Case Study

RICHARD AND EVAN GLASS: GLASS AND BLUM CERTIFIED PUBLIC ACCOUNTANTS

As I stated elsewhere in this book, different professions measure success differently.

Accountants measure success in figures; profit and loss. A business that is profitable is a success, a business that is fun, rewarding, and creatively fulfilling but loses money every year is a hobby (in fact, that is exactly how the IRS sees it as well!). This mentality often seems foreign to those of us in creative fields, but just as business people value our creativity by hiring us to shoot ads, brochures, and build websites, we should value their business acumen and seek their advice to ensure our long-term financial well-being.

In your career as a photographer you will probably be audited at least once; It’s a fact of life. Photographers are prime candidates for the IRS because we often bill much more money than we claim as income (because our legitimate expenses are so high) and because many of our deductions are exactly what the IRS deems suspicious (home offices, meals, transportation, etc.). In the case of an IRS audit your accountant is your best friend and your first line of defense. If you follow his or her advice, and run your business as a business (not a hobby) you will probably come away bruised (because all audits are painful), but not broken.

Like many photographers and entrepreneurs I have made thousands of bad decisions; luckily I’ve also made a few that were just good enough to outweigh most of the stupid ones. One of my best decisions was retaining Richard Glass as my accountant.

In the 30-plus years that Rick has been my accountant he has never condescended or patronized me when I have made a stupid mistake. He has helped me survive two IRS audits and a couple of brushes with bankruptcy. He understands that my goal has never been to get rich. It was to have a creatively challenging career, but he also gently reminds me that money and financial planning is a tool in that quest. He has also reminded me that there would be points along the way where I might have new priorities, to own a home, to have a child, to put a child through school, and eventually to retire.

Over the years I have referred many other photographers to Rick, including many of my old students. Recently Rick’s son Evan joined the firm where he has taken on the task of guiding a new generation of photographers and artists through the minefield of starting and running a business. Because Glass and Blum represents over 40 photographers they have a particularly valuable bird’s eye view of the field and vast experience with the problems that are specific to photographers.

Rick and Evan Glass Certified Public Accountants

Interview

MJ: Part of the reason I’m writing this book is because there is a widespread notion that photography is in trouble, that parents don’t feel that there’s a viable career anymore because many photographers of my generation are struggling. But I see my ex-students, young photographers starting out, and they are doing fine. My sense is that the business models have changed and that older photographers haven’t adapted, but the younger ones are comfortable.

RG: Well, yes and no. I agree that the switch from print to the web has been a painful experience for photographers who were successful in the print era; some have made the adjustment and some haven’t.

MJ: I look at it and … you know, I’m doing fine, but I have always wondered whether I could survive purely as a photographer without teaching. I would have more time to shoot and promote my commercial photography career. But my teaching job supplements my income in other ways, especially with regards to my health insurance and my retirement planning.

RG: Well that’s pretty much the case with many of our clients, and we have clients who range from the very top of the field to the young ones a couple of years out of school. The only ones that are really successful are the ones who have managed to add on something to their career.

MJ: They’ve developed a multiple revenue stream of some kind. What kinds of things?

EG: Teaching is a big one, but then there are people who get grants, or lecture around the country. The ones who are financially secure purely on their photographic practice alone are very few. One of my clients is a major artist now with museum shows all over the world. He’s terrifically successful, but his work is very expensive to produce. I’m not sure he could do what he’s doing—produce the work he is creating—without grants.

MJ: I’ve always thought that part of the problem is that as photographers we kind of “fall into” the business. We work as assistants, or some other day job, then we get a couple of small jobs, then a couple of bigger ones, and the next thing we know we are in business, but most of us never went through the process of actually formulating a business plan.

What are your suggestions to a young photographer to avoid the pitfalls that come with falling into the profession?

RG: Well, the schools need to teach it, they need to teach some real business. The students need some sense of value, of what their time is worth, and how to bill for their services. What do you plan on doing? How long does it take you to do it? And what should you charge?

Very few artists develop a business model and it’s absolutely imperative as a creative person to have a model that supplies you with enough income to support your work creatively.

MJ: Money is one of an artist’s creative tools…

EG: Yes, you as teachers within art schools teach them good skills to develop their work, their artistic vision, but you haven’t taught them how to cost a job, price their work, or how to sell it. They haven’t been taught how to be in business.

MJ: So step by step, how should they do it? What should we be teaching them?

EG: You should do exactly what they teach in the M.B.A. programs. First: Do what you like; and that’s great, no argument.

But then the question is: How do you bill for that? What do you charge?

How do you make it profitable? How do you network your business?

RG: We have a client now, a painter, and she is very good. She hasn’t had any successful shows yet, and I feel that she is pricing her work way too low, but she also doesn’t have any reputation yet.

So our business plan for her is to get her into some collections first, because it raises the value of her inventory (the paintings). This plan has been successful with several of our artist clients who are now making high six- and even seven-figure incomes. The goal is not to sell a painting or two for $4000 a piece; the goal is to get the work out there in a significant way, the Venice Biennale for example.

MJ: But that’s a very similar model to the traditional photographer scheme of young photographer developing a portfolio then bringing the work around to portfolio reviews, getting magazine assignments, which are very low paying, and then using the prestige of that exposure to charge bigger fees for corporate or advertising work.

EG: Well, yes, sometimes you do have to give it away, but it’s the sales pitch that develops from what you do every day. Not enough photographers are focused on the “sell-through” of their career. They’re not getting their work out there, and in front of people who are knowledgeable enough to buy it.

They are just working from assignment to assignment, and they aren’t developing a specialization. And we all know that specialists are paid more than generalists.

MJ: And I know for a fact that almost every super-famous photographer out there is losing money on magazine assignments with the expectation that they will make it up on advertising campaigns or corporate assignments.

But there are specialist categories in photography that require diverse skills, like travel stories where you might have to shoot landscapes, portraits, architecture, and food all in the same assignment. My corporate practice is a specialty that requires diverse photographic skills, but it also requires other skills that aren’t related to photography, like a basic understanding of branding and how a Fortune 500 company wants to be positioned through their corporate communications.

RG: Yes, and remember back when you were doing a lot of motorcycle stories for magazines? That’s the kind of exposure that makes someone come to you when they need that specific kind of work. That’s how you create a brand, and branding is what you need to do.

MJ: And in fact, I’ve just spent two days shooting an ad campaign for a motorcycle company. It took a lot longer than I would have liked, but after years of shooting motorcycle stories for magazines at fees where I made little money, or broke even, it did finally pay off.

I got the assignment because I’m a good photographer, but I think it was actually my expertise that they were really paying for. I knew where to shoot because I’ve ridden all those roads, I have a file of locations I’ve been scouting for years, and I knew how to produce the shoot. I think that’s true throughout the industry. A great sports photographer isn’t just a good photographer, he’s a student of the game; he knows where the play will be. Fashion photographers are fashion historians and scholars. Many of the greatest fashion photographers aren’t actually very good photographers, but they know the industry.

What’s the most common mistake you see among your clients?

RG: It’s following their dream without the process that develops their dream. They want to do something but they don’t think about what’s required to do it, and how much effort it takes.

Let’s say I have a client, and she wants to do a story about the women who are being raped in the Congo. Well does she know how much it costs to fly to the Congo; does she have a sense of the danger? Is she going to try and sell the story before she goes or is she just going to go without a plan? And we both know photographers, your ex-students and my clients, who jump on planes and go, with no plan. They do great work, but they can’t sell it. They’re risking everything on their passion and a dream, but then they come home and there’s no market for the work.

MJ: Yes, well, I understand that from both sides, because I’ve gone off and funded losing projects myself, but then there have been other times when I wouldn’t do a story because I couldn’t find a magazine to sponsor the story and it would have been irresponsible to spend the money without preselling the story.

EG: You need to do the business first. You want to talk to National Geographic first, or get a grant, or launch a kick-starter campaign. There are corporations and NGOs that would sponsor those human-interest projects.

And there are those new ways to get the work out there; Kickstarter, Instagram, Twitter.

MJ: People are often surprised that I’ve never incorporated. It’s just always seemed complicated to me and I felt it would add another level of bureaucracy to the business. Do you recommend incorporating?

