How do photographers ever make any money?
Image courtesy of Big-E-Mr-G via Flickr
Until today I had a vague idea that many photographers, especially freelancers, might struggle for cash. Certainly I was aware that the ever-increasing numbers of, frankly, amateur photographers (myself included) now ogling the professional world means that the ‘market’ is increasingly a crowded, competitive place. It seemed obvious that with an ever-increasing supply of photographers to choose from, many offering their services for free or on spec, pay would suffer.
But was it not ever thus? This was the story when I first started in journalism. This is the way of the world. Surely if you’re good enough you’re cheap enough.
The numbers don’t add up
According to the nice freelancer teaching me and a few other hopefuls the rudiments of photojournalism at college today, there is a simpl-ish equation for working out how much you should charge for one day of work.
It goes something like this: Take your desired annual income (eg £40k). Then double it. That’s to take into account the extra cash you’ll need for expenses. It seems a bit much to me, but hey, let’s go with it. Then divide that by the number of jobs you think you can do each working week. So 80,000/3 = c.27,000.
Then take THAT figure and divide it by the number of working weeks you have in the year. Say you take one month off and two weeks for training. Pause a minute to reflect that your holiday is unpaid. So 27,000/46 = 586.96.
That’s almost £600 per day, three times a week, every week of the working year, to reach what is in effect an average professional salary (in London anyway) of £40,000. Is that realistic? For a beginner? I suspect not…
Even modifying the figures slightly – lowering the expenses, for example, or upping the number of days you work – doesn’t change the basic premise: making decent money as a freelance photographer is hard. And that’s before the aspiring snapper even thinks about whether they’re good enough to have enough work to make the figures add up.
What was worse, two hours after this brutal equation was explained to me I masochistically went to listen to the travel editor of the Guardian explain – as if I didn’t know – that it’s very hard to sell feature articles to newspapers and that almost no-one makes a living out of it.
Thank heavens I actually do have a job. For those of you who do want to consider this type of thing, some useful information can be found at the NUJ’s London Freelance website, or there is a huge collection of photography links at Foto8 magazine.
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