Business cards always gear exposure up, its a great way to talk to people about your work, especially the more you get into it. I use to be heavy into bird photography, still dabble in it just not as much here lately kind of an off season. But the one thing I would always do is bring business cards with me. Many people would see my equipment / age and be dumbfound, mainly because I'm a 25 year old guy walking around with huge lenses and binoculars, actively birdwatching with an age group that is generally dominated by ages 55-70! So when people ask me what I'm doing I give them a card and say go check this out, and explain that I take photographs for fun, but mostly do rare bird documentation photographs.

For me to get my work noticed I did a few other things that I can recommend highly. Keep a folio online (I'm not familiar with the one you are using, but I use Flickr Pro, 25 a year unlimited photo hosting - www.flickr.com). Make sure you have it cleaned and organized. If you're going to use it as your main source of showmanship, only put your best up, hold back anything that would be considered sub-par for yourself (right now I'm using my flickr to host a lot of images and documentation shots and reptile work so again, kind of in a off season). Next thing, join groups, NOT stuff like "Nat geo photos to go" or "I wanna be a photographer" but real groups like magazine groups that want people to send in shots for possible publication. There are many out there, you just need to do some searching. The last thing is tagging. Figure out what the best key words and tags are for your images and plaster them so that everytime someone types a random phrase in google you have a chance of coming up with your image! It works, I promise! If you do wildlife, make sure you are using both common naming and scientific naming. Then further the inclusion by adding tags for the kingdom, class, order, and genus as well. This way you have a very broad spectrum for people to acquire one of your images with. . . . Now flickr doesn't offer a monitizing function allowing people to order your prints, but it does offer exposure that will allow you to have people contact you with information about image use rights. Using these methods landed one of my bird shots last year in a biodiversty exhibit at a Museam! On top of that, many of my shots have been used in publications all over the US, I have been contacted by professors to use my shots in classrooms or research papers, and graduate students have even emailed me looking for usage rights in graduate thesis work! Again, this won't pay the bills, but it will help you grow a fan base and get the exposure your images need to live.

Finally, equipment . . . since you broguht it up, yeah we'll bring it up again! It's not always the equipment that make the photographer, but it sure can make the difference between a shot that happens, and one that does not. Many of the good lenses you'll need are going to run quite a bit of money, Nikkor 24-70 f2.8 lens is a beast, but the price tag is more than everything you currently have combined! If you don't plan on doing a lot of portriate / landscape shooting, stay away from wide angle lenses for now. They are fun! But heck, they are expensive, and you're not after that in general. For wildlife, I used a Sigma 150-500mm F4.5-6.3 HSM OS lens for a LONG time mounted on a Nikon D200, then a Nikon D7000. This set up faired extremely well for me, and I imaging it would do wonders for you with that extra length. For the price the Sigma 500mm is the best length bang for the buck out there. But get a half gimbal head and a good tripod to really get your use out of it. Your images will jump in sharpness when you need them to at those long focal lengths. The lens is decent at f7.1 and amazing at f8 - f11, but you're going to need superb lighting or a camera with the ability to cleanly handle high ISO (thinking along the lines of a D700, D800 (easily up to 6400), D7000 (upto 3200)). Other options are out there, Nikkor 80-400mm lens is a great lens for the most part, its a bit soft, but many people have been able to use it and get hands down fantastic images. Another lens that I'd like to HIGHLY reccommend is the Nikkor 300mm f4, this is the budget awesome prime. It's faster than your other options at 400 and 500mm and you can add a 1.4x tele to it to make it a 420mm f5.6 which is as fast as the 80-400 but a heck of a lot sharper, a prime lens, AND 20mm greater reach. The only downside to this is that it has an older style focus mechanism so you will not be able to autofocus on the D3100, D60, D40, D3200, and D5000, D5100 as well. . . as well as a lack of VR (Come on nikon!).

BONUS CONTENT:

Touching on equipment one last time, I'll point out a new technology that is bloody amazing! Nikon entered the mirrorless camera game with the 1 series cameras. They offer a 2.7x crop factor on their lenses, so it has a SUPER small sensor, but man it does wonders in a lot of ways.
1) With the Nikon Ft-1 adapter you can mount your nikon lenses onto this small mirrorless camera, think J1 for budget, V1 for comfort with the added viewfinder
2) Because it has a 2.7x Crop Factor, you get an additional 1.2x crop than you would if you were using a DX sensor nikon camera with the same glass. This means a 500mm lens would have an EFL of 750mm on a D7000, EFL of 500mm on a D700, and a whopping EFL of 1350mm on a Nikon J1!
2b) When you utilize the crop factor, you lose NO light - usually adding a teleconverter causes you to drop your F stop by the same amount as the tele, a 2x tele will drop you 2 f stops (think f4 goes to f8) while a 1.4x will drop you 1.4 stops (f4 goes to f5.6). With the crop factor of the sensor and the light retention of the Ft-1 adapter you retain your fast f stop!! So what this means is if you use a nikkor 70-200 f2.8 lens, you will have an EFL of 540mm @ f2.8! This translates to wicked awesome depth of field as well as superb autofocus abilities as well as wicked fast shutter speeds (think ISO 100, exposure 1/4000 sec @ f3.2 in daylight).
3) Insanely fast Frames Per Second shooting with Raw capabilities - Big for people trying to photograph wildlife in action.
4) Cost over all is GREATLY reduced to a comparitive cropped or full frame setup with a smaller package that can still retain some GREAT shots IF you know its limitations.

Breakdown on Cost:
Nikon J1 kit - $500
Ft-1 Adapter - $200
Tamron 70-200f.8** - $769
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Total: $1469

Going the budget route with a Tamron 200 f2.8 is an alternative, but it delivers! Just don't expect Autofocus to work, to keep with autofocus capabilities you'll need to look into Nikkor, at least the 80-200 AF-S, or a used Nikon 70-200 f2.8 VR (not the new VRII). But this will add at the least $800 into your final cost.

Go check out some of my test work with this set up, as well some of my work, be sure and look at my sets "Warblers 2011" and "Panama Highlite shots" for some great examples. Many of my J1 test shots can be seen on page 2 of my flickr page if you are interested in this budget small footprint camera set up. Let me know if you want to talk more on any of this!
www.flickr.com/codyconway

Cheers