RG: You have to take it on a case-by-case basis but in general I’m not a fan of incorporation for exactly the reasons you stated.

But in the case of two artists who are working together and have careers where one might be making more than the other then forming a legal partnership is a great idea.

We have two clients, a husband and wife. She’s a very successful photographer, but he’s not as successful.

She gets an assignment to go to Africa and he goes as her assistant. His presence is absolutely integral to the shoot but the IRS disallowed all his travel expenses. As far as they are concerned he’s on vacation and just tagging along.

Moreover, they share an office. Now the IRS says that only one of them can claim the office but if they were a legal partnership then the office can be shared by the partnership and her profits could be offset by his losses and lower their combined tax liability.

MJ: That’s brilliant.

So I asked a bunch of younger photographers to send me some of their questions. Here’s one: Do you have any tips on programs or apps that will help us to stay organized?

RG: Well, of course the first and most important one is QuickBooks, which is the industry standard, and everyone should be using QuickBooks.

But there’s also a great app that’s free; if you get a Chase Ink. credit card, it gives you back money, maybe it’s 4 percent on gas etc., but it comes with an app called “Jot.” Jot allows you to take a photo of your receipt and tag the receipt to a job, or a client, and summarize all your expenses instantly online, and import the file to QuickBooks seamlessly, and it’s all free with the Chase Ink card.

MJ: And of course you need to keep a separate card for business anyway (many young photographers aren’t aware of this) because the IRS doesn’t allow you to intermingle your personal purchases and expenses with your business expenses.

If you pay interest on a card that is being used for both business and personal expenses the IRS will disallow all of the interest paid on that card as a deduction.

EG: Because photographers travel so much, and their expenses are so high, it’s imperative that they keep scrupulous records of all expenses. There’s another program, unfortunately it’s a little pricey, called Neat Receipts; it uses a desktop scanner to scan your receipts and once you scan in a receipt once it memorizes the category of the expense and you can export the information to QuickBooks.

RG: And in the new Cloud-based version of QuickBooks you can also take a photo of a receipt and attach it to your invoice. You can even allocate portions of the receipt to four different clients if you need to.

MJ: Do you have any advice on what to spend money on and what expenses to avoid?

RG: I believe in only spending money on essentials. As a rule of thumb, we encourage our clients to have a separate space for their business. Allocating a portion of your residence for your business is one of the traditional red-flag items that the IRS looks at. If you do decide to have a home office, it must be a separate room with a door, and that space must be used exclusively for business purposes, otherwise the IRS will disallow the deduction,

If you have a separate space for a business it is never questioned, and artists can have many separate spaces. You might have a shooting studio somewhere, an office somewhere else, and storage space somewhere else. That’s okay, but you have to remember that every time you spend a dollar you have to earn something in excess of that dollar. You have to remember that if you sell something for $500, you never actually get $500 because there are expenses associated with earning that $500. There are taxes to pay, and because of your self-employed status you are paying double social security, and double Medicare. Off the bat you are paying 15.3 percent in social security and you are never going to get away with paying less than 15 percent in federal taxes. Add in state and city taxes, that’s another 10 percent, and you are over 40 percent taxes on your net income.

MJ: Could you tell the shoe story? It illustrates the point perfectly.

RG: A client walks in and she is wearing some very nice shoes and I commented on them. She says, “Oh yes, I got them on sale they were only $250.” And I say, “Then they were actually $500 in your tax bracket.”

She says, “No they were $250.”

“No, because as a freelancer, nearly 50 cents of every dollar you make goes to the government in the form of social security, taxes, federal state and local taxes, so in order to buy a pair of $250 shoes you have to make $500 in pre-tax dollars.

It just illustrates how it works. Now if it had been a camera, which would have been a legitimate deduction, and that would be a different story. As a freelancer the government does allow you to deduct things that people with traditional nine-five jobs aren’t allowed to deduct. Things like a portion of your car, camera equipment, entertainment, travel, that kind of thing.

MJ: And if you deduct part of your car you need to keep a diary for the car. Can you talk more about the importance of the diary?

RG: If you are deducting part of your car, for instance, then you are required to keep a contemporaneous record of the mileage that you use for business. You can’t just estimate it; you have to keep a daily log. Every time you get in the car and use it for your business you have to note the mileage (and bear in mind that the mileage must jive with shoot dates, business appointments, and EZ pass documentation). You also need to verify the total mileage so you can ascertain the percentage used for business.

Likewise, you are allowed $75 dollars a day in non-receipted expenses. Let’s say you are on a shoot and you send an assistant out to get batteries for $16.00 and he forgets to get a receipt. Fine, you just write that expense in your diary and it’s an allowable deduction. But, and this is important, you have to be able to prove that you had the money on hand for the expense. You can’t just make up $75 in non-receipted expenses. And the diary has to be a contemporaneous account of your activities and expenses; you aren’t allowed to reconstruct it later from memory.

The diary is very, very important. It can’t be stressed enough that you need to keep a running log of your activities and expenses. Of course it’s important in the event of an audit, but I think it’s even more important as a tool for you to have an ongoing awareness of where your business is. It’s the lack of awareness that gets people in trouble because they don’t save the necessary money they need for taxes, social security, and retirement.

MJ: So another question from one of my young photographers: Towards the end of the year is it wise to spend money on a big purchase in order to lower my tax liability?

EG: That’s almost always the first question young photographers ask because they are anxious to buy all the gear they’ve wanted but …

RG: You should only spend money on things that are essential. If you have to buy a new computer then, yes, doing it towards the end of the year might make sense.

MJ: It might actually be better to put that money in your retirement account right?

RG: Absolutely, because when it comes to retirement the most important thing is to start early.

MJ: In my Business of Art class I always tell the students that the most important thing they can learn in the class is to start their retirement account the day after they graduate.

RG: Absolutely. Retirement planning depends on the “miracle of compounding” so it’s important to start as soon as you can.

Let’s take a small amount that a young photographer who is just starting out can easily afford, say $2000, and put it in a modest interest-bearing retirement account of 8 percent and adjust that by a 4 percent rate of inflation and assume a retirement age of 70. We’ll also assume that the young photographer is going to add $2000 per year.

If they start late and the money is only allowed to compound for 20 years that money becomes $939,608, which sounds like a lot, but when you adjust for inflation it’s only the equivalent of $137,503. That photographer’s monthly income from that fund will be $7859.00. Again it sounds like a lot, but when you adjust for inflation it is the equivalent of $1,150 dollars a month. Probably not enough to live on comfortably.

Now let’s use a much smarter example: A young 20-year-old photo student gets out of college and starts early with a $2000 annual contribution. As their business grows they increase their contribution to $5000 per year and they contribute to their account for 45 years. At 70 years old they will have an account worth $2,716,038!

Again this sounds huge but the value in today’s dollars will be $397,468, and their monthly income will be $22,718 or roughly $3,325 in equivalent income after we adjust for inflation. The key is to start early and give the money time to grow.

Compounding is what makes people wealthy. When I was younger I had $6000 saved. I bought a 20-year bond that paid a very high yield of 13.75 percent. When it reached maturity 20 years later it paid $81,300. That was pure compounding. Unfortunately interest rates aren’t that high anymore but it illustrates the point.

MJ: I understand that now, but it was hard for me to fathom when I was younger because that sexy new camera, motorcycle, or lens was calling out to me. In fact I’d probably still go buy the lens. I think the thing that saved me was having the money taken out of my teaching salary automatically. Setting up some form of forced saving seems like it’s a good thing, at least for people like me who aren’t very disciplined. It also seems important to note that credit-card debt works the same way, and at much higher interest rates, so it’s important that photographers do everything possible to not carry any credit-card debt, and that can be very difficult when you are just starting out.

RG: Credit-card debt is one of the biggest pitfalls of the profession because photographers are always advancing money to fund shoots and buying equipment that takes time to pay for itself. And yes, you’re absolutely correct that having the money taken out automatically, say $150 per month in the beginning, is a very good thing. You won’t miss it, but it will grow over time.

Now there are two forms of retirement savings: the regular IRA which allows you to deduct the money from your taxable income (but is taxed as income later when you retire), and a Roth IRA, which is taxed when you make the money, but is thereafter tax free (when you withdraw it).

