Harry Lim Photography's Blog

In a recent post, I talked about some legal and tax issues to consider when starting your own photography business. I touched on pricing and want to dive a little deeper into the subject. There are a ton of resources out there; some paid, some free. So while this post is not meant to be exhaustive and comprehensive, I want to give you a starting point.

The first thing is knowing your cost of doing business; your overhead costs. The NAPP has a great on-line calculator where you enter all of your expenses and how much you want to earn and it will calculate how much a day of shooting will cost you.

I find the calculator most useful for helping me think of things I might have otherwise overlooked. Retirement, for example, or how many days a year you want to work.

Think of it this way: Your current 9-to-5 job provides you with X-amount of dollars a year. That salary pays all your bills, including health care and retirement. You also get 2-days a week off and 2-weeks a year for vacation. So if you quit tomorrow to start your own photography business, would you make enough to keep your standard of living?

People wonder why photographers charge so much when all we do is take pictures. The calculator above puts it into perspective. There’s marketing (a later post), postage, gas, software, equipment, taxes, etc.

Last week a blog post caught some traction on the web. It was from a photographer who commented to an upset bride-to-be who complained on Craigslist about “expensive” wedding photographers. The reply summed it up nicely. You can read the response here.

Another good resource is this 15-minute tutorial offered by Mark Wallace. I really can’t say it any better so just watch it.

There are books and software dedicated to helping you figure out how much to charge. But there is no one-size-fits all solution. You have to know how much it costs you and then figure out the quality of your work compared to the competition. If you’re just starting out as a wedding photographer, can you compete with the 3-thousand-dollar-a-wedding guy? Maybe not, but that doesn’t mean you should try to undercut the 3-hundred-dollar-Craigslist guy either.

Your price has to be fair to both the customer and yourself.  I am perfectly happy to negotiate, but I am equally happy to let a client walk away if we can’t agree. I would rather lose a hundred dollars one day than to work for less than what the job is worth. I know I’ll make that hundred and more from the next client who is willing to pay what is fair and reasonable. Don’t price yourself out of business.

I’ll leave you with a great blog post Zack Arias wrote a couple of years ago: “Cheap Photographers Only Kill Themselves, Not the Industry.”

So you want to be a professional photographer? You’ve got a camera, a website with some galleries and you’ve even earned a few bucks on the side for your work. You have the passion, now you have a taste for the business. So it’s time to quit the 9-to-5, right? Not so fast. There’s a lot you need to think about first. Sure you can take money under the table, but if you want to be legit, if you want people to take you seriously as a professional then you have to take certain steps.

The first question a lot of beginning photographers struggle with, is how much to charge. There are quite a few sources to turn to for help with this question, but I’m going to save that for a later post.

Before you start charging people, you need to set up your business. The example I am about to provide is for my specific case in my state (Florida). I am not an accountant or attorney, so use this as a guide.

First, you have to decide if you want to operate as a sole proprietor or a corporation. Don’t tell Mitt Romney, but corporations are not people (more on that in a moment). As a sole proprietor you just run your business and pay taxes. A Limited Liability Corporation, as the name implies, gives you protection against debt and lawsuits. If you are a sole proprietor and the business goes bust or you get sued, your personal assets are at stake. Do you really want to lose your car, house and life savings because your photography business didn’t make it? As an LLC, debts and lawsuits are limited to the corporation and not your personal assets. In Florida, it costs $125 to register an LLC and $140 a year to file annual reports.

Speaking of lawsuits, you can buy commercial liability insurance and “errors and omissions” insurance. The first, protects you if someone gets hurt or property is damaged while you’re on a shoot. The latter is bridezilla insurance. Or in the case of one New York studio, a divorced man who wants tens-of-thousands of dollars to re-create his wedding. You can learn more about insurance for photographers from the PPA and ASMP. I got a quote from a company offering a 1-million dollar liability policy, $15,000 in equipment insurance and $25,000 errors and omission protection. The quote was for $625 a year.

Next, you have to get an Employer Identification Number (EIN) from the IRS. This is just a number the IRS uses to identify a business. If you get a W-2 from your employer, you should see the EIN number on the form.

Now you’re ready to pay taxes quarterly! Yay! Depending on how much you made and spent on business expenses, you have to estimate how much taxes you owe and send a payment every quarter. Since you work for yourself, you owe self employment tax. The current rate is 13.3%. Just like your wages are deducted for social security and medicare, the SE tax deducts 10.4% for social security and 2.9% for medicare.  Then there’s income tax. If you are married and filing jointly and make less than $17,400 you are in the 10% tax bracket. More than that but less than $70,700 you are in the 15% bracket. For singles, anything between $8,700 and $35,350 puts you in the 15% bracket. So in my case, I’m paying 28.3% in tax: 13.3% for self-employment and 15% for income tax.

