If you are trying to find a good niche for your photography, do the research ahead of time and get a gauge on your competition. In some cases, it may be too fierce, and your competing photographers may be too good. Then what?

Well, there are the obvious choices: Go ahead and plunge into it anyway, working as hard as you can to improve and become better - or at least as good - as those you are competing with. Or find another niche. The latter may be hard, as it would require you to completely change up your style.

Speaking of style, that might end up being your best way out. Let’s say you shoot mostly people (like I do) and you want to sell them as stock photos. You don’t have to shoot the traditional, highly saturated, blue/green toned photo of a businessman with a briefcase, a laptop and a cellphone. Those shots sell, but there is also an army of photographers shooting that exact type of photo. Add your own flavor to it. I tried doing just that in this photo, by having my model act pissed off. I did other ones in the same series that were comical or sad. Just to be different.

Mostly though, what seperates my photos from my competitors is my processing. It’s not really a specific style, that I have sought out consciously. I just learned how to process photos and started doing it the way, that got me images I liked. Two things enabled this. First, I learned the basics, so I knew what I was doing. Second, I forgot all about salability and just went for a look that I liked.

Rasmus Rasmussen is on loan from iStockphoto, where he is part of the image inspection team.

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