MJ: Can you talk a little about sales tax? What it is and when to charge it? One of the young photographers has the question: “If I buy a camera from a NY-based retailer and have it shipped to Florida then there is no sales tax. What happens when my sister then ships it to me in New York State? Do I owe sales tax?”

EG: First of all, you don’t charge sales tax. You collect it for the state. You are simply holding it temporarily.

RG: You only collect sales tax on items that are physical objects, like a print or a wedding album. Digital photography has largely eliminated the sales-tax issue for photographers. In the film era the photographer bought film from a retail supplier and presented the supplier with a sales-tax resale certificate and the supplier did not collect sales tax. Later, when the photographer billed the client, the photographer would collect the sales tax on the finished product. Then the photographer would send that money to the State Sales Tax Authority. If the photos are delivered via wire transfer then no sales tax is collected, but if there is a physical conversion to a tangible asset (i.e. a print is made, or an album) then sales tax is collected.

For this reason it’s important that if prints or albums are made, and they are usually made later anyway, they should be billed separately.

MJ: Because otherwise the tax is charged on the total, including the photographer’s fee?

RG: Correct, but back to the original question of do you owe sales tax on the camera that is shipped out of state. When the camera is shipped back to you then you owe a “use” tax. Essentially, it’s the same thing.

MJ: Aha, right. It occurs to me that I just bought a motorcycle from a private party in Massachusetts and when I registered it in New York I had to pay use taxes just as if I had bought it in New York.

RG: Exactly.

MJ: I remember when I used to have you come into my class and you would talk about time management and it was always surprising to me how few days in the year are profitable.

RG: First, take off weekends, so right off the bat we are down to 261 workdays a year. Now take off national holidays and we are down to a little over 200. Take off some vacation time, sick days, or the days you have to run errands, go to the DMV, etc. Now we are below 200 days.

Now clients think they are paying for the day you shoot …

MJ: But every shoot has at least a half-day of pre-production or more, and at least another day of post-production.

RG: Right. I was at Paul Warchol’s studio one day watching him work on the computer to do the postproduction on a shoot he was getting ready to deliver to a client. The amount of time he spent on each photo was incredible. Replacing colors, dodging, darkening, and compositing.

MJ: And clients think they are just paying for the shoot, but I figure that for every hour I am on set shooting I spend 45 minutes on the computer.

RG: And how do you charge for that time? A student sells a print, maybe from their thesis show at school and they charge $100 because that’s what their friend charges. But are they making any money on that sale?

How much did it cost for you to make that photo? Travel expenses, did you pay the model, how much did the print cost to make? They aren’t thinking about those questions, not to mention the cost of their education.

Ultimately you only have about 1500 hours a year that you can be profitable. 1500 hours that are billable and those billable hours also have to cover all your expenses, rent, insurance, equipment, taxes, computer, websites, FTP servers, etc., and you also have to make up for all your downtime as well.

MJ: What’s the question people don’t ask? What’s the mistake we all make?

RG: “How much money is enough?” That’s the question they should be asking and too often they don’t.

People come to me and they ask, “How much money do I need to buy a home, to retire? What should I be doing?”

MJ: And what should they be doing?

EG: They should be reviewing their income from last year, looking for expenses they could cut, looking for trends that could make their business more profitable.

RG: The problem is that they aren’t looking at their own finances. They come in here and say, “Here’s my stuff, here’s my box of receipts, and here’s my QuickBooks.”

But my question is, “Did you look at it?” and too often, they haven’t.

MJ: I know that I am one of the guiltiest clients you have on that score. Two years ago you called me and said, “I have good news and bad news. The good news is that you doubled your business in one year, the bad news is that you owe a lot of money in taxes. Have you saved it?”

And in fact I just barely had enough on hand to pay the tax bill. In fact I was all set to use the money to do a renovation but decided to wait until after April 15th, and the taxes completely wiped out my savings. More importantly, I had no idea of the situation. I sensed that I’d had a pretty good year but I didn’t know by how much or why. I didn’t know where the money had come from.

RG: And where did it come from?

MJ: All the extra income came from video work. The photography end of my practice was exactly the same as the previous year, but honestly I was just doing the work. I was completely unaware until you brought it to my attention then I went back and looked at the invoices and realized where that money had come from.

RG: And that’s the problem. Clients come to us and they say, “I just did what I did. I had a great year, or I had a bad year.”

And my question is, “What did you do to get more jobs? Are you following your business plan? Are you networking?” I ask those questions to make you more aware but also because I have over 40 other clients who are photographers and I want to share that knowledge, positive or negative with my other clients.

But too often the photographers don’t know; you aren’t aware of what’s working and what isn’t. Evan and I look at all of it in detail. But you should be too. The photographers look at QuickBooks and think it’s for us, but it’s really for you. It’s your tool to understand your business. It’s really all about discipline and self-evaluation.

The profession has changed enormously over the past ten years and everyone has had to invent new ways of doing business; new models for a new millennium, but photography is alive, well, and headed into the future.

Being in Business

Your Work and Skills Have Value: Pricing Your Work

Let’s compare the skill sets of two young photographers who graduated at different points in time.

1994: Develop and print black and white and color photographs (analog). Medium- and large-format photography. Two semesters study of the history of photography.

2014: Analog black and white printing, medium/large-format photography, digital photography (capture), raw image processing, video/audio capture and editing, website development, advanced digital retouching/compositing, lighting, multimedia presentation techniques, a minimum of four semesters of history and critical theory. Computer programs: Photoshop, Capture One, Lightroom, Illustrator, InDesign, Premiere (or Final Cut), Dreamweaver.

Two things should be obvious from this, the first is that to maintain a career in photography you must never stop learning, because none of the skills that were taught in 1994 (except the History/Critical Studies classes) have any relevance to the current practice of being a professional photographer.

The second is that a student graduating in the current environment has far more training and is far more versatile than photographers of the past. This means that the market is far more competitive and the standards of excellence and expectations of clients are far higher.

They also have (in general) a much bigger capital investment in equipment and computers.

So why do young photographers undervalue themselves? Why are young photographers so afraid to charge a fair price for their work?

I think the answer is that to a large extent our profession has bought into the myth that “everyone is a photographer” and that our skills have no value. There are two reasons this is a false argument. The first is that while it is easier for the average person to do acceptable work, it is far harder than it has ever been to do exceptional work. The other basic misconception is that we are selling our skills. We are not selling our skills, we are selling our vision. Our vision, our interpretation of the world, is unique and that is the true value we bring to any job.

Taking the Next Steps: Becoming a Photographer, But Don’t Quit Your Day Job Yet

Take Stock of Where You Are

Look at your bank account and your projected business/personal overhead. Could you survive six months with little or no work? Do you have an insurance policy in place? Do you have the funds to replace your computer if it died today? Have you created a budget for promotions? Undercapitalization is the number one reason that most small businesses fail.

Do you really have the necessary infrastructure to leave your assisting/waiter/bartending job? Do you have the bare minimum of equipment and computers you will need (for most jobs)? Do you have a support network of friends you can share equipment with? Do you have a strong enough website, portfolio, body of work? Do you have a plan for ways you can promote your work? If someone wanted to meet you tomorrow with a possible job do you have a portfolio printed to bring to the meeting?

Don’t just think about the questions; tackle each one and make lists that really quantify the answers in black and white. Find a few mentors with more business experience—your boss, your parents, your ex-professors—and go talk to them. Ask questions, find the answers, and then ask better questions.

Write a Business Plan

Sounds boring. As I typed those words, it sounded boring to me as well. So let’s make this a little more fun and take it out of the universe of investment bankers, spreadsheets, and MBA graduates.

Let’s make a road map. Think of this map as an inspiration board for your life. Make it fun, and visually interesting. Use the map as a way to break the big problem into small manageable problems that you can solve systematically.

Get a big sheet of poster board. Start with a picture or word at the bottom of the sheet that represents where you are. At the top find an image or word that represents where you want to be in five years. Don’t be afraid to be ambitious. Part of making your goals achievable is voicing them out loud. No world champion athlete or rock star was ever shy about their dreams.

Now create a visual map that details all the steps that will be necessary to get from where you are now to where you want to be. Your map can have multiple “end points.” For instance you might want to have a gallery show in five years, as well as publishing a book, teaching at a major university, and shooting for magazines. In fact it’s great to have all of those goals because each reinforces the other. For example, if you aren’t showing and publishing your work it will be virtually impossible to land a teaching job.

