Work for free not for peanuts….and protect your future career!

Ok so not the snappiest of titles for my first post – hopefully I will get a bit better as time goes on!

Now to the meat of the matter at hand. If you’ve read the about section of this blog you’ll know that I have a background in running business and finance so perhaps I am more sensitive to the subject of this post than many photographers would be, but it’s something I am seeing so often now on social media that I think it really does warrant a debate.

Many amateur or hobbyist photographers want to turn their passion for photography for their profession and therefore start looking at how they can make a living from the skills they have developed behind the camera and the very large sum of money they have often invested in gear. A large number of photographers in this situation will at least initially think about Weddings as the obvious place they can start earning.

So they go online and they come across the common advice that shooting a Wedding can be logistically stressful and ‘high stakes’ for the couple getting married so they should consider ‘second shooting’ with an experienced Wedding photographer a couple of times so that they can learn and maybe get some shots for their portfolio.

And it’s fairly solid advice, it echos a concept from the financial planning series of books ‘Rich Dad, Poor Dad” by Robert T Kiyosaki – ‘Earn to Learn’ in the book the author advocates taking work for free or low money with people you can really learn from so that you can then go on and reap a bigger reward yourself from what you have learnt.

With this in mind people turn to facebook groups where Wedding photographers are advertising for second shooters. A couple of sample ads below where I have removed the names etc.

Can you see what’s wrong with these ads? And why in my opinion these are not the second shooting gigs you should be looking for.

If you can’t don’t worry I’ll explain anyway. In the UK the at the time I am writing this the minimum wage is £8.21 per hour and in an employed role you will likely be entitled to a company pension, you will be earning enough ‘National Insurance’ credits (Social Security in other countries) to get the state pension, you will have a sick pay entitlement, a maternity pay entitlement, all your gear, insurance and transportation costs are covered.

Hopefully you see what I am getting at the money is simply not enough for a ‘self-employed’ role. Now I know that some readers and applicants for these roles will be thinking, ‘It’s more than I make in a day at work’ or ‘If you’re doing it for experience any money is good’ but I’d take issue with both those points.

Firstly, let’s look at ‘It’s more than I make in a day at work’ the key difference between this as a daily rate and your day job is that you get to go and earn this every day from your day job. If you shoot weddings for a living you will likely only shoot 40-50 per year so you really need profit (after all your costs) of 5 time what you earn at your current work to have the same basic income as you do now and if you want to have the same benefits too then you probably need to change that eight to ten times per Wedding what you earn per day now. Oh and a ‘Wedding Day’ is usually 14 hours outside the house, I suspect that your day job is probably significantly less.

So this brings us on to the second point ‘If you’re doing it for experience any money is good’ and this one I get a little more but I would ask you to consider the following, if experience is your priority then you should be careful about who you are trying to learn from. Do you want to go and work as a second shooter for someone who has actually built their business model on providing Wedding photography as cheap as they can and is depending on finding someone desperate for experience to help them deliver a premium multi shooter experience to their couples? Or alternatively would you rather go and work with a successful premium photographer as an unpaid (because they don’t need you) third or fourth shooter? Which do you think would deliver you the best ‘experience’.

Now I do not believe for half a second that the people who are posting these adverts looking for an inexperienced and cheap second shooter are trying to ‘exploit’ the applicants in the style of Mr Burns from the Simpsons, they have simply gotten themselves in to a business model where they are trying to compete on price all the time, and they were probably applying for similar second shooter giggs a couple of years earlier.

And that’s the long-term problem to your future career by feeding your services cheap in to these business models you are propping them up when they are actually economically unsustainable and you will find yourself possibly trying to do the same in future years.

Look at the advert below also picked up from facebook.

With the pre-wedding consultation, possibly 14 hours on the day, probably another two days of post processing and of course all the gear, travel, insurance, gear and other costs the photographer here can not really make a sustainable living.

But this sort of thing drives down the price for everyone and makes it very hard to carve out a career. I would dare say that he probably thinks this is what he has to do to get the work, build his reputation and raise his prices later but that theory is fundamentally flawed because of the psychology of pricing.

The Psychology of Pricing…

The psychology of pricing can make it very difficult to escape from providing a low cost service, but you can break away from a ‘Free service’ fairly easily if you do it in the right way – this isn’t about photography but business generally – but I’ll keep it on photography here. Very few people believe they should get something for free, but equally few people want to pay more than they (or people they know) did before.

In any business your best and cheapest source of business is recommendations and referrals from existing clients, one of the downfalls of this is that they almost always will know exactly what their friend paid, and they expect to pay the same or even less.

So using the example earlier if the photographer had charged £400 he might if he is persistent manage to charge £450 next time but there is a good chance he is getting off to a bad start as the couple will feel they are being overcharged compared to their friend.

Now if he had done the Wedding before to build his portfolio entirely for free because they had won a competition, or he had a personal connection to the couple and he had made it very clear that his usual price was £2,000, if they’ve won a competition it’s simple if they are someone you have a personal connection to you have to make them swear they never tell anyone you did it for free because not everyone is worth a Wedding gift like this they’re special. Then when they refer a friend the friend comes in expecting to pay around £2,000 and if the photographer offers them a £500 discount because they were referred or if they book there and then etc, they will feel they got a bargain at £1,500. And then when they refer their friends they’ll be happy with somewhere between £1,500 and £2,000.

Now I know some cynics reading this will be thinking he’s marketing the £400 as a special deal so the next couple won’t expect that price. But I would simply assert that you’re wrong in my experience (20 years of self-employment). We live in a culture now where we see sales and discounts through cynical eyes we think subconsciously (and consciously) that if it can be had at that price once then it can be had at that price again! If you think about it I’ll bet that there is something in the supermarket you never buy at full price because you know the ‘deal will come around again’.

And I know you might get someone who just wants you because they think you’re that good but actually psychologically people make the mental shortcut that if you’re charging only £400 then you’re probably perfectly competent but if you were worth more you would be charging more!

This is of course all just my opinion based on my experience of being self employed in another field and owning some other businesses and of course of working with a lot of freelancers with their finances in my full time profession of financial adviser. So of course please feel free to use the comments below to tell me if you agree or disagree with my logic.