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Home >> Learning >> e-Book on Wedding Photography Table of Contents Wedding Photography e-Book - Business Considerations
You may find it worthwhile to create a more formal structure to market your photographic services rather than running it ad hoc, or as a sole proprietorship. On your own, any liabilities incurred by you conducting your business means risking your personal assets. Establishing a limited company creates a legal entity that you can create a personal relationship to but assumes all the risks of your business. The company is the one that advertises the services and signs the contract with the clients, but would own no assets to sue for. You in turn rent your personal equipment to the company to facilitate the fulfillment of the client contract. The company also hires you to provide the photographic services. In the end, the company makes no money and loses no money because revenue in should equal expenditures out. However, if you decide to put assets under the company’s name, then the company has made capital expenditures that may result in the company going into debt. Servicing the debt as well as paying all the rental and services fees charged to the company may allow you to declare a loss on your personal taxes. To obtain further details, don’t contact me, contact a tax expert. To go further with the tax considerations though, let’s say that you use a room to hold client meetings and another room as your home office to keep track of accounts through a computer. If you have Internet access to facilitate the creation and maintaining of a business web site, as well as FAX machines, telephones etc., all of these are business expenses. For the client meeting room and office, if the two combined make up, say 20 percent of your home (arbitrary numbers used here), then you can write off 20 percent of your mortgage payment as a business expense. Again, talk to a tax expert to determine the exact percentages allowed. Same goes for household bills and utilities to maintain the house and hence the meeting room. Insurance
Commercial insurance policies are not cheap.
In
For photographers in
For British Columbia photographers, registering your business allows you to bypass the payment of the provincial sales tax (PST). You need a PST number, which is provided on an official card, and you normally either present the card or more typically, tell the clerk or the lab the PST number and viola, no PST to pay on the bill. This applies only to film and processing charges and not to equipment expenditures (as far as I know). You would want to contact the BC government for further details of all the hoops and hurdles to jump through to obtain a PST number for your company. Contracts If you wish to keep to a formal business structure than you would want to use a written contract outlining your services and the client's commitment in retaining you by paying a percentage of your total package price. Contracts should obviously be drafted by a lawyer, but a Google search should bring up generic contracts made available to aspiring photographers for such purposes.
You should also consider incorporating permission to utilize the wedding photos you have taken for future marketing purposes in print and electronic formats. Undoubtedly, you want to retain copyright over the images you have taken unless you are willing to sell the negatives and be done with that particular job. Before doing so, you obviously want to print or scan all the good photos for marketing purposes later on with the understanding from the client that this is your right as the photographer. You never know when some hack writer will approach you and ask for permission to use your photos to illustrate some second rate e-book on the topic. Advertising If you reach a point in your wedding photography that you feel the need to expand and get yourself known in the market, you need to consider advertising and other marketing approaches. Formal advertising is not cheap, whether it is a listing in the local Yellow Pages or an ad in a local wedding directory. The rates charged could be the profits from two or more full day weddings and as a part time photographer that could be a lot of profit to make up for depending on the market you’re in. I know a couple of local photographers that advertised in the Vancouver Wedding Directory, a once a year publication that comes out in early spring, in time to help brides out for the coming summer wedding season. Their full-page ads cost a few thousand dollars just from this one, once a year magazine, let alone any other marketing costs they have to bear. That’s a fair bit of coin to be blowing even if the directory gets widely distributed. There are also wedding and bridal fairs that require a fee to be paid to have a display to show prospective brides your photos. Wedding boutiques that are not already providing in-house photography services are another source of marketing to get your name known to people in the business. However, the usual thing for wedding boutiques is to allow you to place your business card on a pinup board along with dozens of other photographers, not exactly the best way to get noticed. One photographer I know did a quid pro quo with a well known and well regarded wedding dress designer in Vancouver. He did some model shoots using some of the custom dresses and gave the designer usage of the photos and in return he gets referrals from her while also being able to utilize the images for his own marketing needs. Hit the streets and start talking to people 'cause you never know what might