Put your map somewhere that you will see it daily. That’s the value of making it visual; if you write a formal business plan you are likely to put it in a drawer or leave in a folder on your computer and forget about it. Making it visible is a daily reminder of what you have and haven’t done in order to achieve your goals.

Draw the routes to your goals. If your five-year plan is to show at a major gallery then your “en route” goal for this year might be to organize your portfolio and participate in a few portfolio reviews. Make thumbnails of your current images and stick them to the board as you create new work. When your board has 30–40 strong images (after a year or so) you are ready to go to your first portfolio review.

Make sure that you include “loss leader” and “profit centers” (more on this to come) as a series of short-term destinations in your road map.

On your “teaching” line you might want to note the different times you have attended various student or faculty exhibitions at different universities. When you see work by faculty or students you are impressed by take a picture with your phone and note the artist’s name. Network with the faculty and students. Propose a new course for their curriculum. If, or when you eventually interview for an adjunct position it will show the interviewer that you have been interested for a long time and you are knowledgeable about their program. In fact, though I didn’t consciously plan it, this is exactly how I got my current teaching position.

Visit the galleries you like regularly. One of the main reasons I always liked dropping my portfolio off to magazines or galleries in person is because it made the physical place more real to me. I could imagine myself coming to the offices with a shoot under my arm, or visualize how my work might look on their walls. Emails don’t do that. You can’t just dream, you have to take steps to make the dream concrete.

I would also create a “money” line. Look at how much you make now and realistically look at how much you would like to be making in five years. What are the simple, manageable steps to achieving your goal? Who do you have to meet? How much should you be charging? If you have been working for $1000 a day for two years and you are booking 100 days a year it might seem like you are very successful, but you are probably working too hard and barely making ends meet (remember that $100,000 in gross receipts actually translates to approximately $40,000–50,000 in net income). When you are working too hard for small fees it takes time away from building your long-term career. Reevaluate your price structure periodically. Some clients might complain, but incremental price increases are the norm in any business.

On your money line put a colored Post-it on your board every time you encounter a new “cost of doing business expense.” These are your monthly or annual expenses (insurance, studio rental, bookkeeping, assistants, web hosting, etc.) that are tied to your running your business and aren’t billable to a specific job or client.

Over time, your vision board/business plan might look like one of those flow charts you see on police shows that diagram the clues and victim locations when a detective is hunting a serial killer. That’s exactly what you want it to look like; this isn’t a profession that has a direct path to success. You will always be exploring new leads, encountering new problems, and learning new skills.

Building a Brand

This sounds like a big deal, but this is actually the part of your career that your art school/photographic education really did prepare you for.

I was lucky that one of my first big clients was Landor and Associates, one of the world’s largest and most prestigious brand-marketing firms. Part of my job as their photographer was to photograph important meetings with clients as if I was a fly on the wall. It was a very valuable education.

Its founder, Walter Landor, said, “Simply put, a brand is a promise. By identifying and authenticating a product or service it delivers a pledge of satisfaction and quality to the consumer.”

Artists create brands; this was the purpose of all those portfolio projects you did in art school. You were being trained to create an artistic identity, a brand. Picasso was a brand, so was Avedon, so is Cindy Sherman. If I tell you I just bought a BMW it immediately creates an image in your mind. The same thing happens if I tell you I just bought a Cindy Sherman print.

Every book on professional photography will tell you that you have to build a portfolio that reflects your brand, showcases your technical abilities, and your creative vision. This book is no different; except that my advice is that you should build a portfolio where commercial success is secondary. In fact, I often think it’s the last thing you should consider.

When you build your portfolio to meet the needs of the market you are telling the world that you are capable of doing something that everyone else is already doing. Your goal should be to create a market or a need that only you can fill. The more idiosyncratic and unique you are, the more you can charge when the job requires your specific vision/interpretation/skills.

This is the big lesson that we can learn from the history of photography. The great photographers who are also the most successful didn’t do what was popular or marketable. They did something that no one else had ever done. In doing so they made their brand so unique that it was inimitable. In the present day we talk about Cartier-Bresson in hushed tones of reverence, but in his day he was an upstart iconoclast who dared to take the small camera seriously when everyone around him was lugging around Speed Graphics. No one else could do what Avedon did; no one else can do what Cindy Sherman does. Because they are inimitable these artists created a playing field where only they could win, and a product that no one else could produce. This is precisely why they can (or could) charge anything they wanted.

This sounds very risky, and it is. You may not be as successful as other photographers by following this advice but it might mean that you could become far more successful in the long run and much happier as well. It simply makes no sense to chase a market that is already saturated with thousands of competent photographers. It makes more sense to have the market chase you by creating something unique and then creating a demand for your vision/product.

Let’s look at two popular musicians that you are probably familiar with: Justin Timberlake and Jack White

Who is the better musician? Most people’s immediate answer is Jack White, and to be certain he is the definition of a true innovator. But let’s consider Justin Timberlake: he does his own arrangements, he’s an innovative performer, plays two instruments, sings, and authors most of his own songs. In fact when you really consider the artistic accomplishments of them both I would say it’s probably dead even.

Who is more commercially successful? Justin Timberlake of course, but does that mean that Jack White should change his style to become more marketable? Would Jack White be more successful if he tried to be more like Justin Timberlake? I doubt it would work, but I also doubt he could do it. Most importantly, would it make him happy?

The lesson is that you should try to be successful within your own unique abilities and accept/embrace the limitations of your abilities.

There’s no denying that both Jack White and Justin Timberlake are very, very successful doing what each of them do best. The trick was that they each had to create an audience for it.

Marketing and Promoting Your Work

Assuming that you have been studying art/photography on a university level for at least four years, at this point in your career you should have a pretty clear idea of what kind of personal projects you enjoy doing. Most schools require a senior year thesis and presumably this is (or should be) the purest form of who you are and what you stand for as a photographer.

Who will be interested in your work? What is your next step?

A career in photography is like a series of poker games with ever escalating stakes. Your student portfolio is your “buy-in” stake to the lowest level of the game, but if you took your time at school seriously it should represent a hefty sum. Your thesis work (should) represent your best work at this particular point in your career. You might assume there is no place in the market for it, that it’s too arty, obscure, or personal. But if you really look at the history of art, or the interviews in this book, then it’s apparent that the most successful careers have been built on people who pursued their creative vision without compromise. What made them successful was their ability to promote their work and create an audience. Your job is to look at the market and see where you could fit in, not change who you are, or what you do, in order to fit in.

If you love shooting landscapes and being outdoors then look at clients who use travel and landscape photography: Travel and Leisure, Condé Nast Traveler, Outside, airline travel magazines, and ad agencies that handle resort accounts. You may have to adapt a little, but it’s better when they can see what you do and then find assignments that are tailored for you specifically.

A Marketing Campaign

I’m a firm believer in old-school marketing, but I’m also older, established, and I live in a major media center. That said, I still believe that the best business relationships are built on personal relationships. An email blast inviting people to look at your website might have value, but it’s a little like blindly blasting a shotgun into the woods and hoping that you hit something. Long-lasting clients are created with a handshake and eye contact.

However, you do have to find a way to get your foot in the door. In today’s world that means you have to take a multi-pronged approach.

Direct Mail

I still like direct mail as the most effective way to introduce yourself to certain potential clients. It is expensive, by the time you print the pieces and pay for postage each inexpensive direct mail promotion you send will cost at least a dollar per unit. For that reason I recommend direct mail only to a specific high-value audience. Use targeted direct mail for your top 50 magazines, design firms, and art directors.

The problem with direct mail (or any campaign for that matter) is that photo editors, art directors, and so on are bombarded with it. An art buyer at a major ad agency once told me that she gets 50–75 promos delivered to her in a day. She picks up her mail at the front desk when she arrives at work in the morning, by the time she walks to her office 90 percent of the promo cards she’s received have been thrown away.

This is why any direct mail piece has to be very unique and special in order to be effective.

