Offering photography services

If your main concern is making money then perhaps you shouldn't have become a photographer? I'd imagine it's the same for a lot of the arty type jobs. I'm pretty sure there are painters and musicians out there who struggle to make money. What about athletes or people playing football/rugby etc? They certainly start out playing for free lol

At the end of the day you do what you need to in order to get recognised or to get the necessary experience. If that means doing some work for free or doing it at discounted prices then that's what you do.
 
An Exception said:
@kd
I'm not saying it isn't the way forward, just pointing out there are plenty of people offering wedding photography for free. Worse still is there are many many more people offering it at less than minimum wage with no scope or intention of raising rates.

What would be the way to get into the field would be to second shoot along with a pro tog.
I don't think just because your not charging them, doesn't give you a licence to mess up their wedding.

Sometimes you can't do this though due to lack of willing from other pro tog's. I personally only second shot 1 wedding before jumping strait in and charging a decent rate.
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Oh no, don't get me wrong, if you're not capable, you shouldn't be allowed to take weddings for photos, but it seems like, unfortunately, the easiest way to get in would be that. I'm not saying its the right way.

I think being a second tog for a main shooter is a nice idea, but plenty of people probably don't realise this is an option.

Personally, from the other side, I think (on the whole) price in wedding photography does reflect quality, and that if you want to hire soneone thats free thats your choice. If you hire someone for nothing though expect them to turn up with a compact camera.

I expect to be paying a reasonable sum for my own wedding comes around, but how would you feel if someone turned up and asked if they could be a second tog for you at a wedding? Presumably you'd want to see their portfolio or such like first, but still. Would you charge someone for the secondary tog that helped out or not?

kd
 
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James J said:
To both of you, look at the state with the stock photo market where people have driven the prices down into the floor due to "competition". Its got to the point now where a massive over haul of the stock photography market is taking place to give more back to the photographers. If neither of you are familiar with that market, I'd definitely suggest having a read as its quite eye opening from a photographers point of view.

Its also well known that theres a surge of sports photographers that are doing the job for next to nothing, often free (because they enjoy the sport), taking paid work away from the pro sports togs that have invested thousands of pounds into equipment and expertise. Quality of shots doesn't even come into it, as magazines and newspapers primarily don't look at quality, they are simply interested in cost. Saying otherwise suggests you don't have much of an idea how the market works.
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I am very familiar with stock photography, considering that stock photography has paid for most of my photography equipment and even contributed to some photography related holidays.

I am also familiar with illegal practices of price fixing.
 
@kd

I think it's a good idea to offer your (2nd shooter) services for free if your struggling to find someone.
I even asked for advice here.
http://forums.overclockers.co.uk/showthread.php?t=18198203

I asked countless local togs and got turned down by everyone of them. I had no wedding experience.
In the end I just went out into Oxford and took loads of portraits of strangers in the street to pad out my portfolio.
I noticed a 2nd shooter job on photographers.co.uk, applied, and tog got back to me to arrange interview. Drove all the way to Birmingham and tog gave me the job.

I was paid £80 for around 10-11 hours (but processed them for my own portfolio so 30+ hours in total) work to second shoot. I walked away from the wedding knackered but buzzing. I would have done it for free.

The next wedding I shot was as a guest at a family wedding, I just took my camera and a couple of primes.
I booked my next wedding from the work I did from when I second shot my first wedding + plus the wedding I photographed as a guest. The bride said she particularly like my stranger portraits.

I charged £750 for around 30 hours work. Prior to this wedding work was slow, but I wasn't interested in the ubber budget market.

I'm hardly well established now, but I'm happy with progress, and things have picked up nicely.
 
D.P. said:
I am very familiar with stock photography, considering that stock photography has paid for most of my photography equipment and even contributed to some photography related holidays.

I am also familiar with illegal practices of price fixing.
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Yet you blindly argue against the sole reason why stock photography has declined year upon year in revenue for nearly all photographers who have a large stock collection?

