Value of experience

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You get paid to do what others can’t or won’t do. Maybe they don’t have the time, maybe they don’t have the tools or maybe they don’t have the know-how. In any case, if someone can do what you do, they won’t pay you to do the same thing.

This means that a professional photographer should have better tools, better production values and better abilities and more creativity than their competition and even their customers. But this is not always the case.

An amateur photographer, and maybe even a customer, might own the same or better tools than a professional photographer. An amateur might have the same creativity and ability as a professional.
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Photo Op or Photo Flop

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It’s now three days into Queen Elizabeth’s tour of Canada and (as expected) the photos are quite boring and even non-existent. Political conventions and campaigns usually have better photo planning. I don’t know why the same effort isn’t put into a royal tour. I suspect it’s because a royal tour is basically run by the police rather than a creative director or a public relations agency.

The purpose of a photo op can be completely lost due to poor planning. For example, what’s the point of doing a statue unveiling when the statue isn’t in the photo? Why have the talent stroll through a garden when the garden isn’t visible?
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HST for photographers

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Added: Much of this changed in 2012. Please see this government web page.

 

Photographers in Ontario and British Columbia (B.C.) know that their new Harmonized Sales Tax (HST) kicks in on July 1. The HST is called the “value-added tax” which sounds like a fast-food combo meal: for just a dollar more, you can up-size your tax to our new value-added tax.

Federal government page for the HST has lots of (confusing) information.

The HST will benefit large businesses and government. Gee, guess who got left out? The consumer. Business will save billions of dollars annually, the government will earn billions more in taxes, and consumers will pay billions more each year. Notice any kind of pattern here?
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Reality Check

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The following quotes are from a web forum used by art directors, marketing and public relations people, web designers, and other marketing “experts”. The topic was: how much to pay a professional photographer for business portraits to be used on a business web site.
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Effectiveness of Adwords for photographers

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Advertising either works or it doesn’t, there’s no middle ground. If an ad is going to work, it will work right away. To know whether an ad is working, it must be measurable. If results can’t be measured then the ad is a waste of time and money.

I’ve been using Google Adwords for just over three months and I was planning to use it for at least one year.

Quantity of Results

After three months of using Google Adwords:

• My ads have been served up about 2,300 times per month.

• The click-through rate is about 1% (21 to 25 clicks per month).

• Number of enquiries is 10% of the click-throughs (about 2 or 3 per month).

• Number of paying jobs is 0.

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