When I was starting out I did a direct-mail campaign for about five years. I bought exquisite handmade papers and mounted small original prints to the paper. My name and contact info was rubber stamped to the mounting surface. Everything about them indicated that they were handmade. The process was very labor intensive. Creating 400 individual pieces took about ten days of printing, mounting, addressing, and so on. Each individual piece was a little jewel and each cost over $4.00 by the time it was mailed. I’d send out about 400 promos per mailing (yes that’s $1600). I did this three to four times a year. Every time I did a mailing I’d get back at least four times the cost of the mailing in new assignments. They paid off very well.

The real beauty was that I could pick and choose each image I sent and tailor it specifically to the person I was sending it to (I’d typically print four different images per production).

When my client list got too big I eventually had to resort to offset printing and I’d print 1500 mailers at a time. The response to those mailings was abysmal. I had gone from the “quirky fine art photographer” to someone who looked like everyone else.

In fact I even got calls from art directors (many of whom had never given me an assignment) complaining about the new mailing campaign. Many of them had been collecting my handmade promos for years and were disappointed that I had changed my approach.

The trick with direct mail is frequency. One mailing a year might yield some short-term results, but three to four per year creates brand recognition.

A few other tips: If you send your direct-mail promotion without an envelope it might look pretty tattered by the time it gets to your audience. On the other hand if you send it in an envelope it might never get opened. I always send mine in translucent envelopes so the client can see the image without actually opening the envelope.

It’s also a good idea to mail a copy to yourself before you do any mass mailing. Sometimes post office barcodes can obscure your image or contact information.

The post office has specific guidelines for the aspect ratios of envelopes; using a square format or something very long will require more postage. Nonetheless, my most effective mailings were always square; it cost much more in postage, but it also made me stand out.

Websites

I don’t know if it’s accurate or true, but there is a quote attributed to the late art director and photographer Henry Wolf that goes something like this: “You should only show work that you would want to be shown at your funeral.” In today’s world your website is by far your most important marketing tool. It should be more than beautiful, it should be inspirational. It should show your best work, and only your best work.

But I think one thing that most people overlook is that it should also indicate who you are and what you will be like to work with. If you are a still-life photographer you will probably be working a long day shoulder to shoulder with an art director. Does he or she want to spend a day with someone who is pompous, self-involved, or unpleasant?

If you are a building a wedding business, do you want to seem like a fun-loving free spirit, or a consummate professional (who might take too much control over the festivities)? Either perception could be viewed as a positive or negative by different potential clients.

There is no correct answer, but it’s important to realize that in the process of building your brand you will get the clients you deserve, whether you like it or not. This means that you should always be looking at your career and your clients, and analyzing where you are and where you want to go.

Websites for photographers are worthy of an entire book but I think there are a few hard and fast rules to live by:

•  Update and redesign your website frequently.

•  Your web pages should load instantly. This is the most common complaint among photo editors and art buyers. Nobody will spend the time to wait for your beautiful flash animation to load if it takes longer than 15 seconds (in fact that is probably too long).

•  Navigating your website should be clear and direct. Organize your work into clear galleries or pages. Remember that many bigger jobs will require both interest from the art director/buyer and approval from the actual client so being able to send a client to a specific gallery of your website is important.

•  Your contact information should be clear. It amazes me how many young photographers don’t include their phone number on their website. Email is great but any potential client should be able to reach you instantly.

Depending on the particulars of your career you might also want to consider having multiple websites; for instance you might want one for your personal fine-art work and another for your wedding business.

Network!

Show your work to everyone who will take the time to look at it. Attend a local portfolio review (save the pricey/prestigious ones like Review Santa Fe for later). Go to the local newspaper or regional magazine and ask the art director to take a look at your portfolio.

Whenever you show your portfolio to one person ask them if they can recommend other people you should meet with.

These probably won’t yield immediate results but word of mouth is still the best advertising and older established professionals (generally) enjoy meeting and helping young photographers. You may think your student work is too far out of the mainstream for more established professionals to take seriously but anybody in any creative profession—art directors, photo editors, and so on—is (or should be) looking for new sources of inspiration.

Don’t forget junior art directors, photo editors, and designers. They are often in charge of smaller “front-of-the-book” shoots and when you make contact with them your careers grow together.

Attending local functions like ASMP seminars is another great way to network (albeit with other photographers) but these seminars are a great way to further your knowledge on copyright laws, licensing, pricing, and estimating jobs. In New York and other media centers there are often “floating” parties at bars where photo editors, art directors, and photographer socialize.

It goes without saying that you should always carry business cards with you, but in my opinion the more important tool is your promo card. Your goal with any potential contact is to get them to take the time to look at your website or look at your book. Which is more enticing: a business card with your contact info, or a promo with a provocative image?

At gatherings where I expect to meet many potential clients (automotive events, galleries, etc.) I carry a variety of different promotion cards with about 20 different images. When I meet someone I’ll just tell them to pick a card with a picture they like. By the time they have looked through the stack they have seen at least ten images and we’ve started a conversation. I also have new insight into what they like.

Portfolio Reviews and Etiquette

In my interview with Brian Clamp he talks about portfolio reviews, but it can’t be emphasized enough that when you attend a review you need to be hyperorganized. The complaint I hear all the time from reviewers is that students and young professionals are too casual about reviews. They show up with a disorganized portfolio, and no résumé or promo card. Every professional reviewer I have spoken to thinks that looking at a portfolio on an iPad makes the photographer look lazy and never shows the work to its best advantage.

Your portfolio should consist of a strong body of work (20–30 images) that reflects your hopes and dreams. It should be perfectly printed because a printed portfolio better reflects your true abilities as a craftsperson. A photo that might look good in an electronic presentation often reveals digital artifacts when presented in printed form.

If you want to show more work and the reviewer seems particularly interested and supportive then it’s fine to have a tablet device available: “I’ve also done this other project. Do you have a few minutes to look at this as well?”

Remember that a review is just an introduction. Don’t be pushy and start asking about when you can expect your solo show or a cover story. When a reviewer says “Nice work, keep in touch” ask them how they would like you to keep in touch. Should you send a promo card every few months? Send them an email when you update your website? Don’t assume you can just show up with a new portfolio. Adding them to your Facebook friends or Instagram feed is one low-key way to remind them of your existence every once in a while.

Periodic email blasts will also keep you on people’s radar but I would caution against doing them too often. I currently get about 100 blasts per month from ex-students. I can imagine that many art directors and gallery owners get that many in a week. That’s one of the reasons I think old-school mailing to a very specific audience is still effective, but I acknowledge that a younger audience might be more receptive to email blasts.

Listen to criticism and suggestions, but it is equally important to note who is giving you advice. If you are an aspiring photojournalist and an art buyer from an ad agency tells you to put together a portfolio of still lifes after he/she has just been looking at your project on teenage mothers that’s probably advice you should ignore.

In fact the value of any direct contact portfolio review is probably not what the reviewer says but how they visibly react. Are they gasping every time they turn the page or are they flipping through the work as a courtesy? Which photos are getting the strongest reaction? Their physical reaction is often far more revealing than anything they might say.

Again, always send a thank you note, no matter what the reviewer says or how well/badly you get along.

Networking and Social Media: Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, and Blogs

Anyone reading this book probably has more social networking savvy than I do. Social media is an invention of the younger generation and it’s an absolute necessity in the current marketplace. However, it’s important to remember that when you are posting to social media as a professional photographer you don’t want to be “liked” by everyone. Your followers should be a community of peers, current clients, and potential clients. A photographer in today’s marketplace ignores social media at his or her peril.

Aside from celebrities, the most popular people on Instagram are teenage girls posting selfies. Your audience and their audience are fundamentally different: teenage girls want to be popular; you want to be respected (and hired). Think of it the same way you pursue any other social interaction: your goal isn’t to just be “liked”; it’s to be liked by people that you also like. Simply put, social media is an extension of your brand/artistic identity, and you have to treat it as such.

Photographers with large followings on social media are also increasingly important to potential clients. Magazines and corporations want to ride on the coat tails of your followers. An assistant of mine with over 100,000 followers was recently hired by an ad agency to spend a day shooting portraits of dogs on the streets of New York and post them to Instagram with a pet food company’s hashtag. This is just another example of the new ways advertisers are using photography and how all photographers have to look beyond the established business models of the past. The job didn’t pay much, but it was an important foot in the door with a major ad agency; it also shows that the art buyer was already following his Instagram feed.

