Category: Business

The ability to scale up is typically considered a very desirable (if not the key) property of a business, a research group (in academic context) or any other entity or project where productivity is measured quantitatively (i. e. in terms of profits, journal publications, etc.) However, in certain cases, consciously limiting the scale of the project has tremendous benefits in terms of quality of the end product as well as the quality of the experience of the process. A great example of this decision not to scale up is shown in “Jiro Dreams of Sushi“, a documentary about a high-end sushi restaurant in Tokyo.

In my experience, limiting the scale of projects certainly works well for photography. High-volume photo shoots involve a lot of overhead related to production and logistics. As the scale of the project increases, so does the overhead, while the essence of the project that served as the original motivation, at best, remains unchanged.

My original  exploration of the business aspects of photography was focussed on stock photography. In retrospect, the passive nature of the stock photography income was the most attractive feature: you shoot, process, keyword and upload a photo once, and after that, it just keeps selling (that is the theory, anyway). Also, there is an interesting aspect of trying to figure out what type of image would be attractive to potential buyers. However, because the range of buyers is incredibly wide, what bubbles up to the top are rather generic and not particularly interesting, from my personal perspective, images.

Eventually, my interests shifted to sports and events photography. In part, this is because this niche provides more opportunities for interacting with people, who are involved in the photo shoots. From the business perspective also, the type of photography that delivers both a product (images for sale) and a service (event coverage) has been more successful (at least in my particular case).

I am quite pleased to see some of my photos enlarged to a rather enormous size and covering the interior walls of the new athletics centre of our university. Every time I go to the gym now, it feels as if I visit my personal gallery.

I think that at some level, art should have an application. This has certainly been the case with the works of the classics, but nowadays, the opportunities for finding these applications are even more numerous. The problem, as usual is in finding the balance between usefulness of a piece of art and fair compensation for its use. In the case of my sports photography, for example, the financial benefit to me is questionable at best, considering the amount of time and effort it takes. Still, I believe a fair balance is there, as I like the idea of supporting the school and its student-athletes beyond my main function as a faculty member. Also, having my photos integrated into the architecture of a new building is very nice.

My associate, who got me involved in the sports photography for the university and with whom we took these pictures, also thinks that this collaboration with the school has been quite productive, even just for satisfaction of knowing that our images have a life beyond our hard drives.

Many people, who start photography as a hobby, at some point contemplate doing it professionally. There many degrees of involvement in professional photography, though, from occasionally selling a few images while keeping the “day job” to committing to the photo business full-time. Dan Heller, the author of several books and articles on the business of photography, including the “Profitable Photography in Digital Age: Strategies for Success,” describes various degrees of commitment to the business aspect and the associated advantages and disadvantages.

To me personally, one of the most appealing aspects of doing photography part-time is the ability to limit the photo projects only to those that are interesting from the creative standpoint. These projects are often not the most viable commercially, but I don’t have to forgo them in favour of more profitable, but often boring shoots, that would certainly feel more like a job rather than fun.

Of course, in theory, a job does not have to be boring. In academe, for example, the combination of teaching (which can be very rewarding in its own right) and research continues to fascinate me even after doing it for a few years. Still, with a “real” job come obligations, which tend to spoil whatever leisure we might have. As Allan Watts puts it in “The Wisdom of Insecurity, “… most of us are willing to put up with lives that consist largely in doing jobs that are bore, earning the means to seek relief from the tedium by intervals of hectic and expensive pleasure.” In the case of photography, I think that it is better not to turn it into a “bore” if at all possible.