Not really sure what to make of your opinion anymore if what you say is true :S
 
An Exception said:
@kd

I think it's a good idea to offer your (2nd shooter) services for free if your struggling to find someone.
I even asked for advice here.
http://forums.overclockers.co.uk/showthread.php?t=18198203

I asked countless local togs and got turned down by everyone of them. I had no wedding experience.
In the end I just went out into Oxford and took loads of portraits of strangers in the street to pad out my portfolio.
I noticed a 2nd shooter job on photographers.co.uk, applied, and tog got back to me to arrange interview. Drove all the way to Birmingham and tog gave me the job.

I was paid £80 for around 10-11 hours (but processed them for my own portfolio so 30+ hours in total) work to second shoot. I walked away from the wedding knackered but buzzing. I would have done it for free.

The next wedding I shot was as a guest at a family wedding, I just took my camera and a couple of primes.
I booked my next wedding from the work I did from when I second shot my first wedding + plus the wedding I photographed as a guest. The bride said she particularly like my stranger portraits.

I charged £750 for around 30 hours work. Prior to this wedding work was slow, but I wasn't interested in the ubber budget market.

I'm hardly well established now, but I'm happy with progress, and things have picked up nicely.
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This is a good example of how things should be done. Instead of walking into something blindly and undercutting everyone, lowering the market value of a service (ultimately), you should aim to slot into the market with other photographers and share the customer pool. If your work is good enough, you'll always have bookings, but that doesn't happen overnight and working as a second shooter gives you an invaluable foresight into how a wedding works from a photographers standpoint.
 
Stock photography is not a sustainable business model. The advent of digital and the ease that acceptable work can be produced has devalued the market. Flickr users selling cut price through Getty are just one such easy source for companies seeking content. Professional photographers have to diversify and offer products that offer value to customers over the cheap/free content that is available.
 
An Exception said:
If your a professional anything, your main concern is making money so you can put a roof over your head and food in your belly.
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One should also choose a profession that makes this goal more likely, photography is not as easy as other fields to become a professional in and make a decent income.

If someone decides to become a professional photographer they cannot complain at competition with competitive prices. Consumers and business can set there own prices and budgets. A photographer that charges professional rates needs to provide a professional service for which customers are willing to pay appropriate fees. This still happens which in why most pro-togs for weddings still charge > 1k.



The real issue is actually the weekend warrior pseudo professionals who shoot weddings on weekends as a side job to their usual Monday-Friday job. The weekend warriors are those who take business away from the true professionals whose sole or major source of income is photography. And yes, I brush some people on this forum with such a comment, but it is not meant to be a personal attack, merely a statement about the photography business.

I am just as guilty, I sell some of my work but I am a full time professional software engineer and generate a vast majority of my income from non-photography related activities. What sales I do makes is a sale lost from someone who relies entirely on stock photography sales to make a living. I don't need the money form selling photos, I use sell photos mainly as a form of feedback so i know my techniques and compositions have commercial value and quality. The money is mostly beer money. Should I care that I am taking sales form professionals who use photography to put food on their table? Not really, it is a free market and people can do what they like.

Any business or profession has competitors and the market helps define costs. There was a time when programmers could earn a small fortune because it was a unique skill set. Now everyman and is dog can code.
How many people here made their own website for their photography business rather than paying for a professional web designer - in doing so you have cost business to professionals that are trying to make their living.
 
Rojin said:
Stock photography is not a sustainable business model. The advent of digital and the ease that acceptable work can be produced has devalued the market. Flickr users selling cut price through Getty are just one such easy source for companies seeking content. Professional photographers have to diversify and offer products that offer value to customers over the cheap/free content that is available.
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Never said it was, yet whats killing it is subscription based payment methods which sell photos for pennies and then give a percentage of that (often poor) to the photographer. If you sell a small image through istockphoto's partner program, you get $0.28 for it as an example. Thats not even a supplementary wage there as you'd have to see thousands of images to make a difference financially.

Getty is a different animal though as the rates are very good, especially if you can get RM instead of RF on your selected photos. I had a great month last month via getty as its one of the few business models that doesn't shaft the contributor.

I agree with you that pro togs have to diversify, yet that only goes so far, as if you devalue the market so much you'll physically not be able to work enough in a day to turn a nice profit.
 