However, it’s also important to note that the agency didn’t hire a pretty teenage girl with 2.5 million followers. Popularity alone isn’t enough. They chose him because he’s a wonderful young photographer who would make exciting images, and their client (the dog-food brand) would benefit from being associated with him. That same young photographer recently sold a major story to a prestigious magazine because photo editors (that he had never met with) had been following the progress of the project on Instagram.

The lesson is that your social media presence should be pursued as thoughtfully as your portfolio or your website. Post your best work and only post work you want your professional community to see (set up a separate account for your friends and family postings).

Because Instagram is a community it can also be important to “follow” other photographers whose work you admire. If, or when, they start following you or recommend your work it can mean a huge boost to your online presence. Recently one of my assistants checked her Instagram status while we were driving to a shoot. A famous photographer she followed had just recommended her work; by the time we arrived at the shoot she was squealing with delight, as she had acquired 60,000 new fans in less than an hour.

Many young photographers use Tumblr or a WordPress blog as their primary web presence because it is free.

Tumblr in particular has a nice exciting edge because work can be presented in such a free-flowing format. It’s easy to add new images, GIFs, and other experimental work. Many clients will return regularly to a Tumblr page to see your most current work, but it’s still necessary to have a website. When you have a website you can direct a client to a particular area that they will be interested in. Blogs and Tumblr accounts tend to make clients “surf” though everything, and that’s precisely why they are so engaging. However, when you are actually up for a job it’s important to have an organized website so a client can go directly to the work that is relevant to their project. Websites are more easily broken into sections. You don’t want a potential fashion client to get distracted by making them wade through all your landscape work. It makes you look schizophrenic rather than multi-talented.

Remember that when you are being considered for higher-paying jobs with more important clients you will usually have to go through several layers of approval in order to get the job. The first people you have to impress are other creative professionals; art directors, photo editors, and designers. These are people who respect you because you are creative and experimental. They are fans of your work and they are rooting for you to get the job. These are people who love returning to your Tumblr because it inspires them. They might think of you for a job you have never done before because they are looking for a new approach.

However, their choice of photographer still has to be approved by their client. Generally these are business people: corporations, banking firms, and consumer advertisers. These people aren’t as familiar or comfortable with the creative process. They want the security of knowing that you are a solid professional choice (because they have a boss to answer to). They want to know that you can do their job because you have done it, or something similar, before. They probably aren’t going to respond well to a Tumblr page.

Blogs (with video, photos, and text) are a great way to show the world that you are more than a pretty face, or great eye. In your blog you can show experimental work, (videos recent shoots, etc.) or write a thought provoking review of a show or book. When one of your followers reposts a particularly interesting article from your blog you gain visibility from all of their followers. Imagine the importance of a respected photo editor, gallerist, or art director reposting an article from your blog to his or her Facebook followers!

LinkedIn can be very useful in terms of finding traditional nine-five jobs that are photo-related (in-house studio photography, photo editing, retouching, gallery and design jobs for instance). In my experience it is pretty useless as a way for freelancers to market their work. I could be wrong, but LinkedIn seems to be set up for business people networking with other business people.

The thing to remember is that your social media presence should have real content. If you are posting ordinary images or self-indulgent drivel it hurts you more than it helps. When you over-post it can have a very negative effect on the people you most want to impress.

Though a social media presence in the current marketplace is vital to your career, it is equally important to remember that for most of us social media is not “real work” (although there are people who are professional bloggers). I stopped posting articles to my blog when I realized it was a distraction from writing actual books. I also curbed my participation in Instagram after I realized that I was reaching for my cell phone more often than my Leica. Too often social media gives us the impression that we are “doing something” when we are actually accomplishing nothing. It can be an inordinate drain on your time and resources.

Cold Calling Potential Clients

Cold calling is when you simply pick up the phone and ask to speak to a photo editor, or other potential client. For many of us it is the most odious task in the world. You feel like a telemarketer because you are calling someone you don’t know and asking them to take the time to look at your portfolio.

It is awful, but it works. There is no marketing in the world that is better than a face-to-face meeting with a potential client.

Pitching Stories

When you send promo cards or emails to photo editors at magazines you are standing in line with hundreds or possibly thousands of photographers who are all yelling, “Hire me! Look at me!” It’s a very passive way to network and make connections.

When you actively pitch stories to magazines you are setting yourself apart from the crowd and being much more proactive about your career. You are coming to them with something very valuable they desperately need: ideas

Almost all of my favorite stories, like this travel story to the Arctic, were the result of pitching the idea to a magazine

Take a look at any magazine. There are usually 10–20 “front-of-the-book” stories that are one or two pages long with a photograph. Then there are another 50 pages of feature stories. That’s a lot of ideas to come up with, and a lot of content to produce, month after month. If I were the editor of a national magazine I would welcome every story proposal that crossed my desk.

Breaking into an established magazine can be tough, but proposing stories is one of the best ways to do it. Your proposal has to follow a couple of key guidelines:

•  It has to be content the magazine is traditionally interested in but has never covered specifically.

•  Your pitch has to be well researched and thorough, but it can’t be too long. A one-page cover letter with the basic idea, and three supporting pages that show your research is probably a good guideline.

•  Because you are pitching the story as a photographer your pitch should include visual elements that give the editors a clear idea of what photos they can expect. This doesn’t mean you have to have already made the photos. You can use existing imagery from the net to provide background visuals.

•  Obviously there should also be a link to your website and it should contain images from other projects that prove your ability to deliver stunning imagery that is appropriate to the idea.

•  Most importantly, your pitch should convince the editors that you have a unique insight into the subject; otherwise they might assign one of their regular photographers (it happens all the time and there is little you can do to protect yourself).

For example, maybe you are a diehard Formula One enthusiast. You watch every race and follow all the teams. You might decide to pitch a travel story to a travel magazine on attending the Monaco Gran Prix. It is entirely possible that not a single editor at a travel magazine even knows what a Formula One car is, and they might be completely ignorant of the broad appeal of the sport or fact that it is the most popular spectator sport in the world. They might not know of the rich tradition or unique dangers of the Monaco Gran Prix street circuit, or the staggering capabilities of the cars.

Your first job is to educate them and explain why their audience and subscribers will be interested in this story. You could build the story as a guide to attending Formula One events, complete with a list of hotels that have rooms with vantage points that overlook the track (lots of wealthy people travel for the entire season as spectators). If you have deep knowledge of the event or special access (perhaps one of the teams has agreed to give you access to a particular driver for example) then you have started to qualify yourself as someone with unique expertise and the ability to make photographs that none of their regular contributors can make.

Now let’s take the same story and pitch it to a different magazine: Suppose we pitch it to a men’s magazine this time? It’s a good bet that everyone at the meeting will be familiar with the sport, but it might be surprising for them to realize how highly trained the drivers are. This time we might spin the story differently and make it all about the physical demands of the sport, the endurance that is required (F1 drivers typically run a heartbeat of over 160 beats per minute for the entire race and lose ten pounds after every race).

Who do you send your idea to? Since you are a photographer then you should send it to all the key players in the art department, typically the director of photography and creative director. You should also send it to the editor in chief and the managing editor. Your hope is that one department will find the idea compelling for either visual or editorial reasons.

The one important aspect of pitching stories is that timing your pitch is crucial. Your idea has to arrive at a time when they will be receptive. It is foolhardy to propose a ski story in the middle of the summer, but if you wait until after Thanksgiving it will be too late. Finding the sweet spot, when they are planning for future issues, can be very difficult.

Back in high school I happened to see a map that showed a route that was 2500 miles long, stretching north from Seattle all the way to the shores of the Arctic Ocean, over 300 miles north of the Arctic Circle. The trip is only possible in August and there is only one gas station for the last 500 miles on unpaved roads. I dreamt for years about taking a motorcycle road trip on that road.

For almost 20 years I pitched every magazine I could think of with my idea for a motorcycle travel story to the Arctic via that route. No one was interested. One day I was at the coffee machine with one of my editors and I mentioned the idea in passing. Though I didn’t know it my timing was perfect: they were looking for an original idea for a “road-trip” story.

He approved the story on the spot. A month later I was on a motorcycle riding through a barren landscape populated with caribou and grizzly bears.

