freelancing

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 help build customer trust and enhance the photographer’s reputation.

Any corporate photographer can arrive, set-up, shoot a few business portraits and then deliver the finished photos a few days later. Hopefully, the customer receives a professional level of competence and quality but beyond that, the photographer didn’t really “prove” anything to the customer.

But if. . .
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Photography pricing resources

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Just a short list of a few resources for learning to price commercial photography. 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 quite surprised at what your CODB is.

• 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.

 

Canadian GST / HST tax form

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This article was posted in 2012. Canada Revenue Agency (CRA) has since made changes to the GST/HST filing process. Back in 2012, taxable and non-taxable (zero rated) sales were included together. Starting in 2016, taxable and non-taxable sales have been separated. This means that the GST/HST form mentioned below is out of date. The CRA has not published an updated form because it wants you to file GST/HST only online.

 

Back in 2010, Canada Revenue Agency (CRA) made it mandatory for businesses to file quarterly GST/HST tax returns electronically. As much as electronic filing is fast and easy, the instructions were, and still are, poorly explained. Fortunately the CRA continued to mail a paper copy of the tax form so you could follow the instructions on the paper copy when filing your GST/HST electronically.

About a year ago, the CRA stopped sending the paper copy of the GST/HST tax form. So now, when filing a tax return electronically, you have to remember (or guess) each step of the tax return. For example, you’re asked to enter a dollar amount for “Line 108” – Uh, what the heck was Line 108 again?
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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.

 

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.

 

Marketing Professional Photography

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When marketing its products or services, a business is usually told to focus on selling the benefits of those products or services. Sell the sizzle, not the steak. But this isn’t entirely accurate.

Human nature is such that people are motivated by the need for risk aversion. People will act more to avoid a loss than to gain a benefit. We fear loss more than we desire a benefit. This is known as the Prospect Theory.

From the New York Times:

…most of us find losses roughly twice as painful as we find gains pleasurable.

A professional photographer seeking new clients should frame their marketing more around loss avoidance and minimizing risk rather than just pointing out potential benefits. New clients are usually concerned with avoiding risk since they’ve never worked with that photographer before, (i.e. “Can we trust this photographer do the job properly?”).

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