The business side of photography
Photographers use batteries and all batteries can leak. This means that sooner or later, many photographers will end up cursing at leaky batteries.
Contrary to popular belief, all batteries don’t leak acid. Lead-acid batteries leak acid because, well, that’s why they have “acid” in their name. But alkaline batteries leak . . . wait for it . . . an alkaline material called potassium hydroxide.
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De-skill: to reduce the level of skill needed for a job.
Many tasks today require less skill to perform due to advancing technology. But when something requires less skill, some people wrongly assume that it also requires less creativity, less expertise and less talent. A good example of this is photography.
For the third time in seven weeks, a company sent me business headshots they wanted fixed. It was plainly obvious that all of these companies had used amateur photographers (or a really bad professional).
A small law firm today sent two business portraits and a list of what they wanted fixed:
– fix the uneven brightness of the faces
– make skin colour better
– the eyes are too dark. Make brighter.
– replace the [office] background with a plain background
– add shoulders to each person and make the pictures square
Photographers need to catalogue their images. A catalogue is a visual list of your pictures that helps you organize, search and retrieve them.
There are a lot of photo editing software but very few for digital asset management (i.e. cataloging). There are many cloud-based cataloging solutions for larger businesses but the high cost of these pushes them out of reach of most photographers.
Media Pro, a popular cataloging application for many years, was discontinued in August 2018.
I started using Media Pro in 1998 when it was called iView Multimedia. Back then, the British software company gave it away as shareware. In the early 2000s, iView Multimedia changed its name to iView Media Pro and gave it a $60 price.
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If you thought your home office was small or ugly, here is someone’s “vintage” 42-square-foot home office before it gets renovated. It has no functioning lights or heat. But it does have lots of nails in a wall, a very sloping floor and a sewage pipe in the corner. I didn’t ask about the dark red stains on the floor.
A small financial consulting company last week sent me four business portraits they wanted fixed. Another photographer shot these portraits three months ago and I don’t know why he or she didn’t fix the photos.
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(With apologies to Charles Dickens)
It was the best of houses, it was the worst of houses, it was the age of beauty, it was the age of squalor, it was the epoch of style, it was the epoch of simplicity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of disrepair . . .
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Just wanted to point out that the Canadian government has posted its 2019 kilometric rates for car travel by government employees.
These rates are the bare minimum of what photographers should be charging for use of their vehicle.
Your situation may require you to charge more. For example, it costs me about 85¢/km to drive my car. This is much higher than the government’s 57¢/km (including tax) for Ontario.
Please check the date of this article because it contains information that may become out of date. Tax regulations, sales tax rules, copyright laws and privacy laws can change from time to time. Always check with proper government sources for up-to-date information.
You might be thinking that you can save a few dollars by hiring a good enough photographer. After all, good enough is okay, right?
US phone company AT&T did a series of commercials about hiring just okay people (and here and here).
But would this apply to photographers?
Many companies shop price first because they assume that all photographers are the same. They wrongly think that it’s the camera that makes the photos.
Hiring an experienced, professional photographer is about finding a photographer who has enough experience with customers like yourself so they can understand your photo needs and can do the work confidently.
Professional photographers should have enough experience to know what the risks might be and what problems might arise and then know how to minimize those risks and prevent those problems from happening. This level of experience is necessary to make your photography project a success.
Experienced photographers charge more because they know more and can help you more. Or would you rather save a few dollars by having an okay photographer “figure it out” at your expense?