come of it. If you don't try you won't be getting anything out of it. Other non wedding-related businesses also have business card boards and I’ve seen photographers post their cards on such boards. A traditional business card is quite small and lacking in viewing potential, so many photographers turn to 4x6 sized cards with a sample of their work, be it a wedding, portrait, or other eye-catching image. If you are already involved with the digital darkroom, creating and printing such cards should be quite cost-effective. I suggest matte paper though, as glossy may look fantastic straight out of the printer, but can be easily scuffed and scratched and you don’t want your name looking worn, torn and dog-eared in the public domain. It goes without saying that a serious wedding photographer should have a web site as a primary means of marketing and being able to show your work in the virtual world. Many of the local Vancouver web sites were created by a team of web designers known as Dreamweavers and their fee for creating great looking sites seem pretty reasonable, but you’re still looking at over $1000 for a basic web site with a gallery to showcase your images. On top of that is the cost of hosting the web site at an ISP or other host, usually on a monthly basis and if your web site is so large or so popular that it pumps out a huge amount of bandwidth, you face additional costs to cover any excess not covered in your hosting plan. I would expect that most wedding photography web sites would be well within the packages offered by a host. If you are at all handy with HTML, you could try and create the web site yourself or do your own updates using templates provided by the web developer. However, unless you are especially good at being an amateur graphic designer, it is probably best to let someone else design the site and then have yourself do the updates to reduce ongoing costs for every time you have a minor update to do. I’m talking about being able to update the image gallery easily, as well as pricing and scheduling if offered. If you are quite busy during the season, a calendar page is a nice idea to show prospective clients when you are booked and which days are still open, but if you’re not busy, best not to reveal to the world how much time you have on your hands. A gallery is a must for any wedding photography web site. You must provide samples of your work to prospective clients because it beats the heck out of having to utilize your time to do such showings in person. Since so much of wedding photography is still shot with film, a film scanner may be a good investment to digitize your images, as well giving you the opportunity to print off your work. For printing needs, a film scanner with Digital ICE is more expensive, but a huge time saver from not having to spot for dust with color films. ICE unfortunately is not effective with real B&W films because ICE is hardware and software based and the hardware is unable to cut through the silver halide via the infrared scanning channel. Another reason to use the chromogenic B&W films such as Kodak Pro B&W or Ilford XP2 (I assume because I have not actually scanned such films with an ICE featured film scanner). A more cost effective solution for those not intending to print from their scans is to scan the proof prints with a flatbed. Flatbeds are cheap like borsch with good enough scanners costing as little as $100. Dust is not much of a concern because you only have to spot the most egregious specks due to the very small size of an image for web usage. Consider an automated gallery producing software to save you time in having to manually create every single page. However, I have yet to find a gallery application that can create a gallery automatically from existing image files and be powerful enough to allow the creation of new pages for when I want to add more or change the existing images. If anyone has some ideas or knowledge of what I seek, please let us know, because everything that I have access to seems to require creating a gallery from scratch again every time I want to change or add an image. I notice that more and more wedding web sites provide a list of packages and prices, so this should also be incorporated into the web site. There’s no point in keeping it a secret since interested couples will call up and ask you your prices and then compare them to other photographers’ rates anyway. Some basic biographical information about yourself, your experiences and any significant clients that would help your marketing should also be included. Your web site should have a killer image on the home page to draw viewers in to want to see more. A gallery of your best photos, package pricing, bio and some flowery mission statement or goals would round out a basic web site. It does not have to be huge or complex, just eye catching from a good design. There isn’t much more that I can say about advertising and marketing, except to say that most established photographers do some form of it to keep their name in the public view and that in the beginning when first establishing your business, you would need to do a lot of it. But just keep in mind the potentially high costs involved versus what kind of business you actually have to pay those bills. The goal of most photographers is to do away with marketing altogether and work solely on referral business from past clients, but then how do you get your name out to those first sets of clients that can generate future referral business? Copyright This section is more for the Canadian readers wanting to understand a little bit more how copyright