Hi, everybody, welcome to Episode 32 of the photography explained podcast. In this episode, what are the 20 most popular types of photography?

I’m your host Rick and each week I will try to explain one photographic thing to you in plain English in less than 10 minutes without the irrelevant details.

My aim is to explain things in just enough detail to help you and me with our photography, and no more. I’m a professionally qualified photographer based in England with a lifetime of photographic experience which I share with you on my podcast.

So what are the 20 most popular types of photography?

Now I need to say that I’m just going to fly through the list and make a couple of points about them, and then I’m going to come back to the ones I want to talk about in future episodes because there are some that I’ve got a lot to say about and some that I’ve got not so much to say about.

And there are things I need to know a lot more about myself. And one of the questions, as I go through these, is this Can you make money from them?

Here are the 20 types of photography

Okay, so, in no particular order, sorry, in alphabetical order (unusually organised for me), the 20 most popular types of photography are

• Architectural
• Documentary
• Event
• Fashion
• Food
• Industrial
• Landscape
• Macro
• New-born
• Portrait
• People
• Photojournalism
• Product
• Sports
• Still life
• Stock
• Street
• Weather
• Wedding
• Wildlife.

Okay, that’s my list of 20 types of photography.

I’m sure there are others. But this covers most things. And this is how I see it. See this is the benefit of having your own podcast!

You can listen to the episode here

Or keep on reading. Or do both. Entirely up to you!

So let’s get straight into the list starting with

1 Architectural photography.

Now this is what I do. So I’m not going to talk about this too much here. Architectural photography is the photographing of buildings. I’m going to talk about architectural photography in the next episode of the podcast. And I’m also going to talk about construction photography in a separate podcast episode. So let’s move on from these.

2 Documentary photography.

The best way I can describe this is those people who are like war photographers, people who go into these places of incredible danger and conflict. This is where documentary photography is for me.

Can you make a living doing it? Most certainly.

Am I going to make a living doing it? No, it sounds far too dangerous. But I am sure there is much safer stuff out there – this is just what comes to mind when I think of it!

3 Event photography.

I’ll come back to some of these in much more detail – don’t worry. Event photography – now this could be any kind of event, sporting, social, or commercial.

I’ve done a couple of sporting events and I’ve done a couple of other events. I didn’t love it. I’m rubbish with flash, basically.

But event photography is something that you can indeed making a living out of.

4 Fashion photography

Like event photography, with fashion photography, there is definitely a living to be made. It’s a specialism all of its own that I know nothing about and I’m not going to cover here.

5 Food photography

More my kind of thing apart from the fact that you need lights and some close-up gear that is! But food photography is, yeah, there’s a living to be made there.

6 Industrial photography.

My kind of thing. big, large, dirty smelly installations, big plant rusting stuff, noise. That’s my kind of thing. Can you make a living? You sure can.

7 Landscape photography

I love doing landscape photography.

Can you make a living doing it? It’s difficult, very, very difficult, because everybody’s doing it.

8 Macro photography

Photographing small things, a great niche (or niche) depending on which side of the pond you are on. Can you make a living doing it? Probably.

9 New-born photography

10 Portrait photography

11 People photography

19 Wedding photography

These are all photographing people. Now I’m probably the worst person on the planet to advise about anything to do with photographing people because I photograph everything other than people. But yeah, there’s lots of business opportunities there for these genres, which I think I’ll cover separately.

12 Photo-journalism.

Back in the day, lots of people made a living from photojournalism. I think it’s more difficult now than ever to get into photo-journalism because everyone has a phone, and iPhones take great photos.

So difficult to make money but I’m sure there are people making a nice living from this.

13 Product photography.

Everybody needs photographs of their products. It’s a great niche to get into. And if you think about it, the list of products is endless. I specialise in construction product photography, the problem is you don’t do it that often. But when you do, you can get some big names.

I have photographed some of the biggest names on the planet.

14 Sports photography.

I’d love to do this. I had a dabble at sports photography when I had the Canon 100-400 millimetre monster lens, which I used to take some great photos. It was at the Cricket World Cup in the UK, and I got some great stuff.

The big problem I had was after a few beers my handling of this massive lens wasn’t too good and it caused problems with the people sitting in front of me! Sorry folks!

15 Still life

I need to look into what still life photography is as to me still life is more about paintings. So um, yes, we’ll look into that one.

16 Stock photography.

I want to say something about this. I’ve tried stock photography, I’ve not made any money out of it. I’ve got some stuff on Adobe Stock. And you know how much money I’ve made from these? Well, I have not actually made it yet, because I’ve never received a payment because I have never reached a payment trigger.

