Re: Thinking about charging for work...


Jeremiah DeWitt Weiner wrote:
Pat <groups@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
There is no "photography" market. There are hundreds of specialty
markets.

Pat, I thought your response has been one of the most insightful so
far. I took a marketing class in grad school a while back (which turned
out to be surprisingly interesting and helpful), and what you say jibes
with what the professor said. Aiming to be "a photographer" is, I
guess, like saying you're going to open "a restaurant". Where? What
kind of food? How much is it going to cost? Who's going to eat there?


You can only offer people two things:ability or time. You can do
things that other people don't have time for or things that people
don't have the ability to do.

This is a really good point. I think the "ability path" is probably
better-paying (anybody with time on their hands can mop floors; not just
anybody can do underwater welding) but there are always exceptions (for
example, my company could run its own email server, but it's more
efficient for us to contract that work out even though it costs a fair
amount).

A related piece of advice I've seen is "find the hardest thing that
you can do, and go do that". Because if something is hard, you're
probably going to have that much less competition. Again, there are
always exceptions - if you find mopping floors really difficult but
being a world-class soccer player easy, well... - but the point is that
it's a way of moving yourself onto that "ability path" where you're not
competing with every warm body capable of pushing a mop or shooting
portraits at the mall.


The other piece of advice I have is to work for people with money.
Not that it's impossible to make money off people without much of
their
own - McDonald's does.
I think it was Douglas Adams, in one of his Dilbert books, said
something to the effect that there are only 4 types of people in the
world. Rich and smart. Rich and dumb, Poor and Smart; and Poor and
Dumb. You don't want to go after the poor people because they don't
have any money. You don't want to go after the Rich and Smart because
they will steal your idea and put you out of business. So you want to
go after the people who are Rich and Dumb.

But there's a reason that that space is
dominated by a few chains running cookie-cutter establishments while the
luxury space is not, and I'm guessing most of us would rather be Bouley
than Wendy, you know? If you try to work for people without money, you
usually have to compete on price, and that gets you into a place where
your customers are mostly interested in price and not quality, and you
really have to run at maximum efficiency all the time.

But everybody's got to make their own choices. Not everybody is
motivated by money or prestige or whatever; some people are probably
happy doing portraits at the mall. Some people like the ability to
close up shop at 5pm and not have to think about work until 9am the next
day. If taking pictures of nothing but miniature goats for $20,000 a
year makes you happy, why not?

--
Oh to have a lodge in some vast wilderness. Where rumors of oppression
and deceit, of unsuccessful and successful wars may never reach me
anymore.
-- William Cowper

.

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