works in Canada. Most of this information was gleaned from an article written by Brian Boyle for PhotoNews (Spring 2004). PhotoNews is a newsletter/magazine published by photo equipment distributor Amplis Foto and sent out to customers of Amplis Foto distributed products (Hasselblad, Bronica, Tamron, Manfrotto, Gitzo, Tamrac, etc). Since this is about copyright, best to make sure I cite the proper source of the material below J In Canada, when a photographer is commissioned to create original photos for a client, as soon as the photos have been handed over and the photographer paid, the copyright for the original photos belong to the client, not the photographer. The implications for the wedding photographer are that the client owns the copyright to the photos you took once they have paid for the shoot and taken away their albums. You may hold onto the negatives, but permission must be sought from the client to utilize those images for promotional purposes. I suspect that most clients do not know this and probably most amateur photographers getting into weddings do not know this either. To workaround this automatic assigning of the copyright to the client for commissioned work, the photographer must draft a contract to clearly indicate that the copyright remains with the photographer and that the client has no claim to the images other than usage rights. This is more appropriate for the commercial type of photography, but if you’re the type of wedding photographer that wants to hold onto the negatives then it is best to ensure that a proper contract is drafted, understood and signed by the client. For other photographers, the copyright is not much of an issue because they either sell or give away the negatives as part of the package. However, even so, if they wish to display those photos as enlargements in the studio or window display, they must have permission from the client and it is best to do so in writing. A written contract makes very clear what the intentions are and no confusion will arise from verbal permissions given. Related to copyright are the privacy rights of individuals in Canada. If you have a photograph of a recognizable person, you cannot use that photograph without the permission of the person in it. A model release provides the workaround to this issue. There are obviously some considerations allowed for photojournalists taking photos of a newsworthy event and not utilizing the image for commercial purposes, but I am not familiar with all the nuances of this example. There has been an instance of a Quebec photographer and magazine being sued over the photo of a recognizable face being run in the publication without prior consent, despite the photo being “editorial” in nature. The Canadian Photographers Coalition is working to change the copyright in Canada to be more like the US copyright laws in which the photographer automatically is assigned the copyright for any image produced unless specifically signed away to another entity. I was somewhat familiar with the copyright issue from past work done for my workplace when my manager and I had a short discussion about the matter and informed me that copyright actually belonged to the workplace. I think I could have disputed some of the photos taken and used by my workplace since they asked me to take the photos but never paid me for it, but I express this as a hypothetical and not as something to actually be followed up on. For photographic work I do now for my workplace, I have come to agreement for payment options and copyright is not an issue I have any problems with because I do not foresee why and how I could ever make use of photos of my workplace events for future commercial usage. In another example, I shot some food photos for a restaurant and as I was commissioned to produce original work and was paid for it, the copyright belongs to the restaurant owner. Some of those images could have been used over again, but legally, I would be required to obtain the restaurant owner’s permission to utilize them in another capacity. The last personal example I can offer is of a photo I took used in a TV commercial by a radio station. They did not commission the work, but instead found my image through the Internet. They solicited permission to use the image for a one-year period and we came to terms on usage price to be paid. I made clear that I retained the copyright to the image and that their fee paid would only be for that one-year term. The radio station rep agreed to the terms and the deal was struck and about a month later I saw my image on TV J Next Chapter - Equipment Considerations (Medium Format) |
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Correspondence & About this website Copyright © 1998-2008 Edwin Leong |
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Many
photographers run sideline businesses without a formal structure, that
is, they do not incorporate themselves and do not take advantage of
any tax breaks that may be available to them. Also, a company assumes
the liabilities of anything that happens in the course of your business
operations during an event.
Whether
you run the business as a company or a sole proprietorship, insurance
is a key consideration. As a business, there is little choice but to
take out a commercial policy to cover your photographic equipment and
to cover third-party liability incase someone trips over your tripod
and sues you for a broken ankle. It may be possible for the couple to
indemnify you of responsibility, but I would not want to take any chances
if I were running a business and making a good return from it.
