subject: Profitable Photography [print this page] Profitable Photography Profitable Photography
To run a profitable photography business requires not only great photography skills, but also business and marketing savvy. There is a whole lot of unseen hard work behind the glamorous life that people associate with being a photographer, especially jet-setting photographers who travel to different countries to photograph weddings and portraits.
A photographer can realistically operate from his home office or home studio, avoiding heavy monthly rentals of an office or showroom, resulting in huge savings. Virtual offices are available nowadays if you require a prestigious official mailing address, without actually incurring the overheads of a physical office.
Working from a home office usually means that you do all the work yourself. By all the work, I mean everything, from replying emails, answering phone calls, meeting clients, editing photos and albums, delivering albums, marketing yourself, etc... to balancing the accounts, preparing documents for tax submission, running errands, paying the bills, etc.
Outsourcing certain tasks is one solution to this problem of overloading yourself. Some photographers outsource the album layout work, or the editing and processing of photos. Others team up with other photographers to reduce the individual workload, or to accept more than one job in a single day. Beyond this, you would be looking at hiring one or more permanent staff to do the work for you. Having a permanent staff could work to your advantage, though there is a monthly salary overhead that you need to look into.
Another overhead is the regular upgrading of photography equipment. Camera manufacturers constantly strive to create better lenses and camera bodies, enabling photographers nowadays to capture images that were exceedingly difficult to capture 10 years ago. Imagine switching from ISO 100 in an outdoor shot of a bride entering the church, to the next shot of her inside the church, waiting with her father to walk down the aisle, at ISO 1600. In the past this would have required using 2 camera bodies, each loaded with different film.
Marketing your photography services also requires a chunk of expenditure from your budget. These days there are plenty of avenues to market yourself. A free way to start is to have your own website, or blog-site. Domain names and web hosting plans are very affordable, enabling anyone to start creating a website for their business. If you are design-savvy, you can create your own unique look-and-feel for your website. Otherwise there are ready-made WordPress themes available.
A profitable business only happens when your revenue is regularly higher than your overheads. This requires careful planning of your resources, and adapting to market changes.
