Best Business Practices for Photographers [56]
Work for a total of 100 days over the course of a year (that is, a 12-month period) on non-union productions and provide proof of that work to the union when you are applying to become a member.
Regardless of how you get accepted (in other words, Method 1, 2, or 3 above), the annual union dues are $6,000, and you will have to pay them regardless of whether you get any work. Being a member of this union does not guarantee you any set amount of work, but it does make you eligible for work on union productions.
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When they are, they are doing things like a "special," which results in things such as movie posters and marketing materials above and beyond the set stills that are used as PR for the movie, and they are paid significantly more for those uses of their work.
Thus, as a unit photographer, you don't need to use lighting or have assistants, for example. Your time is set by union or production schedules, and so on. Unit photography for non-union productions is, as one would assume, less. Consider, then, that if a non-union rate for unit photography for what is approximately a 10-hour shooting schedule is $400, your time and hourly wage would be $40 an hour. For union work, at $700 a day, you are looking at roughly $70 an hour.
Consider next the photojournalist. If the average photojournalist completes three assignments in a day for a newspaper, and each assignment requires an hour of shooting during the course of the day, he or she is "working" for three hours. If it is a small community newspaper, maybe that equates to the non-union scale, or if it is the big local paper of record for your community (especially if that paper has union employees), a base minimum of $70 for each of those three hours would be applicable.
Further, with photojournalism, there is a lot of travel and sitting around and waiting. Generally speaking, when I bill my time for travel, it is at a rate of 50 percent of the shooting rate. Using this as a basis, an eight-hour day for a photojournalist—three hours at $70/hour and five hours at $35/hour—works out to $385. Then, you add in risk: Is the assignment in a dangerous part of town or a shopping mall? Then, add in the creativity: Is it a portrait of the high school athlete of the week against a wall, or is it the production of the Food Section opener with a stylized picture of a dish of food attractively placed on a table in a restaurant, and so on? Then add in uniqueness: Is the assignment you are called upon to complete one where you are the only underwater photographer certified in your community with underwater cameras to document the raising of a historic relic from the local lake or a stylized above/below water shot showing a bass fisherman's contest that is taking place? Much of the work of a photojournalist requires a great deal of creativity that, frankly, is highly undervalued in their contribution to the publication. It is often argued by photographers that their willingness to shoot for newspapers or other photojournalistic organizations is a labor of love, but it must not be so much so that you suffer close to the poverty line.
Corporate photographers and those doing advertising work for ad agencies and design firms are called upon to produce a wide spectrum of work, where when it comes to time, creativity, and uniqueness, even the sky is not the limit for the creative fees for this type of work. Some can be downright boring, such as covering a conference in a boardroom. You could do this in an equally boring manner, or you could amp up your creativity and capture amazing images showing the interaction between the conference participants. Consider that the PR/communications person for the company could make the boring images himself with a digital camera and that perhaps you are being brought in to make engaging images. So, starting with the baseline rates,