The First Thing to Consider When Starting Your Own Photography Business: Profit!

We hate to put a damper on the enthusiasm, but most startup businesses eventually fail. Many of them do so in their first couple of years of operation. This is especially true in artistic professions such as photography. Many amateur photographers decide to turn their skill into a business without having the business expertise necessary. Artistic brain has to stop for a moment and bother itself to be cash-register brain.

So that's the purpose of today's essay, is to be aware of the pitfalls out there which await you. By looking at the reasons behind these failures, you will be able to sidestep them and place yourself in that ten percent of businesses which survive! Does that get your attention?

In short, you must learn to be as passionate about your business as you are about your craft. This means never taking off the lens cap without first having a sense of exactly how much richer it will make you. Every business-related purchase you make should be justified by how much money it will make for you.

How much should you charge per piece? This isn't as hard as you might think. Find somebody else doing business and price a similar piece of work, or shop around your telephone book and get quotes for going rates for studio sessions. The number-one mistake that new photographers make is in not charging enough for their work! Especially freelancers will sell their work at half the price they could be getting, reasoning "I'm new, so I should charge lower just to get the business going."

And that's a great plan, but the problem comes in step two. Once you get a strong bunch of clients going, you're constantly doing cheap, underpriced work for clients who expect it from you, and you're constantly busy and yet you're not making any money. Have you been here? If you have been, then here's a news flash: You're not new anymore! Raise your rates! You should raise your prices just high enough that maybe one or two of your bottom-paying clients go elsewhere, but you're still getting enough new work to compensate.

Now here's the second most-common mistake photographers make: they over-specialize. You see them all the time. They decide that they're just going to do wedding photography, or news photos, or wildlife. Yes, certainly, you need many different items of equipment to branch out, but to focus on a niche is to willingly exclude all the business outside that niche. It is as if you were shuffling down the street broke, while there was boxes of money off in the alley if only you'd thought to look there. So broaden your market. Come up with new, innovative business concepts.

Here's a third thing that photographers have as a weak spot: they tend to be computer illiterate. At the very least, you should have a website, a portfolio that is viewable online, at least one stock photo website that is selling your work, and at least one graphic imaging program that you're really, really good at. Now, you might be wondering, "I take photos, why do I have to be good at drawing pictures on the computer?"

Because, if you've noticed, there's a lot of "Photoshopping" contests online out there. Because, if you've noticed, the movie series "Lord of the Rings" and "Pirates of the Caribbean" were both done mostly with CGI (computer generated imagery) and very little filming.

Consider a graphics artist, somebody who's at least good enough to work on a Pixar animated film. They can buy the same digital camera as you, and begin taking pictures. Unlike you, they don't have to worry so much about photo quality, because they can touch it up on the computer. Whereas you are limited to reality. You can only photograph what exists, but a graphics artist who photographs on the side can produce any image that they can dream up. Guess what's going to happen? That graphics artist who photographs on the side is going to cut your throat in this business! To compete, you'll have to be able to pick up computer graphics art on the side.

We hope you have enjoyed this and other articles about the photography business. You will also want to download "Income From Photography" right away, so I've provided a button below to do that. If you just landed here and don't know what I'm talking about, you can see the introduction page by using this link to "Starting a Photography Business". Whatever you decide, I hope you have a pleasant stay on my site, and may all your pictures make the cover of Time magazine!