James J said:
Yet you blindly argue against the sole reason why stock photography has declined year upon year in revenue for nearly all photographers who have a large stock collection?

Not really sure what to make of your opinion anymore if what you say is true :S
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Stock photography, and really you are only talking about micro-stock here, has decreased in value purely because around the world their are millions of photographers that have the capability to produce photographs that designers are willing to purchase. There was a market need for lower cost lower quality stock photos, companies took advantage of this market need, photographers were willing to make pocket money to support such a model.

True stock photography still exists and you can still sell your work at $500-800 a photo. You will need both the technical quality and photographic skill to make sales.


Stock and micro-stock are really totally different markets. I have a micro-stock photo that took 5 seconds to compose, 10 seconds to process, 1 minute to keyword, it is technically flawed with noise, too shallow a DoF, is soft, relatively low resolution (4Mp). That photo alone has paid for several of my lenses and filters. I have other photos on non-micro stock sites that I spent months trying to pull off, nearly got frostbite, nearly lost all my camera gear, cost a load in fuel and took a large amount of time, the price tag is significantly higher!
 
PM me some of your work thats for sale at such a high price please as I'm very dubious to your claims. First you say that stock photography has paid for most of your photo gear, then you say its beer money and now you say its paid for several lenses and filters.

Its all getting quite confusing! :S
 
An Exception said:
@kd

I think it's a good idea to offer your (2nd shooter) services for free if your struggling to find someone.
I even asked for advice here.
http://forums.overclockers.co.uk/showthread.php?t=18198203

I asked countless local togs and got turned down by everyone of them. I had no wedding experience.
In the end I just went out into Oxford and took loads of portraits of strangers in the street to pad out my portfolio.
I noticed a 2nd shooter job on photographers.co.uk, applied, and tog got back to me to arrange interview. Drove all the way to Birmingham and tog gave me the job.

I was paid £80 for around 10-11 hours (but processed them for my own portfolio so 30+ hours in total) work to second shoot. I walked away from the wedding knackered but buzzing. I would have done it for free.

The next wedding I shot was as a guest at a family wedding, I just took my camera and a couple of primes.
I booked my next wedding from the work I did from when I second shot my first wedding + plus the wedding I photographed as a guest. The bride said she particularly like my stranger portraits.

I charged £750 for around 30 hours work. Prior to this wedding work was slow, but I wasn't interested in the ubber budget market.

I'm hardly well established now, but I'm happy with progress, and things have picked up nicely.
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Yeah, I was curious for future reference more than anything else. I suspect it would more be something I'd do at weekends to do on the side of my standard job for some time really.

I wouldn't expect to necessarily be paid particularly well as a second tog. Out of interest did they use your photos as second tog? And if so were you in charge of doing the processing, or did you just give a copy of them to the first tog for his own processing choices.

As for the stock debate, Getty seems like one of the better, and more widely used versions, even by pros.

kd
 
He didn't say he was making beer money from it, but that millions of other togs are happy to.
4mp should give a clue as to how old this stock is, and how small but plentiful sales can add up over time.
 
An Exception said:
He didn't say he was making beer money from it, but that millions of other togs are happy to.
4mp should give a clue as to how old this stock is, and how small but plentiful sales can add up over time.
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Not necessarily as thats just jumping to a conclusion. 4mp could be the result from a heavy crop after all.
 
King Damager said:
I wouldn't expect to necessarily be paid particularly well as a second tog. Out of interest did they use your photos as second tog? And if so were you in charge of doing the processing, or did you just give a copy of them to the first tog for his own processing choices.
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Yeh, the pro tog used my pictures, but processed them in his processing style so they matched his pictures, and I processed just my pictures for my blog.

The wedding in question is the first wedding at the bottom of my blog.
 
James J said:
PM me some of your work thats for sale at such a high price please as I'm very dubious to your claims. First you say that stock photography has paid for most of your photo gear, then you say its beer money and now you say its paid for several lenses and filters.

Its all getting quite confusing! :S
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No, Sorry i wont send you private portfolio work that generates me income, especially a photo that had almost zero effort and creates sales.