There are, of course, deductions you can take. I pay for my own health insurance, so I can deduct that. If you bought a new lens or camera, that’s a deduction. You can even claim mileage at 55-and-half cents a mile.

[UPDATE 2/7/11]: Check out this post on special tax advice for photographers.

Let’s add it up so far: $125 for the LLC, $625 for insurance and 28% of everything I earn (after legitimate deductions) goes to taxes. Still think you can charge $100 for a photo shoot?

I’ll get more into pricing in the next post. For now I want to leave you with some resources. Check out Photoshelter’s Vimeo page for great videos with the “Tax Ninja” on taxes for photographers and three good videos with John Harrington. Harrington, of course, is the author of “Best Business Practices for Photographers” and the Photo Business blog. I’ll leave you with a video on the “7 Common Tax Mistakes Made by Photographers”.

…and now for something completely different. Every once in a while, I like to push myself out of my comfort level and try something new. A few weeks ago, a photographer friend of mine posted an image on Facebook of a motocross racer and said he wanted to try to shoot something like that. My neighbor’s two kids race their bikes at a track not far from here so I coordinated a shoot during a practice night.

For someone who shoots houses for a living, trying to shoot something that moves very fast is a change of pace, to say the least. I got there just before the sun set and quickly found I had to boost my ISO to at least 800. I knew I wanted to show some motion in the wheels so I thought a shutter speed of 1/125th would work. I was shooting with the 70-200 f/2.8 lens and thought I would start at f/5.6, but that went out the window right away and I was shooting wide open at 2.8 the whole night.

After the sun set, I had to boost my ISO to “HI” which on my camera body is only 3200. I started shooting in RAW, but switched over to JPEG because at 6.5 frames per second, the buffer time was taking too long. My Compact Flash cards have a 30 Mb/s transfer rate. If I shot sports professionally, I’d probably have the 45 Mb/s cards. One last tip if you’re shooting fast action: make sure you set your camera’s focus drive to “AI Servo” (aka Continuous Focus for Nikon). This tells your camera to track motion.

Despite all the knowledge I brought onto the track, the vast majority of my shots were craptacular! I had trouble nailing the focus in the low light conditions. But hey, that’s what trying something new is all about, right? I might go again…maybe during the day to see if I have better luck. You can see the rest of the gallery HERE.

I shot the annual Vacation Rental Managers Association (VRMA) conference at the Hilton Bonnet Creek Resort in Orlando last week and it was a white balancing nightmare! Truth be told, I shoot in RAW so I can always change the white balance in post, but I like to get an accurate representation of the image at the time of capture. It’s just a comfort thing, not to mention trying to get as much right in camera to begin with. Take a look at this image: (NOTE: for the images in this post, try not to focus on the content, but rather the color. These examples are pretty much out of camera with little or no editing)

You can see how “orange” or “warm” it looks. That’s pretty much right out of camera. The warmth is due to the tungsten (incandescent for you Nikonians) lights overhead. So I switched from “auto” white balance to “tungsten” and while the result was better, I knew I’d run into trouble if I wanted or needed to use flash.

In the image above I used fill flash with a 1/2 cut of Color Temperature Orange (CTO) gel. Putting an orange gel on your flash essentially turns it into a tungsten light. So if you set your white balance to tungsten (incandescent) then the two light sources will balance. If you look carefully, however, you’ll notice that the waiter’s face still looks a little “cool” or “blue” in comparison to the room. So I added another 1/2 cut of CTO which equals one full cut and that did the trick.

The next day, I turned to using custom white balances for each room and that really made a difference.

Compare the color of the walls in the image above to the very first image in this post. Actually, if you see that white board on the right side of the frame; that’s what I used to get a custom white balance.

I learned about custom white balancing as a news videographer right out of college. Back then, those big cameras didn’t have handy white balance settings and you couldn’t tweak it in post. You either set the kelvin temperature or you took a custom white balance every time you moved from indoors to outside and back.

In case you don’t know, when you take a custom white balance, you’re basically telling the camera what “white” is so it can set all the corresponding colors accordingly. Camera models vary, but to take a custom white balance, take a picture of something white that is getting hit by the light source in the room. If, for example, you have a mix of tungsten and daylight, take something white and put it where it’s getting hit by both sources. You might need to switch to manual focus because your camera may not find focus in something with no contrast. Next, go to your menu function for custom white balance and select the image you want to use. Then, change your white balance to “custom”. Don’t forget to switch back to auto focus.

The classrooms (pictured above) were the worst! They really did have this weird orange color that seemed warmer to me than regular rooms lit by incandescent lamps. Not to mention, I was expecting fluorescent lights at hotel conference rooms. Switching from “auto” to “tungsten” didn’t help at all. So I just shot the white door at every room to get a custom white balance.

Getting the right white balance is crucial if you shoot JPEG because you don’t have as much latitude in post processing to tweak it. It’s less important if you shoot RAW, unless you’re like me and want to see an accurate picture when you shoot it.

