business practices

Dialing for dollars

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Freelance photographers usually get paid by cheque and, I suppose, occasionally by cash. Some photographers, including myself, also accept credit card payments through a PayPal account. In this case, the common setup is that the client accesses a web page on the photographer’s site to start the PayPal process.

PayPal just announced its new PayPal Here system that will allow a business to accept credit card payments using a smart phone. This is similar to the up-and-running, two-year-old Square system.

There are differences between PayPal Here and Square but there’s only one difference that matters to Canadian photographers: PayPal Here will be available in Canada and Square is not.

Square says that it’s looking into expanding outside the USA but it’s been saying that for two years. Perhaps the competition from PayPal will force Square to get moving. [Update October 24, 2012: Square just announced that it’s available in Canada.]

Apparently, the Square system is/was capable of being used for credit card fraud. The PayPal Here card reader is encrypted.

For professional photographers, accepting credit card payments on location could be a big help. Some business customers and government clients can pay on-the-spot with a corporate credit card. But not being able to accept credit cards on location means the photographer has to send an invoice and wait up to several months to get paid.

Update March 18, 2013: PayPal Here is still not available in Canada.

 

Terms of endearment

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A common practice of professional photographers is to condition their work upon a set of Terms and Conditions. This is not new or unusual. Virtually all businesses have some sort of terms and conditions that govern their customer transactions.

For some businesses, their terms and conditions might be very simple: “Cash only. No refunds.”
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Reach for the top

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That Sears, Walmart and some grocery stores have portrait studios should be of no concern to commercial photographers. The fact that these stores do family portraits for as little as $7.99 and business portraits for $29.95 is meaningless.

Don’t worry about it.

These cheap photo stores are not your competition, unless you’re trying to do $7.99 children’s portraits and $29.95 business portraits.

Don’t worry that some other professional photographer charges $35/hour or that they give away all pictures and copyrights for $199. Unless you’re racing to run your business into the ground, this photographer is not your competition.

Your competition is the photographer who charges more than you because they have what you want.

Always compete up not down.

–Added April 2013: Sears and Walmart portrait studios shut down.

 

Business advice for photographers

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The American Society of Media Photographers (ASMP) has a few dozen videos to help professional photographers improve their business practices. Topics include negotiating, marketing, pricing, paperwork, licensing and copyright.

These videos were produced for American photographers and so there are a few legal and business issues that either don’t apply or are different here in Canada. However many of the concepts and principles are equally applicable to Canadian photographers.

 

Commercial photography for web sites

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When licensing pictures, corporate photographers and commercial photographers must remember that there’s no such thing as “web use.” The Web is a medium, not a use. Photos used online can be editorial, advertising or anything in-between.

Many business clients use photographs not only on their web site but also on social media sites such as Facebook and Twitter. A photographer has to decide whether such use is no longer editorial or public relations but rather a form of advertising. The common definition that only a “paid placement” is advertising may no longer apply.

For a corporate client, its own web site is usually considered marketing collateral and not advertising. All advertising is marketing but not all marketing is advertising.

But for a business client such as a retailer, is its web site a form of advertising? What about that company’s Facebook or Twitter account?

Perhaps every use on the Web should be priced higher than similar use in print. This is not just for the larger and longer-lasting “circulation” of a web site but also for the increased shift towards advertising use.

 

Pricing editorial photography

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When it comes to pricing their work, photographers need all the help they can get. fotoQuote and Blinkbid are two common software tools used.

An overlooked tool for editorial photographers is Editorial Photography Estimator. The free version is still available but not the commercial version which included data for advertising photography. A new edition of the commercial version was supposed to have been released in 2011.

It’s very important to remember that Editorial Photography Estimator (EPE) is from 2001 and its numbers are out-of-date. However, the underlying concepts are still valid. Editorial fees, for both assignment and stock, are based upon the circulation of the publication and that publication’s ad rate for a full-page colour ad.
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Higher prices make customers happy

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The key to helping your customers better enjoy your photographs is to raise your prices.

A 2007 USA study, with the catchy title of “Marketing actions can modulate neural representations of experienced pleasantness”, showed that marketing actions, such as changing the price of a product, can affect consumer enjoyment of that product.

The study used functional MRI to observe the brain activity of test subjects while they sampled differently-priced wines.

The subjects were told that five different wines were priced at $5, $10, $35, $45 and $90. But unknown to them, there were really only three different wines: the $5 and $45 wines were the same; the $10 and $90 wines were the same.
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