« Alamy announce sympathies for the plight of the UK Newspaper industry
Alamy announce a ‘Find a Photographer’ service »

12 easy ways NOT to succeed in business as a new professional photographer


Creative Commons License photo credit: °Florian

PP presents an easy to follow tutorial. “12 easy ways NOT to succeed in business as a new professional photographer”. Follow these tips and you’ll be flipping burgers inside 48 months.

Contracts and business

1) Don’t have any terms and conditions. You’re a photographer, you’re not actually running a money-making business are you?

2) Don’t discuss and agree fees and a contract before shooting the job. You never bothered finding out how much you were going to get paid and how long you had to work each week when you were in employment. Why start now?

3) Don’t have a clue about your copyright. That way you won’t be offended when people try to grab it.

4) Do charge for your photography by the hour. That worked really well when you were an employee didn’t it? No point in charging a fee for your product instead of the time it takes to make it – you don’t see successful companies doing that sort of thing do you?

Websites

5) Do have a website that lists your ’specialities’ as every style of photography imaginable - even though you’re not really very good at any of them if you’re honest.

6) Do list your gear on your “about me” page. I’m sure you won’t get that £10k ad job unless you tell everyone about the entire contents of your camera bag (and don’t forget to list who makes your camera bag too).

7) Do show images on your website in simulated frames (wood, metal etc). Nothing says “I’m a professional” more than that.

8) Don’t have any good examples of prior commissioned work on your website. Pssst… nobody knows you didn’t actually shoot that can of Heinz beans for money and you just got it out of your cupboard to make it look like somebody paid you to do it.

Making images

9) Don’t bring more than one camera body or lens to a shoot. Nothing ever goes wrong, these things are so reliable nowadays.

10) Don’t bother using any lighting on location shoots. Just push the ISO on your new baby to 6400. That’ll be fine after a bit of Noise Ninja and curves in Photoshop. Nobody will ever notice.

11) Don’t bother shooting RAW. RAW is for purists. You’re a pro – you get it right in the camera. You don’t need to adjust anything after the shoot. All these retouchers have got it so wrong.

12) Don’t bother with colour management or profiles or any of that hocus-pocus. It looks good on your monitor so it should look good on everyone else’s right?

PP

Tags: , ,

If you found this article helpful you may also like to read:

This entry was posted on Monday, March 30th, 2009 at 4:25 pm and is filed under Assignment Photography, Photography Business. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

3 Responses to “12 easy ways NOT to succeed in business as a new professional photographer”

  1. lol. #7 is my fav.

  2. [...] Back in March PP posted some tips for new photographers advising on what NOT to do if they were to have a successful business. You can see “12 easy ways NOT to succeed”here. [...]

  3. #6, the gear list, is hysterical. Sad but true though. I know one wedding photog who lists every lens.

Leave a Reply