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Being a photographer is one thing. Owning a photography business is quite another...
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Duh! Right? We all know this, right? Sure, but what does that translate to in real life? Lets take for instance one thing that often causes trouble between customers and clients and that they don't teach you in school: communication.
When you first talk with a customer its really important to lay out on the line absolutely everything that you plan on doing and charging for. For instance, on my smaller product and commercial shoots I have a standard 2 week turn around time. I can go faster, but because it would interfere with my workflow and cause me to push current work forward farther ahead I would need to charge more to make up for the loss of income due to pushing the other work forward. So, the more you pay, the faster you get the images. For some reason, in this digital age, a lot of customers seem to think that 2 weeks or even 2 days is a really long time. As far as I'm concerned, that's fine. I can work faster, but then it costs more. However, this kind of thing is something that really needs to be discussed ahead of time, even if you are doing it for a friend.
It is really important also to talk about how you are going to get the images from your computer to theirs. Due to the State of California requiring that I charge sales tax on all tangible items that I sell I try to avoid selling disks of the images to clients because that would require me to charge sales tax on the entire shoot which is a hassle for me to collect and give to the state and it costs extra money for the customer. So, the legal way I get around this is by sending the digital images electronically by means of ftp or with smaller shoots through a very simple and wonderful little program called Pando. However, its really important to make sure that your clients understand how to use ftp or Pando for this process to work. I do not recommend this for people who don't use computers at all. Be sure to ask if they can handle using the program or are okay with the process of sending the images from your computer to theirs. It is one of those little things that can give you a headache all day if something goes wrong with it.
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