6) Budgeting, Angus Fraser - 1/12/17

Our next lecture in Professional Practice was all based around budgeting within your photography career, and my scans from the lecture can be seen below.

We started the lecture off by talking about the case study we have to undertake for this project, with Angus mentioning it's quality over quantity in terms of the work, and that we should consider completing some short briefs from competitions to put in the case study.

In terms of budgeting, the first piece of advice he gave was that you should hire equipment because this has many positives in comparison to owning. For instance you don't have to pay for upkeep of equipment, insurance and hiring equipment is tax deductible too! We then went on to talk about fees and expenses, and he gave us some good sources such as the AOP and 'Beyond the Lens' to find budgeting templates we can use. He also said we need to add terms and conditions on the back of any invoice or estimate to a client, to give you any legal cover you need.

We then had a go at creating our own budget for a client who wanted portraits of construction workers. It was a 2 day shoot, and we had to make an estimate for a budget and price each element on the list Angus gave us. The list can be seen down below with the cost we added to each element, as well as the actual price list for the client.

We ended up with a final figure of £13,910 and the correct figure was £11,075, and for our first budget we'd ever done I was pretty pleased with how close we were. I found the task really helpful because it really illustrates how you need to plan a cost for everything, and even put a 10% contingency on for emergency costs.

We rounded up the lecture by talking about some of the different competitions we can enter for photography. For example the Taylor Wessing, AOP Student, Royal Academy, BJP IPA just to name a few. As well as this he gave us a website link to find lists of competitions available for photography, also stating whether they have entry fees or not. This is something important to me because I know how low the chances are of winning one of these competitions, so I want to find those which aren't going to put me out of pocket.

I found the lecture really beneficial because I love learning about more of the career aspect of photography. It excites but also scares me, and also makes me more motivated to make the most of these three years when we have the guidance we need and a space where we're able to make mistakes.

#professionalpractice