The Get in Motion Tour is coming to a city near you. It’s for anyone interested in making films with your DSLR. I shouldn’t say “making films” because you can also include wedding and event videos. I’m going to get ahead of myself here and say one of the things the presenters talked about was the fact that photographers already have existing relationships with clients. You might be a senior photographer, or a portrait photographer, or a baby photographer; you get the idea. Well, video is just one more service you can offer.

Okay, on to the review. I attended the workshop last night in Orlando. A bit late on a school night, but overall I thought it was worth it and for 49-bucks a great value. I have to say that I didn’t learn a lot of new things, but that has more to do with my experience and is no reflection on the instructors. My first job out of college was as a news videographer; that’s where I learned the principles of photography (lighting, composition, white balance, etc.). I also know about the 180-rule and not “breaking the plane”.

The first part of the workshops is spent talking about “storytelling”; why it’s so important to draw a viewer in and how to do it by shooting sequences. How those sequences are edited together is part of the story telling process.  Even though I already knew this, it was a good reminder. When I worked in TV news, I knew the best way to tell a story was to personalize it. If I told you about a guy who was murdered or that the housing market was bad, you might not care. But if you heard from the dead guy’s pregnant wife or the mother of three who is about to become homeless, you might care a little more. In other words, I want to tell you their story. It’s not enough to just string together some beautiful clips.

The site claims you will learn how to make videos for events, birth announcements and weddings. You don’t, per se, learn the nuts and bolts of how to do it, but they do show examples which can give you inspiration. In fact, most of the course consisted of showing examples. In a couple of cases, you see the same video clip shot or edited differently to contrast technique.

Then the course goes into gear, specifically lens selection and what kind of look and feel it gives. They also talked about monopods, microphones and recorders. The course wrapped up with some editing techniques in Adobe Premiere.

I wish they had talked about a few things that some beginners may not know. Someone in the audience asked about frame rate; and while the instructor answered the question, he didn’t address how this affects your shutter speed. As a general rule, your shutter should be at twice your frame rate. So at 24fps, you should be at 1/50th of a second. There was also only a passing mention of focusing at narrow apertures. It might be helpful to know that following focus is very difficult (if not impossible) when shooting at f/1.2 or 1.8. There was also no mention on lighting or lighting gear (they did have a couple of hot lights with reflective umbrellas for a live shoot but there was no mention of them). I think it’s assumed that photographers have this knowledge but most of us use flash and not continuous lighting.

Again, I can’t say I learned a whole lot, but it was good refresher. It was also inspirational and I did pick up some tips on syncing audio and doing some post processing on video clips. If you’re just getting your feet wet or haven’t even dipped your toes into  DSLR video, then I would definitely recommend going. If you’re an intermediate, then it’s 50/50. I would say if you have the time, $50 is not much for a 4 1/2 hour workshop. You at least get some food for thought.

Note: If you want to go and need the discount code, David Ziser sent one out. It’s: DPTBLG.

Not too long ago, I blogged about a new television show on the Weather Channel featuring landscape photographer Peter Lik. I was excited that someone decided to make a TV show about photography. So imagine my surprise when I found another one! I was flipping through the channels last weekend and came across something on the PBS station called “Wild Photo Adventures”.

This particular episode featured the host teamed up with a storm chaser. They were chasing tornadoes and trying to get pictures of one. At one point in the show they photographed a lightning storm. What I really liked about the show (aside from the fact that there is even a TV show for photographers!) is that the host talked about his settings and thought process. When he wasn’t on a tripod, he boosted his ISO to get a faster shutter speed. When shooting lightning, he walks through the “how-to” process and explains the use of “bulb” mode.

Incidentally, on the same day I was able to catch an episode of “From the Edge” and I wasn’t thrilled. Maybe it’s the fact that Peter Lik is shooting with a $30,000 medium format camera (I’m guessing on the price) which the majority of us do not have; or the fact that he was trying to get through very narrow slot canyons while carrying his tripod legs fully extended over his shoulder. But it was probably that he never really talked about exposure or composition. Granted, I’m judging based on only one episode.

I was intrigued by Wild Photo Adventures and wondered how regularly it airs on TV. Luckily, the episodes are available online. Since the host, Doug Gardner, is a wildlife photographer, most of the episodes deal with nature (hence the name). There’s even an episode on photographing flowers and two episodes shot in the Florida Everglades.

Check it out…

Image: notesonphotography.com

So last week I posted a link to an article on my Facebook page about the acronyms manufacturers use for their camera lenses. It did a pretty good job, but I want to take it one step further for Nikon shooters. In my opinion, there are a WHOLE LOT more letters Nikonians have to decipher. In fact, there’s an entire GLOSSARY on the Nikon site to help you break it down. Did you know, for example, that your lens might be gelded? Yikes!

So check it out for yourself and the next time you get pulled over for DUI and the officer asks you to recite the alphabet backwards, just start with “VR”.