The business side of photography
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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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.
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.
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.
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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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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From time to time, newer professional photographers ask what they should do when a client is late to pay. The answer is easy: remind the customer to pay.
Okay, maybe it’s not quite that simple although it can be.
When a client hasn’t paid within the time period set by the photographer, often the reason is that the client has lost or misplaced the invoice, or they’ve simply forgotten to pay it. (Yes, it would be nice if we could “forget” to pay our bills.)
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