Are you a photography buff? Do you take your Canon digital SLR camera with you wherever you go and fill it up with photographs? If so, why do you just leave them there gathering digital dust in your hard drive? Why not share them with the world and even make some money while you’re at it?

Most professional photographers started out as amateurs. They got the bug, scraped together enough money to buy a decent camera and perhaps even enrolled in art school and came out of it with a degree.

You may believe that total dedication is what it takes to make money from photography. You’re right. If you want to make it your career, you have to be dedicated to it. That’s what being a professional is all about. Nobody is saying that you can make a good living at anything if you don’t give it your all.

That doesn’t mean you can’t sell some of your best or most interesting photos, though. Publishers are always hungry for photographs and are always on the lookout for something unique. Let’s say, for instance, that you stumbled across a kitchenaid hand mixer being used for something unusual. You were at a friend’s house and her kids had taken it out into the yard and were trying it out on their mud cookie mixture. Before stopping them, you couldn’t resist taking a picture.

There is not another photograph in the world quite like that. What kind of price tag do you put on it? It’s up to you, but you can offer the reprint rights or sell the photograph outright through a website that offers content to publishers and advertisers. Maybe the Canon SLR camera company would want to use it in an advertising campaign or the Kitchenaid company would want to buy it for their product promotion.

If you are traveling, there is no doubt that you take your camera with you. That’s a perfect opportunity to sell photographs. Photos accompanied by articles sell the best, so write a unique article that would appeal to a wide market and then submit both of them to some travel magazines.

Between your article and your photographs, it could add up to a good portion of your travel expenses. Magazines are willing to pay good money: you’d be surprised how much.

Everybody’s looking for ways to make a little extra money these days. You just may have a great source of extra cash right there in your collection of digital photographs. There’s nothing to lose, so have a little faith in yourself and give it a try.