Loss Leaders and Profit Centers

In business a loss leader is a product that is sold at a loss, or a very low profit margin in order to stimulate interest or sales in other goods or services the company creates. An example might be inkjet printers, which are typically very inexpensive proportionate to their manufacturing costs. The profit in ink-jet printers doesn’t come from the machine but from supplying the (very expensive) ink for the printer. The sale of ink cartridges is the profit center.

The surprise for most young photographers just starting out is that magazine photography (fashion, celebrity portraiture, interiors and photojournalism) is one of the lowest paying fields in photography. Though magazines pay little they are still important because a feature story with your photo-credit generates interest in you as a photographer and tells other potential clients that a magazine has given you their seal of approval. Virtually every nationally known photographer started out shooting for magazines and probably still does.

Gallery exhibitions of your fine-art work can also be considered a loss leader. Most young artists won’t sell enough work to actually recoup the cost of mounting an exhibition, but exhibiting your work in a solo or group exhibition is probably one of the single most effective ways of establishing yourself in the marketplace both as a fine artist and as a working professional.

The problem is when people come to you with low paying work that promises “exposure” but in fact the exposure is so minimal that it’s useless or even damaging to your brand/identity. Record companies are some of the worst offenders in this respect when they try to get young photographers to work for little or no pay with the promise that “it will be good for your career.” Typically they want you to work for free and even assign all the copyrights as if it were “work for hire.” I’ve heard stories from students of record companies simply taking the photographer’s CF/SD card with all the original photos at the end of a shoot.

When you are doing work for exposure it should meet certain criteria:

Will you have, or be given the resources to do your best work? If it doesn’t promise to produce portfolio quality work then it isn’t worth your time.

Is the exposure real? A multi-page, national magazine assignment with a prominent credit line (and creative freedom) is probably worth doing at a loss. Doing the headshots for a law firm’s website isn’t.

Is it a creative opportunity that you wouldn’t have otherwise? Does it give you access to a celebrity, a venue, or a story that you couldn’t do without the help of your (free) client?

A profit center is where you make your money: weddings, designer look-books, corporate headshots, portfolios for interior designers, advertising. These are jobs where your contribution is typically rather anonymous and your creative ambitions are secondary to the needs of your clients. This doesn’t mean you should just do what they say; you are still expected to bring your “A” game, but your contributions must serve your client’s needs first. This shouldn’t be construed to mean that you just passively do what the client wants; in the best of all possible worlds, every shoot—no matter what you are paid—should still produce stunning work for your portfolio.

Sometimes the lines can get blurry. In my corporate practice clients often want to go for such a safe approach but they don’t realize that taking a creative risk is actually the best business decision. They see what someone else has done—possibly one of their competitors—and they want something similar. Clients will usually take comfort in the familiar. Remember that business people have a fundamentally different mindset and measure of success. This is when you and the other members of the creative team (art director, account exec, stylists, etc.) have to diplomatically cajole and convince the client of the wisdom of being daring/creative. But in the end, the client is the one paying for the shoot so you need to accede to their requirements (within reason).

A bride might tell you that she wants her wedding shot like a fine-art project and doesn’t care about any formal portraits, but what happens when her father (the one who is paying the bill) wants you to stop everything and shoot every possible combination of aunts, uncles, grandparents, and so on? The obvious solution is to try and accommodate the father’s request as well as you can. Getting into an argument will not win referrals.

But it’s not always so cut and dry; sometimes you and the client are really at loggerheads. In this case, if it’s feasible, I’ll actually do two shoots, one the way the client wants it done, and one the way I think it should be done. It’s amazing how often people realize that your idea is better once they see it executed, and no client will ever be unhappy at being given more than they asked for. Remember that most clients are not trained artists—they don’t have your powers of pre-visualizing the end result—and at this stage of the game you might not have very good skills at articulating or communicating your vision. You are being hired to be creative so give every assignment everything you have.

Once You Have the Job

Before you reserve a day and arrive on set with a mountain of equipment and a crew you should get a few things straight with your client:

•  What is the scope of the assignment?

•  What will the images be used for?

•  How many days/hours will you work?

•  Who owns the rights to the images?

•  How much will you be paid?

•  How much of an advance will you be given?

•  How much will you be paid in the event of a cancellation?

•  What form are the photographs to be delivered in (TIFFs, JPEGs, prints)?

•  Is retouching (Photoshop) included in the final price?

•  What expenses are covered?

•  Who owns the rights to the images? (You do, unless both parties agree in advance.)

Negotiating Fees

There is one golden rule to negotiating your fees: In a successful negotiation everyone involved should feel like they have won.

This means simply that your client feels that they are paying a fair price, and that you feel that you are being adequately compensated for your hard-earned skills and time. When “everyone wins,” it forms a basis for an ongoing business relationship. If you or your client feels ripped off, or taken advantage of, it poisons the relationship.

“Winning” doesn’t necessarily mean money; it can also mean exposure or opportunity, like shooting magazine stories for little to no money. But when a business hires you to shoot for them then you should make sure you are adequately compensated at the prevailing rate for your market or region. Remember that you have spent years perfecting your craft, and tens of thousands of dollars on your education. Even in the early stages of your career you probably own $10,000 worth of photo equipment and computers.

One aspect of almost every negotiation is educating the client. With the exception of professional photo editors or art directors, very few clients actually understand what goes into the typical shoot. They think you show up, take some photos (which looks like fun to them) and then upload the pictures. They don’t know that you were sweating bullets during the shoot, that you spent three hours prepping gear, picking up rental equipment, or that you will spend four–eight hours on the computer processing the raw files.

One negotiating tip is that many clients balk at the realization that they don’t actually own the images. In this case I will often grant them the rights for an extended period of time (two years instead of one for instance). Very few clients need usage for longer than two years so it’s an easy point to give them. They feel like they’ve won and I have stuck to my principles.

Contracts

Most photographers (especially wedding photographers) will want to create a standard contract to cover issues like cancelation fees, usage, and so on. And it’s a good idea, as your business develops, to sit down with a lawyer and draw up a contract based on your particular business. However, this book assumes you are just starting out and you might be taking many different kinds of work to make ends meet, so I’ll offer some down and dirty advice that will give you some basic guidelines to protect yourself at the early stages of your career: A contract is a “meeting of the minds”; a document that states your agreement with a client. If you have both agreed to a simple letter stating your understanding and an estimate then you should be protected in most situations:

1.  Always send an estimate and a letter stating what you believe to be your agreement. (For questionable clients send a copy of the letter to yourself by certified mail. When it arrives leave it sealed in case you have to go to the small claims court.)

2.  Always get a purchase order. Smaller companies, magazines, and clients might not issue purchase orders, but most large design firms or ad agencies will issue a purchase order once the photographer has been assigned. The PO tells the accounting department that your assignment and fee has been approved. You will need to attach the purchase order to your final invoice. Failure to get a PO in advance will delay your payment.

3.  Always get an advance. (For questionable clients the advance should be big enough that the balance due will be less than $5000, the largest amount you can sue for in the small claims court.)

The estimate/letter states the facts of your agreement and puts a date on it. It also establishes your cancellation policy. If the other party doesn’t agree then they have to dispute it before the day of the shoot. In court it’s almost as good as a lawyer’s contract; in fact it might be better because the judge looks at you as a young honest guy/girl trying to do the right thing.

The purchase order is their promise to pay you. The advance is also a promise, but the most important thing is that you never want to get stuck for more than $5000.

Estimates

The estimate is not only an important protection for yourself it is also a sales tool. When you are competing with other photographers your estimate indicates to the client how well you have thought through the requirements of the shoot. In a way, your estimate is also an education to the client because it itemizes expenses that they might not have considered: Did you include catering? Did you include the cost of a rental van to transport the crew and/or clients? Is there any special equipment that needs to be rented? Hair and makeup stylists? Location fees or permits? Studio rentals? Every possible expense you are likely to encounter should be included with your estimate.

It should go without saying that underbidding/estimating a job (just to get the job) will hurt your long-term relationship with a client. No one likes to be surprised by a final invoice that is considerably higher than the original estimate. In the event of any unforeseen expenses, requests for additional images, or changes in use rights at the last minute, you should immediately advise your client of the additional expenses involved.

In fact, in a competitive bidding situation you never want to be the lowest bidder. It sends the message that you are “bargain basement.” If someone offered you a brand new BMW for $5000 your first question would probably be “What’s wrong with it?”

