Photographers: Are You Trading Your Time For Money?
Summary: "Photographers: Are You Trading Your Time For Money?"
Are you trading your time for money? By the common standard of going to work to earn a living, most of us are doing just that. However, photographers as artists, are trading much more than that for money. They are exchanging their labors of love, the emotions, skill, sentimental value and other non-tangible aspects for money. This distinction is what separates the truly successful photographers from the rest. Read on to learn more, and please do leave a comment!
Most of us are brought up with the idea that we have to go out to work in order to earn the money we need to support us in the lifestyle we want to live.
Before long, we’re caught up in the vicious cycle of “work, eat, sleep“, with our lives slowly being eaten away by the passage of time.
However, most of us never really stop to think about what it is that we’re actually trading for the money we earn.
That “something” is our second most valuable asset in life (our attitude being the first)”
Our time…
Only 86,400 Seconds
Everyone on the planet is given exactly the same 24 hours (give or take a few seconds) every day – no more, and no less than anyone else. It doesn’t matter if you’re rich, poor, positive, negative, busy, or idle. There is no way you can squeeze any more time from a day.
I want you to stop and think for a moment about just how important tomorrow’s 86,400 seconds are going to be for you. What if they were the last 24 hours you would ever have? How much would you treasure each and every second of that day?
Now, here’s another, more important, question for you:
Would you trade any part of that last day for money?
It might seem like a strange question, but I want to stress the point that we’re all trading our time for money every day, without ever really giving it a second thought or fully comprehending its real meaning.
In a very real sense, we’re not only trading our time for money, we’re actually trading our lives for it, albeit little by little, but it’s true nonetheless.
But We Need Money To Live!
Yes, I know we all need to live, and for that we need money. Society just doesn’t function very well without it. However, I believe the way in which we acquire that money, and particularly the things we actually trade in order to get it, is the most important thing to consider.
This is why I believe so many photographers have trouble around the ideas of pricing their work. In their mind they just can’t escape the notion that they’re somehow trading their time for the money they take from the client in exchange for the photographs. In reality, though, we should be thinking about price and value in another sense entirely.
For example, you might decide that an 8 x 10 is $50 on your price list, based on what it costs from the lab and the time you spend to create it. Already, there’s an element here of trading your time for the money you receive for the print, yet your customer is not actually receiving your time, are they? They don’t get a print plus 30 minutes they can go use however they want, they just get the print. It’s as though the time you spent on it simply evaporated into nothing.
Energy, Money, Time and Photography
One of the laws of the universe states that energy can not be created nor destroyed, but only converted from one form into another. The amount of energy in the universe now is exactly the same as it was at the beginning.
But what does the law of the conservation of energy have to do with selling photography?
It’s just an analogy, of course, but the way I look at it, the photographer is expending energy in the form of creativity and manual labor when producing a photograph. Some of that energy is somehow combined with similar energy from the client and then converted into the “value” that the image contains, in the form of emotions and sentimental attachment etc.
I happen to believe that the value contained within those less-tangible forms is of a far higher value, say, than the paper and ink that the image is made from, and I’m sure most of you would agree with that.
So Why Price Based Only On Cost And Time?
So now we come to the main question of the day, which is why do photographers price themselves based only on their costs and some arbitrary notion of what their time might be worth?
That notion, by the way, is governed primarily by their own subconscious programming and how they feel about their own self-worth, together with the confidence (or lack thereof) that they have in their own abilities as a photographer or artist, mashed together with some idea of what the average hour is worth for someone doing this type of work.
Therefore we end up charging a price for our art and photography that is really based in the more primitive paradigm of trading time for money, rather than a more evolved concept of exchanging value for money.
By doing so, we find ourselves running the same old race of trying to communicate to the client that the price we’re asking is reasonable, that it’s competitive, and represents “good value for money” (which has to rank as one of the most meaningless phrases of all time, in my opinion).
But The Client Wants To Know What She’s Getting!
Absolutely! I agree with that sentiment 100%, but maybe not for the reason that some might think!
The client most definitely wants to know what she’s getting, and she wants to be sure that the value to her is equal to, or exceeds, the price she’s paying for it.
The subtle difference here, though, is that it’s up to us, the photographer, to educate her on the actual true value of the photography – a very good part of which is the product of the expenditure of our own labors of love in the creative process.
The value to her of a photograph really lies in the love that exists within it, the emotions and memories it stirs within her soul, the way the photographer captured the moment in just the right way from the perfect angle, at precisely the correct second, with the exact amount of light needed to evoke all of the emotions she experiences whenever she looks at it.
Not the cost of the paper, the ink, or the monetary value of the photographer’s time.
I acknowledge that it’s no easy task to inspire someone so much that they’re willing to pay more than a premium price to acquire whatever it is that you’re selling. It’s a real challenge that we all face every single day when we’re selling the results of our dedicated labor.
It’s such a challenge, in fact, that most of the photographers out there have given up trying, which is both a crying shame and a disservice to both the industry and the clients whom they serve.
Which Side Of The Line Are You On?
On the other side of the line are the photographers we consider to be successful, and revered by both their clients and other photographers alike.
We admire them and their work, and place them on such a high pedestal, yet most of us fail to see the reason why they are so different to the rest of us. We mistakenly assume that it’s their technical command of photography that is so beyond the rest of us, although there’s little doubt that they are good at what they do. We attach significance to factors that aren’t even real, such as where they are, the connections they have, some lucky break, a better market, and so on.
Inspiration Is The Key
The truth is that they’re different because they understand the fundamental value of what it is that they’re selling. They are not trading their time for money, but instead the emotions and sentiments contained within their work.
In short, they inspire people to buy from them, whereas the rest of us are stuck in the outdated paradigm of trading our time for money and trying to manipulate people into buying from us instead.
Tomorrow You Only Have 86,400 Seconds
Think back to one of the first questions posed here. “Would you trade tomorrow’s time for money if you knew that tomorrow was your last day?“
How would you place a monetary value on the experiences and emotions that you could cram into a single day?
Now imagine how you can take that thought and apply it to inspire the people you work for to help them understand and treasure the real value that your photography can bring to their lives.
In the end, our photography is priceless.
How Do You Feel?
I would love to know your thoughts on this and anything else you find on this blog. Your opinions, suggestions and comments are very valuable to me, and to everyone else that reads this, so please take a moment to share your perspective.
Perhaps you have a personal experience that can help shed even more light on this subject, or a unique view that can help others to solve their own “pricing and value” issues.
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We have been pondering this question to some of our local photographers. They basically own a job. There has to be a better way instead of trading time for money. If you you have a photography business, how do you scale it? How do you development long term financial security?
Thanks for posting this, We will be using this as a reference for upcoming articles.
Thanks for the reminder about value and pricing. An example that comes to mind is the seemingly absurd prices charged for luxury goods, say women’s handbags. They’re often made by the same companies that make lower priced bags, they’re still leather, etc. But they have something extra, just because a famous person’s name is attached. That person may have had nothing to do with the design or manufacture of that handbag.
But the buyer gets something: a feeling of success and power by associating themselves with it, the ability to drop the name to friends, and many other things. If our photography can do something like that for a client, raise an emotional feeling, a longing, a connection, a memory–that’s likely even more valuable than a form of snobbery.