freelancing

Pots, Pans and Pictures

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Everyone owns some pots and pans yet restaurants don’t view this as competition. Restaurants know that people will still dine out. Eating at a restaurant is about more than just the food.

Everyone owns a camera and some professional photographers view this as competition. Why? Hiring a professional photographer should be about more than just the pictures.

A commercial photographer has to offer something more than what a camera’s automatic settings can do. Otherwise, they will have no choice but to compete on price, (always a losing situation), and their photo career may be nothing more than a flash in the pan.

 

Better Search Results

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One of the interesting(?) features available to web site owners is the ability to see what search phrases are used to find their site. One such phrase used several times to find this site is: “photography companies hiring photographers”.

Very few “photography companies” have staff photographers:

• Newspapers. But the newspaper industry is collapsing and the hiring of photographers is rare. The number of staff news photographers in the USA is expected to drop by 30% over the next seven years. Canada should be similar.

• Government. A few government offices have staff photographers but this has been mostly replaced by freelancers and occasional contract work. It’s surprising and short-sighted that governments don’t have staff photographers and photo departments.

• The military. But I doubt it’s much of a photography company :-)

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Working for free

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Photographers, do yourself a favour and read this article by US brand strategist Patty Soffer:

Freebies are the scourge of freelance workers everywhere. Beginners notwithstanding (yes, we all pay our dues) many are tempted to work for free because they believe it will lead to paying work. News flash: it won’t. It leads exactly nowhere. When the un-payer decides to ante up, they hire someone else because they want to work with professionals who value themselves. Clearly you don’t if you were willing to give it away for nothing.

– Patty Soffer

 

When someone asks you to work for free, it means they think your photography is worthless. When you work for free, it means you agree.

The best situation is to charge what your photography is worth. But if you must offer a discount, rather than work for free, simply charge less than what your photography is worth but more than what it costs.

 

Making Contact

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My web site offers three ways for prospective customers to contact me: telephone number, e-mail address, and a contact form.

I thought that most people would use the e-mail link. My assumption was that people would prefer and trust their own e-mail software more than a basic web-page contact form.

Over the past three years, 5% of potential customers used the telephone number, 30% used the e-mail address and 65% used the contact form.

Forms can capture not only the person’s name and e-mail address but also any other information you might need. However asking too many questions risks turning a simple contact form into an interrogation and frighten customers away.

Contact forms are easy to implement. Web hosts usually include CGI-based e-mail forms. Blog software either has contact forms built-in or there’s a free plugin available. There are a few third-party-hosted form services.

Contact forms do attract spammers and there are ways to minimize this nuisance. But any spam that does come through a contact form is far outweighed by the benefits of having such a form on your web site. I mention this because I’ve noticed that many photographers’ web sites don’t have a contact form.

 

Bottom Of The Ninth

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Some photo assignments can be challenging in one way or another. But a professional photographer should welcome such assignments as an opportunity to build customer trust and enhance the photographer’s reputation.

Any photographer can show up, shoot a few business portraits, and deliver photos a few days later. However the photographer didn’t really prove anything to the customer except that the photographer was competent.

But if. . .
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Photography Pricing Resources

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Here’s some resources for learning to price commercial photography. But I’m not vouching for any of these. A photographer would be foolish to base their business practices on numbers from someone else’s web site. Use these for informational purposes and to help understand the underlying principles.

— The News Photographers Association of Canada Cost of Doing Business Calculator (CODB) is a good place to start. You may be surprised at your CODB.

— The Canadian Association of Professional Image Creators has a PDF listing suggested minimum usage fees (i.e. licensing fees only). Main page > Useful Resources > Resources > Reproduction Fee Schedule. The site has other useful information.

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Sales tax for Canadian photographers

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For Canadian professional photographers (and other business owners), the federal government has published a brief GST/HST guide and a sales tax calculator. The calculator is titled “GST/HST calculator” but the results will also show provincial tax.

Current sales tax rates (these may change):

British Columbia: 5% GST and 7% PST

Alberta: 5% GST and 0% PST

Saskatchewan: 5% GST and 6% PST

Manitoba: 5% GST and 8% PST

Ontario: 13% HST

Quebec: 5% GST and 9.975% QST

New Brunswick: 15% HST

Nova Scotia: 15% HST

Prince Edward Island: 15% HST

Newfoundland and Labrador: 15% HST

Yukon: 5% GST and 0% PST

Northwest Territories: 5% GST and 0% PST

Nunavut: 5% GST and 0% PST

In British Columbia, Saskatchewan, Manitoba and Quebec, the provinces which have both GST and a provincial sales tax, each tax is charged on the retail price only (i.e. there’s no tax on the other tax).

 

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.

 

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