People sometimes ask how I got my first paid photography work.

This long exposure shot of the London Eye at night is a 30 second exposure at low ISO and 10mm wide. It is my second version of a photo I had taken 11 years ago.

The story goes something along those lines:

In 2009 I was barely beginning my love affair with photography, I was a couple of years into it.

I shot an image of the London Eye by night using a Tokina fisheye lens on a Canon camera. I posted it on Flickr using appropriate tags and carried on shooting London.

Meanwhile, I had a sort of life-defining interaction with a successful street artist one September evening at an art show and as we chatted he gave me that simple advice/motivation: "Set yourself an achievable goal, for example, to have your work published for the first time by the end of the year."

A couple months went by and I got an email in November from Tokina lenses asking if I would be happy to sell the rights to use my photo as the hero shot for a nationwide advertising campaign for the lens I used. They'd found it on Flickr.

By December the image was a full-page advert in all UK photography magazines for a 6-month duration and with my name next to it.

This was the start of many more, it was the motivation I needed to keep me going. So let me pass this forward and give you that same piece of advice: Set yourself one achievable goal, perhaps to have your photography published in a magazine by Easter?

For extra tips read my article on the blog: HOW TO GET YOUR PHOTOGRAPHY PUBLISHED IN MAGAZINES

Good luck to all and let me know how you get on!

Nico