How to: Be a Photographer
Setting up a business? Being your own boss?
Some of you peeps in the interwebs may have seen the post that I scratched together earlier in the year titled “How does a photographer calculate their fees?“.
In there I skimmed through the basics of how a business can create a simple spreadsheet showing how to work out how much they need to earn to keep their company alive, so they can continue to provide a valuable service to their clients.
Forgetting the required creativity, skill, technique and equipment that is required for any profession that you choose to follow – this is what happens in the background long before (and after) someone picks up the phone with an enquiry. 😀
Photography is the example here, but the core knowledge transfers to virtually every business.
Backups – are they really that important?
As it’s the end of the month I thought I’d ask your opinion – Are backups important?
For me, the answer is twofold:
1) Can I afford to lose any of my data? [No]
2) How long do I want to spend repairing/recovering any missing data? [As little as possible]For many people backups aren’t important and they don’t care about re-building their PC or MAC now and again when it get’s screwy.
As a photographer I’m fairly paranoid about my data (both business and pictures), but I’m fortunate to come from an IT background so I thought I’d share with you my backup procedure as part of my workflow.
If I’m on location then I’ll no doubt have my laptop with me, so I’ll transfer data from my memory cards to my laptop before I head back. The Laptop has an SSD so the data on it is pretty safe 🙂
Once back in front of my Editing PC I’ll import all the cards into a folder [yyyymmdd_client] and I won’t erase the cards until they’re about to be re-used, which ensures an extra level of recoverability.
I’ll immediately backup all the untouched RAW and .XMP files onto DVDs (which are stored off-site) and at the same time kick off a copy to my on-board secondary data disk and also to my server.
That’s 3-4 backups already and I haven’t even seen the files yet.
In addition to the DVD, local and server backup, I also have an external RAID box which I back up to when I’ve either finished editing and/or at the end of the day. There are 2 disks in there which mirror each other (RAID0). Every month I rotate out the second disk with a third disk which I keep in a top secret off-site location (my mums :)) and with the fresh disk in it’ll automatically re-build the Mirror.
When these disks are full, all 3 go into storage and are replaced by 3 brand new ones 🙂
So all in all I have 5-7 backups of my data. If the primary source fails then I have multiple redundancy methods to recover what I need 😀
My Laptop (which I use mainly for business use and an emergency editing PC) is backed up weekly to the server plus 1 extra external disk.
At the end of the month I have 3 off-site disks which I do another set of backups.
If that wasn’t enough I also run a Ghost of my system drive every 2 months, so if I get a virus or some new software or an update breaks the laptop, then it’s easy to re-install the last image and get back into action pronto.So far I’ve had to recover the Laptop twice from rubbish applications messing up my system, but the Ghost recovery takes literally about 10 minutes, which is no-time at all compared to a complete re-install from scratch.
If my SSD was to go kaput, then I have spare disks at the ready and I can be up and running in 15 minutes flat.
Worst case scenario – all my machines are attacked by ninja squirrels and trashed beyond repair.
My data is still safe in the HDD backups I keep off-site as well as the DVD’s which I can use as a last resort for recovery should I need them.In the future I see data being stored in a Cloud System, but current DSL is still too slow to upload at a decent speed 🙁
So, do you back up or don’t you believe it’s worth taking the time to do it?
How does a photographer calculate their fees?
Providing (or hiring) Photography as a service requires a minimum fee which is calculated the same way as any other business.
Business Costs + Expenses + taxes = minimum turnover required.Divide that by 230 and you have your average daily minimum requirement.
Why 230? … 5 days x 52 weeks, minus 20 days vacation and 10 bank holidays = 230 🙂This is also assuming you have daily paid work, print sales or licensed image income 😉
Social photographers often work for 2 days in order to generate 1 complete day’s portrait work and Wedding photographers will work for 1-2 weeks on each wedding, but spread over a 6 month period.
We also have to take into account that photography is often seasonal. Busy summers and quiet winter months. Plus there are many days when business owners have to work on accounts, marketing, meetings, networking, testing, blogging 😉 and so on …
None of which is time generating a direct income.
So….. below you’ll see I made a simple table showing estimated costs from a hobby photographer up to a studio +1 assistant where the photographer wants to earn the UK National Average salary of £24,000.
The numbers look a bit whacky, but thanks to the lovely tax man they do add up.
I even kept it conservative by choosing the lowest marketing budget where it should really be the biggest spend (existing business owners will know of the many tax benefits, but I’ve kept it simple)So there you have it.
Try it with your own expenses and numbers and you’ll find your own minimum day rate 🙂I should point out that I’m not taking anything away from highly skilled hobby photographers, but if someone is hiring you for work then you should at least get insurance to protect yourself, your equipment and also your client … and also put a proper value on your skill.
… and pay tax 😉
