Dan Holdsworth

If I were to take one thing away from Dan Holdworlth talk it would be that you could never do too much research. Even if it takes over 10 years. Research has been a huge part in his work and even become some of the key pieces with in his archive.

His work goes into so much depth is seems to be something completely new, and the fact that he is on the cusps of starting to invent some of his own data reading technology is rather impressive to his commitment to the project. To be honest some of it went straight over my head when he talking about it, as it was so much to get my mind around to start with. But even still it was so interesting that I would go to another one of his talks to see how he can extend the work he’s done so far and to maybe start to understand it a bit more. I think because it was something he was so interested in and had been photographing for so many years it gave the images a whole new meaning to if you were to just see them hung up without knowing anything about them.

Pricing

When learning about pricing and costing I have found that it is important to work out what your overheads are before you start thinking of a charge. This is because you need to take into account how much a job is going to cost you in petrol, materials, studio space if needed and models or props. When you get that price it is easier to then think what you would like from it for your time and skills with the added overheads.

Workflow - Taking the photos and how long it would take to edit then and hand them to the clients.

Breaking even - managing to cover the cost of what it cost you to do but with no profit.

Loss - not covering expenses and overheads.

Profit - earning an investment for future work by charging more than covering expenses.

Managing the work flow you have is also important as if you are doing a high volume job for in a high quality, you want to be charging the right amount for what that work is worth. This type of job would be something working in advertising that needs high quality pictures in a frequent magazine or something along them lines. e.g the Argos catalogue.

While setting up a own business with the covering expenses it is important to avoid breaking even as the business is going to be the money that will fund you for your living expense and what will fund the business to advance and expand possible.

Twenty Twenty Creative Agency

Having had Frede Spencer come in and speak about what an agency does and how to contact them had opened my mind a bit more to what actually happens at an agency, and what the roll of an agent did. In my mind an Agent was someone who had a long list of photographers and other creative types of people on a list and they assigned these people off to jobs that they would rake in a huge percentage of the profit, sit back and watch the money roll in.

NOW, I am aware that that’s not the case. The agent’s job is to be the middleman on shoots to make sure the clients are happy and things are running smoothly. This is because it’s not just the photographer’s work that is going to be tarnished if it was a bad shoot. It would also be the agency’s reputation that would be mentioned if something were to go wrong. It is also good for them to be the middleman for money or any disagreements the client has they can be a person that they go to rather than the photographer who is trying to work.

Frede Spencer has 6 carefully selected people working for him and they all have different skills some photographer some sculptors and art directors. A tip helpful tip that he gave was that if you were looking at joining an agency that