer promo that grabs the attention of clients. Recently he himself needed to do some self-promotion, so he decided to get creative and create promo mailers filled with awesomeness. He writes,

Most of the promo pieces [Davis used to receive] were 4×6″ postcards with a picture on one side, and printed addresses on the other side. Stale, non-personalized, and probably frayed at the edges, the postcards rarely made it from the mail room to my desk. But a box?!? A freakin’ box??? NOW you have my attention. Maybe it’s just me, but when I get a box in the mail with a hand-written address, a slow fuzzy feeling comes over me and my eyes open 43% more than usual. YOU good box are coming back to my desk for a thorough dissection.

Above all I wanted to make a self-promotion mailer that wouldn’t get tossed in the trash right away. Considering the caliber of ad agencies, magazine photography editors, athletic teams, and select others that will receive this mailer, that is a tall order to accomplish.

Amateur Photographer magazine is doing something about all the stories in the news …

This past month Canon Canada ran a promotion where each purchase over $200 CAD came with a …

There's a new video on YouTube showing a gigantic shipping container camera promoting a Samsung camera. In the video, bystanders can actually use the "camera" by inserting some money into a coin slot, and then having someone jump onto the massive shutter button on top of the shipping container. The resulting photograph is then displayed on a gigantic screen atop a nearby building.

Looks like the Canon 70-200mm might not be as “collectible” as we all previously thought. Perhaps after seeing how …