Best Business Practices for Photographers [38]
Not to show my age, but this was back in the day when I processed my own E-6 film and hand mounted it, printed captions with a dot-matrix printer and affixed a label to each slide mount, and slipped the mounts into a slide page. I did not have the Internet to do my research, so I'd often find myself at a bookstore reading through Spin, Rolling Stone, and every other magazine where concert schedules were listed. I collected and read the Upcoming Events list on the first weekend of every month in the paper and local city magazine (as well as the free city weekly) so I could see what functions might attract a celebrity, and I'd sometimes call the event organizers and offer my services as a photographer on those evenings—times when I didn't otherwise have work.
The point is, many a friend would be out partying, watching television, and so on. They saw their time off as just time to goof off. I saw that time as time where I could do whatever it took to chart my course for the future. From the minute my eyes blinked open to the moment I drifted off to sleep, I was thinking about being a photographer. I was reviewing in my head, line by line, a conversation I had with a prospective client, determining where I'd failed to close the deal so I could provide their photography or cover their assignment.
When my eyes closed at night, and I could not fall asleep, I would lie in the darkness, the streetlamps glowing dimly through my north-facing window, thinking about how I could improve. Improve my photography. Improve my lighting skills. Improve my negotiation skills. Improve my knowledge about business. I read every book I could, and I pushed myself. I knew that if I just worked harder—and smarter (or as smarter as I could)—than my competition, I could achieve (and sustain) my dream career—one as a photographer, where it's work but not a job.
A Collection of Inconvenient Facts
Ignoring facts cannot change them. Far too many photographers and aspiring photographers simply ignore the facts before them, believing that the laws of physics and economics just don't apply to them.
I see these photographers arrive on the scene and then depart in short order. Many not only leave my city, they leave the profession altogether. The sad fact, too, is they also leave the state of the profession they tried to succeed in just a little worse off as a result of poor business practices.
Here are a few facts for your consideration:
Fact #1. If every time you produce images, the copyright to them is not yours, you will not earn money—any money—from them in the future. You're a day laborer with some creativity.
Fact #2. According to the IRS, if 1) you are required to comply with the employer's instructions; 2) the services are to be performed in a particular method or manner; 3) the success or continuation of a business depends on the performance of certain services; 4) the worker personally perform the services; 5) the worker has a continuing relationship with the employer; 6) the worker has to follow a work sequence set by the employer; 7) the worker can't work for more than one employer at a time, and if you're a freelancer and these sound familiar to you, then perhaps you're entitled to be an employee of the employer, including benefits and their payment of the standard part of your taxes that an employer pays.
Fact #3. Taking standard manufacturers' statistics for the lifespan of equipment (camera and computer), coupled with the amortization tables for deductibility, will give you how much you can reasonably expect to pay over each year. Combine this with other expenses (data lines, software, rent, and so forth), and this is what it costs each year to make pictures. When divided by 52, if you don't earn that much each week, you will most decidedly not be making pictures professionally very long unless your sustaining income comes from other sources.
Fact #4. If your time is not your own, and thus you are doing something at the behest of a client (travel, post-production, planning, and so on), and you are not charging your client for those