The 4 Legs of a Pro Shooter’s chair - Leg 4: VISION
The chair of a successful photographer has four legs. You may be able to sit on a chair with just one leg but it won’t take long before you fall over. A second leg might buy you a little extra time on the chair but you will fall. It’s possible to sit on a three legged chair for the duration of a career but it won’t be a comfortable one. So you need a chair with four solid legs if you want to make it as a pro shooter. After talking about QUALITY, SERVICE and BUSINESS in the previous articles, we’ll devote this final leg of the chair to VISION.
It’s time to strap your jet pack to your back, start the engine and take off because you need a birds view to take a look at your career, your photography and your life. Having a long term vision makes dealing with every day decision making surprisingly easy. Things that may have seemed complicated problems become just little annoyances once you’ve developed your vision.
I believe you should have two kinds of long term vision. The first is your LIFESTYLE VISION. Try to picture yourself at different ages. What kind of life would you want to lead by then? Where would you live? What kind of futuristic hovering car would you fly? What kind of values do you hope your kids will have learned from you? … Just imagine what you would do in an day or week.
This exercise is not in the first place about money, but it will give you a good idea of what you have to earn to live the life of your dreams.
The second long term overview you’ll need to find for yourself is CREATIVE VISION. What does photography mean to you? Is it about creating an ideal world or is it about shaking up the world with the raw truth? Is it about capturing romance or is it about documenting rare poisoned frogs with five legs? You’ll get my point and if you take a good look at your own favorite pictures, you’ll probably find your vision.
Creative vision is not the same as style. Style will be a result of your creative vision, but you could use different styles within the same creative vision.
It’s not like these visions have to be left unchanged for the length of your career. If you are anything like me these visions will shift, evolve and sometimes dramatically change over time. And I think there is nothing wrong with that. To me my VISION is not so much a goal, it rather is my reference point that helps me answer most of my business related questions in a certain point of time.
What camera should I buy? That’s a question that is responsible for countless sleepless nights for photographers all over the world. Although the answer is often simple when you ask yourself this question: “which camera helps me the best to exercise my creative vision?” Off-course money comes in to play too, but by asking the same question for all your gear you will set your priorities straight. Often you will find out that the gear you really need is often surprisingly within reach is you get only the stuff you need for your creative vision.
Another such question is: “What price should I set for this assignment?”. Your creative vision will tell you what your cost of doing business is. Your lifestyle vision will dictate how much you need to make to live the lifestyle you want. This makes it easy to set your minimum price and will make it easier to say no to clients who are just trying to take advantage of you.
Your creative and lifestyle vision should be the center of your business. All the rest should be build around it. Will you be able to shoot the stuff you believe in and at the same time live the life of your dreams? Well that depends mostly on how well you do with the three other legs of your chair.
I hope you enjoyed this series of articles. I don’t claim to be a business guru, but I know this worked for me and will work even better the day I get the legs attached more firmly to my chair.
Bert Stephani
I think the chair metaphor works well here, thanks for posting this series.
Great advice again today! It really helps putting everything into perspective, to see the big picture.
Thanks!
this is an excellent series. those four legs should be adopted by alot of photographer. This for me is a theme and goal for 2009 to establish my Lifestyle and Creative vision to elevate and sharpen my work and style. thanks for making this wonderful post.
Great series! Clearly written and to the point. Liked it a lot.
Keep it up!
I like the series, but if I could give one tip: ‘as is’ the articles on the sites are much too long. Websites aren’t books :). Either break them up using subtitles or section headers or simply add images. I bet it would be pretty easy to add some (photo) examples of your own work and how, for this article at least, it has grown with the vision you had the past couple of years. Make it a little more personal with more real life examples. For example: what was your own creative vision a few years ago? Has it evolved over time? Etc.
Also, allow me to quote a piece of the article (disclaimer: I’m absolutely no expert!):
“Another such question is: “What price should I set for this assignment?”. Your creative vision will tell you what your cost of doing business is. Your lifestyle vision will dictate how much you need to make to live the lifestyle you want. This makes it easy to set your minimum price and will make it easier to say no to clients who are just trying to take advantage of you.”
That’s a pretty bold statement. I personally think an important factor in determining your pricing is making sure it’s competitive. I might want to live a lifestyle of the rich and famous and set my prices so high that no one would even want to book me. Setting your price to whatever you want might be easier once you’re an established photographer who has a style and who has a impressive portfolio to show his/her clients. If you’re just starting out I’d personally be a little more careful. As far as I can tell beginning photographers make up a large part of your readers.
I’m certainly not saying you should sell yourself cheap, but I don’t think you should go overboard either
Just my 2 cents.
Great information!
And to the poster above, I think he’s speaking to some what modest who might under sell themselves.
But I loved the series, and look forward to other great posts.
Nicely done.
You’ve used the basics for creating any type of business and applied it directly to our shared common interest. This makes it a lot simpler for us to realise what we need in order to move towards our goals in photography or design.
In response to Thomas
There is no profession where you see yourself “live a lifestyle of the rich and famous” and attain it immediately.
A bit like signing up to a gym and expecting to look like Arnie after 3 months.
The point behind vision and a business plan is so that you create your vision over time and then you can break it down into chunks so you can plan how you want your career to flow.
This makes it easier to meet your personal targets over milestones and eventually reach your goal (if it’s still the same over time)
In 10 years, if you want the wealthy lifestyle then you break it down into chapters of your career with timelines. You know you will have to make certain contacts and win contracts for the specific work you enjoy. Once you know that then you pursue each chapter in turn with the “vision” being the complete book of your life/career
Thanks for the clarification Steven and CallumW.
Steven: you make a very good point that you should never undersell yourself. I fully agree with that.
CallumW: I wasn’t implying I want to attain that specific lifestyle immediately. All I was saying was that to attain a goal 10 years from now (which obviously includes seting regular milestones and reevaluations along the way) I will have to charge a specific fee today (as a starting point since I do need to start somewhere). If I don’t ask that price, I simply might not reach my goal in 10 years.
But that specific starting price (’minimum price’ as Bert puts it) might be unrealistic. It could prove to be so high that no one would even think to book me for a shoot. Just because I think I should be paid Y does not mean people actually will :). Studying the market and trying to be competitive (without underselling yourself!) are just as important when laying out your long term plans (in my opinion).
This is a wonderful resource, thanks so much!!!
Shellie
Bert,
Thanks for this series of articles! They’ve been inspirational for me and have helped me to reflect upon my photography as a hobby v. as a career.
Keep up the great work and I love the new blog!
Hi Bert,
I like to read your articles as well! I think it isn’t easy to start a career like photographer from zero “finance”-background…
Maybe a tip: I actually bought a book “Rijk in 100 dagen” of Paul D’Hoore a couple days ago and it is really good and understandable if you want to know something more about making money…
Greetz,
Tom
Hi
You posted the answer to your own question …. Leg 2 - Vision
It helps when you take out a little time to visualise what you want, where you are and how to get there. This helps re-focus your attention on the important things.
Which is fine when you can plan your week in balance
I was shown a really useful tool for this recently - a simple time chart.
You split your time into Planning, Action and Leisure … with plenty of spaces dotted about to give room in case something comes up or runs over. Planning is meetings or making contacts, chatting to existing clients and Action is your ‘production time’ (shoots, admin, marketing etc). Leisure is relaxation or family time, or even personal photo time
It’s best when it’s colour coded to make it easier to see when there’s too much of one thing or another and it really helps balance your time better.
Here’s a basic example of the timesheet in case anyone is interested:
http://www.freedom2breathe.co.uk/timeplan.php
CW