It’s a business, not a hobby

I think the single greatest error many of us make in professional photography comes down to mindset. This is a business like any other, but some act as though it’s a full time hobby. I am talking about those of us who choose to take everything personally and who don’t accept that really it’s just work like any other trade or profession.

You know the type: if a potential client doesn’t call them back it’s a personal affront. If an editor publishes the wrong picture or crops it poorly it’s the greatest possible slight. Some will even let them know in no uncertain terms how they feel about such a sacrilege. They’re the ones forever condemning “the state of the industry” to anyone who will listen. Then they’re left wondering at their low rate of return work.

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If you pay peanuts, you get monkeys

Without doubt the most enduring complaint in the photo community tends to be about money. Fees are said to be going through the floor, caused by the availability of cheap digital technology and the resulting competition this has generated from amateur photographers who are as happy getting published as they are getting paid.

Well, if hobbyists were taking my clients away from me, I’d suggest the problem was more about me than them.

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When David becomes Goliath

What a difference a decade makes for Apple. During the late nineties the computer company (that’s all they built back then) nearly went broke. But then came the iMac which changed the company’s fortunes, followed by the iPod, which changed the world.

For most of its thirty years in business Apple has held underdog status, a David in the context of a Microsoft Goliath. The Apple brand brought connotations of a fringe-dwelling cult and its followers were personal computer outcasts with just a two or three-percent market share. But you need to strain hard to remember those days now given what Apple has become: today it’s a globally dominant force in half a dozen markets.

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Camera insurance never looked so good

Pro cameras can appear pretty expensive compared to the semi-pro variety. Sometimes there mightn’t seem to be much difference in the megapixel stakes, the frame rate or picture-quality. But there’s one other measure that accounts for some of those extra dollars — build quality.

Drop a prosumer camera off your shoulder and you’ll probably need a new one. Drop a pro body and as long as the lens survives you’ll likely not miss a beat. The latest and greatest Canon has 76 gaskets and seals making it rain proof. The top Nikon is built like a tank. But for this you pay.

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iPad for photographers – a justifiable business tool or not?

The iPad sounds like it caters more for the photography audience than photographers themselves but I’ll speculate that it will be quite useful to us nonetheless. We know that it’s not going to be a primary computer any time soon, and it’s a consumer oriented device for sure, but priced at well under a grand I think it’s easy enough to justify, especially when you consider a few of these possibilities.

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Cyber security is more than just your PINs and your passwords

I expect that not many of you are being kept awake at night by fears of a cyber attack, but we should at least all be aware of the scope of the threats that exist to photographers on the internet, and that there are some pretty straightforward countermeasures available to us.

The online bits of any small business are susceptible to risks which are compounded by the fact most of us are not IT experts and therefore don’t even know what they are, let alone how we might defend ourselves against them.

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