It’s about 52p, which in American terms is probably about 40 cents.

That’s it.

It’s just a market that’s got more and more challenging with too much free stuff out there.

Now I’m sure there are people out there who make money from stock photography, but I don’t know how they do it.

17 Street photography.

Now I know very little about street photography. I’m going to look into that. And I’m going to cover this one definitely in another episode (losing the ability to speak there, which is a concern). Street photography is something that I’ve always ignored and shunned and possibly dismissed.

Absolutely for no reason whatsoever.

18 Weather photography

When I was researching this list (yes I have done some research) weather came up quite often – weather photography is, erm photographing the weather. Not sure about that.

19 Wedding photography

I touched on wedding photography earlier.

I photographed a wedding once. I won’t be doing that again anytime soon. Absolutely terrifying! Not for me.

If you’re a wedding photographer, you’re braver than I am and hats off to you (no wedding pun intended there).

20 Wildlife photography

Lastly, wildlife photography. I’d love to do that. That’s about where you go, isn’t it? Yeah, I can’t think of anything better than spending all my time photographing wildlife. So that’s something I need to possibly look into and get some get some trips done.

Problem is I need all new gear now because I sold all the telephoto stuff.

Okay, can you make a living out of these?

You can, but it’s tough. I will talk about this in a future episode.

Niche down

The one thing I will say now is to make a living, don’t try and do everything. Pick one thing and do that one thing. I photograph buildings and construction, that is it. Nothing else.

Of course, I do the landscape and travel thing, but I don’t market any of that. That’s just my personal stuff.

Okay, a quick recap.

In this episode, I’ve listed the 20 most popular types of photography and told you a very little about each of them.

What do I want you to do now?

1 – Do this one thing.

Think of which of these areas of photography you could focus on. Just one.

2 – Let me know on Twitter, send a message to me @rickphoto.

Tell me what that one thing is and tell me why – I’d love to hear from you.

3 – Please subscribe to my podcast.

If you enjoyed this episode, or any other episode I have to say. This helps me tremendously.

4 – Please rate and review my podcast.

Again, if you enjoyed this episode, this helps me greatly. If you thought it was rubbish, please don’t rate me because I’ll get a low rating. I don’t want any of them!

5 – Lastly, tell someone you know about my podcast.

This also helps me.

Next Episode.

In the next episode, I’m going straight into architectural photography. This is what I do. I’m not going to do architectural photography in 10 minutes, I’ll warn you now because I’m so excited to talk about this. I genuinely am excited.

Thank you

Thank you very much for listening to my small but perfectly formed podcast. Check out my website, rickmcevoyphotography.com where you can find out all about me and my architectural and construction photography work, as well as my blog where you can learn lots about photography and me.

The Photography Explained Podcast website

And I need to mention here again, I keep on forgetting. Check out the Photography Explained Podcast website, just for this podcast.

Get in touch

Finally, let me know if there’s a photographic thing you want me to explain? Check out how to do this on the website – you’ll see how to do it. If I explain your thing, I’ll give you a shout-out on that episode. The list is live on Photography Explained Podcast.

I got this far!

This episode was brought to you by the power of black coffee because I’m stopping having dairy stuff now which is proving quite difficult (and didn’t last). And also by the power of optimism, and the anticipation of talking about what I do and love doing.

I’m done.

I’ve been Rick McEvoy. Thanks again for listening, and for giving me 10 minutes of your valuable time. And I hope to see you in the next episode.

Cheers from me, Rick

OK – that was the podcast episode.

Want to know more?

Head over to the Start page on the Photography Explained Podcast website to find out more.

And here is the list of episodes published to date – you can listen to any episode straight from this page which is nice.

Let me know if there is a photography thing that you want me to explain and I will add it to my list. Just head over to the This is my list of things to explain page of this website to see what is there already.

Let me send you stuff

I send out a weekly email to my subscribers. It is my take on one photography thing, plus what I have been writing and talking about. Just fill in the box and you can get my weekly photographic musings straight to your inbox. Which is nice.

And finally a little bit about me

Finally, yes this paragraph is all about me – check out my Rick McEvoy Photography website to find out more about me and my architectural, construction, real estate and travel photography work. I also write about general photography stuff, all in plain English without the irrelevant detail.

Thank you

Thanks for listening to my podcast (if you did) and reading this blog post (which I assume you have done as you are reading this).

Cheers from me Rick