5 Financial Steps to Launching a Photo Career—and Avoiding Pitfalls

Posted: April 24, 2013

There are very few ventures that can cause second, third and even fourth or more thoughts, than starting your own business. Fear not, if you take your time and plan carefully, starting your own photography business can be a great venture and success. Pay extra attention to the financial aspects, and know the potential problems before you take the plunge.

Launching any business requires some tricky financial decisions. You need the resources to cover start-up costs, like paying for gear and promotions, and living expenses while you build a clientele. Starting your own photography business has additional challenges. You need time not only to build a portfolio but to keep shooting new work, freelance work can be feast or famine, and you find yourself acting as a creditor to your clients for weeks at a time while waiting for your invoices and expenses to get paid. We asked photographers selected for the PDN’s 30 issues of the past five years to explain how they funded the start of their photography careers.

They took different approaches, but all agreed that getting your photography career off the ground requires a mix of patience and confidence in what you have to offer collectors or clients.

“Starting out is a balance,” advises editorial and advertising photographer Lisa Wiseman. “You must be comfortable taking some financial risks (such as purchasing gear or engaging a marketing service) while ensuring that you don’t incur too much debt. Either one in the extreme can cause trouble.”

1. Plan Your Nest Egg
Shooting for your book, setting up meetings with clients and getting your work out are essential to starting a business, but they take time. While you’re doing all these things, how do you eat?

Of the photographers we talked to, five could remember the specific amount of money they had saved up when they decided to go into business; the amounts ranged from about $5,000 to $15,000. Others explained that they had estimated how long it would be before they generated income—while they pursued paying clients or shot personal work to build up their portfolios—and saved enough to live on during this time. They also figured out what other expenses they might incur.

• Philip Cheung, photojournalist: “I had planned for the worst-case scenario of not getting any work for three to four months out of the year, so I kept an ‘emergency fund’ equivalent of three to four months of salary from my previous job as a graphic designer.”
• Lauren Hermele, documentary photographer: “I saved enough for five months, because I wanted to work on personal projects during that time. I expected that I might not work for those five months, but knew that I would have photos to show at the end of that time that would help me get work.”
• Cole Barash, outdoor and advertising photographer: “I based my ‘cushion’ off of six months of overhead, which included not just living expenses but also business expenses such as insurance and more importantly taxes.”
• JUCO, advertising and editorial photography duo: “We figured it was going to take us a year or so without having a steady income. We made sure to have some cushion for floating production costs, as well as a small amount of money coming in from other freelance projects.”
• Joel Micah Miller, advertising photographer: “I figured it would be a few months. In retrospect I would tell anyone starting out to be prepared to wait a year or two until anyone takes you seriously.”

How did they squirrel away their savings? Most photographers we contacted had saved up the money while they worked: Past PDN’s 30 photographers include former photo assistants, photo editors and studio managers, a waiter, a few construction workers, some graphic designers, a dog walker, a landscaper, a yacht deck hand and a commercial fisherman. A few benefitted from windfalls. Fine-art photographer Scott Conarroe of Canada, for example, landed a $20,000 grant from Canada Council for the Arts, which he invested in a photo project. Alejandro Cartagena took the insurance money he had received after crashing his car, quit his restaurant job, and invested in his landscape and portrait photography career.

Commercial photographer Kyle Alexander had been working as an assistant and a digital tech when he landed one ad job in 2010 that allowed him to pursue his own career. “I had about eight months worth of living expenses that came as a result of one sweet ad job.” But he recommends other photographers save at least a year’s worth of expenses.

A handful of photographers said they funded their earliest purchases, living expenses and marketing efforts with credit cards, which they paid off as work came in. The risk of incurring such debt is that you’ll be working to pay off the bills, rather than shooting for your book. And while shooting assignments, you may have to carry debt while waiting for clients to pay invoices and expenses. “My biggest mistake was not having a solid savings before starting. The first couple of years were extremely difficult, because I was paying the upfront expenses for jobs,” says editorial and fine-art photographer Melissa Kaseman.

Click here to read the entire article 5 Financial Steps to Launching a Photo Career—and Avoiding Pitfalls, at pdn online.

Biz Tip Provided by Tony Bynum, Owner: Tony Bynum Photography