Today is the start of a new series: every month, we will interview a PhotoDeck member about his/her photo business.

Please meet Ariadne Van Zandbergen: Ariadne lives in South Africa, in Bergville, KwaZulu-Natal at the base of the Drakensberg Mountains, and she uses PhotoDeck to power a great stock collection, The Africa Image Library.

I’m a travel and wildlife photographer specialised in Africa. I try to document the beauty of this amazing continent by photographing its wildlife, cultures and scenery.

I’m often away on long trips after which I come home with thousands of images to work through. I use Lightroom for a streamlined workflow of captioning and key-wording, colour corrections, further processing and archiving. Where necessary I bring in Photoshop as well. A subset of processed images gets uploaded onto my PhotoDeck website.

Leopard drinking (Panthera pardus), Sabi Sands, Greater Kruger National Park, South Africa

I run my own photolibrary : The Africa Image Library. My main clients are picture editors for magazines and book publishers, but I also sell to tour operators and designers doing brochures. Other clients are interior decorators and individuals buying prints.

I started off as a photographer almost 15 years go. After completing my engineering degree in Belgium, I travelled through Africa for a year. I fell in love with the continent and decided to try to make a career out of a hobby.

There are few corners in Africa I haven’t photographed, so I’m known in the business for Africa photography. I’m working with most publishers that specialize in Africa and they tend to refer me on as well. Most of it is word of mouth.

Specialising in Africa and documenting the whole continent at a time when very few photographers worked outside the few obvious places in Africa was a good move.

I don’t have any regrets. I’m lucky to be where I am in a competitive business like this.

I’m looking at branching out in doing more fine-art photography for prints. It means targeting a different market and therefore different marketing. It would be fun to do some exhibitions.

Look past the glamour of travel photography. Photography is not just about ‘having a good eye’, it’s mostly about hard work.

Naro bushman (San) dance, Central Kalahari, Botswana

I’ve got 2 Nikon D3S cameras which have a video function. I don’t think it’s great, but I haven’t experimented a lot. To me video and photography have little in common and I’m a photographer and I’ll leave video to videographers.

Picture buyers want to pay less and less for stock photography. Big photolibraries like Getty Images are calling the shots and they are going for quantity over quality. I compete by offering better service. By dealing with clients directly they benefit from my in-depth knowledge of Africa for their picture research.

Grandidier's baobab, Adansonia grandidieri, Avenue of the baobabs, near Morondava, Madagascar

PhotoDeck offers an amazing template for my photolibrary website. All images are available online in high resolution and the check-out flow and payment options give my clients immediate access to images even when I’m on the road.

My clients love my new user-friendly website. For commissioned work where I have to supply hundreds of pics according to a complicated spec, the facility to make structured galleries with sub-galleries is a nice facility that makes my client’s life easy which in turn makes me more sales.

Although the PhotoDeck template caters for all kind of photographers, it does everything which is important to me for an online photolibrary. J-F also offers the best service when it comes to any trouble-shooting or questions.

It would be great to see a way to influence which images come up first in searches. First of all to have newer images coming up first (now the old ones come up first) and secondly through the star system.

African elephant ( Loxodonta africana africana), Kapama Game Reserve, Greater Kruger National Park, South Africa