Your hobby + a computer = extra money

Emily Galash’s friends are so jealous. The 16-year-old Portland, Oregon, high school sophomore is paid $125 a month to take digital photos of teen culture and send them to Look-Look, a youth-culture marketing and trend-forecasting firm in Hollywood.

Galash is one of Look-Look’s 35,000 teen trendspotters worldwide who feed their network inside information about the ever-shifting tastes of the lucrative youth market. The demand for hip, sharp-eyed trendspotters is growing as companies and consultancies attempt to learn more about what makes teens buy.

Some of Look-Look’s corporate clients, such as Virgin Mobile, a cell-phone service provider, use the images on their websites to give pages an authentic teen feel. Which is why Galash’s subjects must first agree to be photographed and then sign a release before she can upload their images to look-look.com.

Galash was offered a shot as a trendspotter last August, when her cousin gave up the job. Known at Look-Look as a “photojournalist,” Galash finds her best subjects at school, in the park, at local malls and near the city’s many music clubs. “It’s getting more difficult to capture original styles because so many young people work hard to stand out,” says Galash. “You have to be able to spot the difference between someone who’s copying trends and someone who’s truly inventing a new look.”

Galash’s advice: Develop your communication skills and intuitive feel for that next cool thing. But remember that “schoolwork comes first.”

Source:Reader’s Digest