Simply put, price your work according to its real value and the effort you are putting into it.

Advances

Advances are extremely important and many photographers who are just starting out are reluctant to require or ask for an advance fearing that it makes them look unprofessional.

Requiring an advance makes you look more professional.

Photography is a business where you will often have to pay for many things in anticipation of the shoot or immediately afterwards: equipment rentals, plane fares, assistants, car rentals, food for your crew, taxis, stylists, studio rentals, props, gas, location fees, and permits. It’s not uncommon (especially on editorial shoots where expenses can be very high and creative fees very low) for expenses to total 80 percent of the final bill.

It is very important to your financial well-being that your advance should at least cover your anticipated expenses so that you are not carrying those costs on your credit cards for any length of time (at usurious interest rates). This is obvious on big projects; few clients will balk at paying an advance on a large project with an estimate over $20,000. The problem is actually more acute when you have ten small shoots that are only $2000 per shoot. You still have the same expenses, in fact they are often more, because now you have ten assistants to pay, ten cab rides, ten lunches, ten rentals, and so on. It adds up quickly and represents a financial burden to your business.

Another reason to insist on advances is because it commits you and the client to the shoot on a particular day. If your client cancels at the last minute then they understand that they have paid a non-refundable fee for the time they have booked.

In my practice I require a one-third advance (based on the estimate) for all my clients, but I will caution that with the caveat that virtually all of my clients are all well-established corporations or magazines. Younger photographers will often be working on smaller-scale shoots and dealing with smaller companies or startups that are far less secure financially. My advice to my students and assistants is that they always get a large enough advance based on the estimate to ensure that the remainder of the invoice is less than the $5000 limit collectable in the small claims court.

Managing Your Money

To be honest I am the poster child for poor money management. When I told Rick Glass that one section of my “Business of Art” class at NYU dealt with managing money his response was that my teaching anything to do with money management was “like Satan teaching Bible Studies.”

I think Rick and Evan’s comments are far better than any advice I can offer but some of the key points are worth being summarized briefly again. Perhaps you can benefit from my mistakes.

•  Set up two savings plans: one for retirement and one for shorter-term savings like buying a house or a building a cushion for times when business slows down or you’re experiencing short-term cash-flow problems.

•  Pay your taxes quarterly. Not filing quarterly estimates will incur penalties and cost you money in the long run.

•  Learn to manage your own QuickBooks program and do it regularly. Awareness and constant vigilance of your financial situation is the key to controlling it.

•  Always get an advance on every job.

•  Find a lawyer and an accountant who are interested in your career and won’t condescend to you when you call them with a stupid question. You wouldn’t do it to them if they called you for advice on a camera purchase.

•  Don’t spend money on equipment that you can easily rent.

•  Charge a separate rental fee for any specialized equipment that you happen to own.

•  Do everything in your power to avoid credit card debt.

•  Use two credit cards to keep business and personal expenses separate.

•  Keep a close watch on your expenses, especially hidden expenses (the cost of doing business) like insurance and web hosting. Look carefully at expenses that can be eliminated or aren’t returning your investment.

•  Set aside a budget for promotions and do them regularly especially when business is good. If you don’t, business won’t be good for long.

•  Develop alternate revenue streams. If one part of your business dries up or becomes irrelevant it’s possible that another might become more profitable.

•  Never, ever rely on one client. This is a traditional pitfall for advertising and catalog photographers who have one or two clients worth hundreds of thousands of dollars a year. What happens when they change ad agencies or hire a new photographer?

•  There is always something to do. If assignments are slow then look at your current inventory of images and upload them to your stock agency. Buy a copy of Graphis to research potential clients. Learn how to shoot and edit video. Do something for your career every day.

•  Keep a daily diary of all your expenses. The amount of money you spend thoughtlessly will probably astound you, and your diary is your best defense in the event of an audit.

•  Remember that whatever you charge for a job represents the total cost of the job. Your net income is actually a (much) smaller percentage of the gross receipts. On a creative fee of $1000 you should assume that $450 should be set aside for taxes, and another 20–30 percent (depending on your circumstances) should be set aside for operating costs, health insurance, savings, and so on.

•  Look for an agent when you are already so busy you don’t have time to represent yourself.

Did I mention that you should save? It can’t be stressed enough. If you are like me and don’t have the disposition to save then find an alternate way to put aside money. My take-home pay from my teaching position is very, very small. This is because I have a whopping 25 percent of my teaching salary deducted and put into my retirement account. I also have an additional amount per month deducted for state and federal taxes (because I am too lazy to file quarterly). My teaching job also covers the medical insurance for my family. I live (pay my mortgage, car insurance, buy food and clothing, etc.) on the earnings from my photography career.

Photograph by Kieran Kesner

Keep an Eye on the Horizon: Changing Business Models

In the 1970s record albums (and the photos on them) were about 13 inches square. Then came cassettes (we’ll skip 8 track tapes), which were rectangles about 3 × 5 and then CDs that were 4.75 squares. Now we download music and the cover art is a thumbnail on our phone that is 2 inches square but there is usually a video that accompanies the song. The repackaging of music means that the photography used to market music has gone through various evolutionary stages. As the scale shrunk photos and cover art got simpler and simpler, and the marketing of music eventually became the domain of filmmakers with traditional still photographers playing second fiddle.

Of the photographers who worked in the music industry who died, who survived, and who thrived? The photographers who reinvented themselves, the ones who saw a whole new market as a challenge, not a threat. The photographers who made the jump to directing music videos.

Photography is, and has always been, tied to technology. It is the stepchild of chemistry and optics, and in its current form it is inextricably linked to digital science.

In the current market, one where the internet has become the primary way to distribute media, along with the proliferation of hybrid DSLRs, virtually every client wants or requires some form of motion/internet content to be a component of every assignment. This is actually (I believe) a market in which photographers are better equipped to succeed than filmmakers because of the differences in the way photography and film has traditionally been taught. Filmmakers are taught to be part of very large, organized, collaborations. Photographers learn to work independently, or with comparatively small efficient crews, and the hybrid DSLR camera allows extremely high production value within small crews.

The invention of the web has certainly killed a huge amount of work for photographers who have been making a living in print, but it has also opened our work up to a global market (hmm, maybe I should make a version of my site available in other languages), and gives the photographer control over distribution of his/her own images.

Thousands of professional YouTubers are making comfortable livings while producing, promoting, and distributing their own original content without ever seeking the funding from a magazine assignment, grants, or Kickstarter for that matter.

Studio photographers who shoot product photography have taken a hit in recent times, but that is primarily because so much product photography is being done at big product studios like Sandbox that employ hundreds of staff photographers; photographers who make a good living with full benefits and without the headaches of running their own business. But wait, why is so much product photography still a static image? Why aren’t still-life photographers animating multiple views of a product in GIF form?

Business models might be changing, they always have and they always will, but as one door closes the smart people will be too busy to notice because they are already heading to the one that just opened.

Work for Yourself and for Your Creative Goals

Becoming a photographer to get rich is foolhardy. No one, not even the most successful photographers who are billing seven figures a year chose this profession because they thought it was going to be an easy way to make money. The same is true for actors, dancers, musicians, athletes, or painters. The work is the reward; the money is a side benefit and a means to an end. The highest paid photographer in the world is making peanuts compared with the average hedge-fund manager or investment banker. If money is the object of your life, then choose a profession where money is the object.

Whenever I hear a photographer complain about the sad state of their career I always want to ask them when was the last time they just went out for a walk with a camera without being paid for it. If you aren’t producing work for its own sake you aren’t getting fresh stimulus, and you probably aren’t very excited or inspired when you are on assignments either. Most importantly, your lack of enthusiasm is probably apparent to potential clients as well.

When you look at the people who are at the very top of the field it’s obvious why they are there; they are the ones who never lost their passion or their creative edge. They are the ones who realize that their time on this earth is short. While they might be making more money than the rest of us, I doubt that any of them are doing it for the money.

We always have to remember that we chose this profession because we loved making pictures so much that we wanted to do it every day. We love the way it allows us to participate in the world, or for the creative challenges we face daily. We do it for the pride of seeing our photos on gallery walls or published in books. We do it for the joy of the work and the way it transforms our lives.