However, i will gladly clarify some things. In total, all of my commercial photography including stock, some events (e.g. I shot my sisters wedding for free but received a gift of a couple of hundred quid because they were very pleased with the results), some direct sales to collegues/friends, microstock and macro-stock has paid for at least half of my kit (but note, unlike some people I am still rocking an old school D90, use a 16-85 and 70-300 a lot, my primes consist of 35mm f/1.8 and 50mm f/1.8 AF-D, most of my kit is second hand and I guess I can exclude the 70-200 and 300mm f/4.0 from my list paid for by my photography) . So the sums we are talking about are not huge.

The money I make is relatively small compared to my main profession- I would have to earn £4-5K a month for photography to be a serious competitor to my main job. I don't make anything near that in a year, hence it is basically beer money. Also note that if I earn a couple of pints of beer a day from selling photos on average, then that equates to about £1000-1500 a year. I tend to only cash out every 12-18 months, each time I do I can go and buy a new toy, last time I got a 35mm f/1.8 and a B+W 77mm CPL with the rest going into a rainy-day fund.


You seem very surprised that it is possible to make money form even micro-stock, let alone macro-stock or that an individual photo can generate hundreds of dollars worth of sales. Just have a look at the top selling photos on istock/dreamstime etc, individual photos can have made the photographer tends of thousand of dollars. Furthermore, if you look at people portfolios and look for the top selling photos, most people will have some photos that have netted hundreds of dollars for them. As for total sales, I have several friends that put in 2-5 hours a week into stock photography and they make hundreds of pounds per month. Yep, you need a large portfolio, of in demand photos that are reasonable quality and are appropriately key-worded.

Do I praise micro-stock websites? No, not really. They run a perfectly acceptable business model and have opened many doors for designers and photographers. Photography like any business has to accept changes and evolve to new platforms, technologies, markets and models. Microstock sites are a web 2.0, 21st century model, the reason older stock sites struggled is because they refused to update their model. Many were still demanding film negatives to be scanned at 40MP+ and for photographers to post in CDs with their portfolios. Microstock sites embraced the internet and digital photography with the realization of the demand of lower priced lower quality photos. Looking at RPI (return pr image) is a very poor comparison metric for a photographer, more useful is total annual income. For many photographer microstock generates far higher total income than macro or full stock and is furthermore much more predictable in sales since gains and losses in a some sales generates unnoticeable differences in income, loosing a few $500-700 sales per month will make a serious financial impact.
 
Ah that makes far more sense then. For some reason I was under the impression that you had around £6000 worth of gear :S lol (no idea why either, very strange)

I agree with everything you said also about microstock. I get very regular sales on microstock sites and I don't even have that much work on any of the sites at the moment. Had 3 sales in less than 24 hours at the moment, but the amounts are exactly great. For no work on my part though, its essentially free cash. A few getty sales from last month though nearly paid for my sigma 85mm F1.4 lens in full, so its still possible to earn a nice amount of cash from stock/microstock (i use this term interchangeably, so forgive me for that), yet its not exactly a stable cash flow by any means!

My best selling image is absolutely nothing special. From a technical standpoint, its spot on, with a great example of a "perfect histogram" and the DOF covers the object in question completely. Its a very niche photograph, which is why it sells to often. I guess yours is something similar also, so fairplay for not wanting to share it.
 
My most numerous selling photo (we are talking hundreds of downloads) is a a very plain photos, basically a texture. There are relatively few other examples of this texture on sock sites, which is surprising. So it just goes to show you never know what sells because most texture photos on micro-stock sites are either not accepted or have low sales because there is so much choice.

TBH, I have not touched microstock in 18 months so i am still glad that money trickles in for doing nothing. One personal issue i have is that I am a landscape and wildlife tog by heart (also a little architecture and abstracts), but these don't sell well on microstock because they are not highly in demand and there is a lot of competition. I have a friend who is far more in to portraits and makes a load of easy money just my photography his work colleagues and friends. Half his portfolio was from him learning new techniques, playing with different lighting etc, he does more event stuff and studio work now and for some shoots he will get model releases so once all photos are professionally done for the shoot he will upload stock-worthy photos to a variety of macro and micro stock sites, only costs him the time key-wording. I think he evens pays for key-wording now.
 
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