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With a clear goal and strong business plan, you can get paid to shoot what you love -- like this dream campaign Menuez shot in Dubai for Emirates Airlines. He was commissioned to document the culture and people of Dubai for a month and the creative team pulled the ads from the edit. Dubai for Emirates Airlines, ©2009 Doug Menuez/StocklandMartel

When most photographers set up shop, they focus on becoming better photographers, naturally. Few photographers, however, develop even the most basic skills they need to run their own business. They hope to hang on long enough to be discovered before they sink under their own lack of knowledge. That’s like building an intricate jeweled house atop quicksand. (Look in the mirror, repeat after me: “You want fries with that?”)

The “get discovered” strategy implies that someone else will take responsibility for your own financial well-being. Ideally, we’d all be born independently wealthy, have our spouse deal with the money, or find the perfect business manager or agent who can do this for us. I’m here to tell you — snap out of that lovely fantasy! Not. Gonna. Happen. And even if, by the grace of the angels, it did, you would still need to learn the basics in order to participate in the decisions being made about your money. Even the best business managers need your help to help you succeed. You really don’t want to be one of those poor schmucks who got super successful but are now penniless because you trusted someone else to handle all your business decisions.

In my new column for RESOLVE, “Seeing Money,” I’ll be sharing what I learned the hard way about the business side of photography during nearly 30 years in the industry. I started as a fine-art student, moved into photojournalism, built a multimillion-dollar advertising studio with a staff of 15, then closed that monster and reconfigured with a minimal crew and low overhead. Along the way I made and lost fortunes.

I never understood money; money was not my goal. I was — and am — all about making great images. But I learned to respect and understand that money has the power to support my most important work. I hope to help you realize the same thing by explaining what works, what mistakes to avoid, and how to recognize the ways our creative brains sometimes sabotage our own success — especially whenever it comes to managing money.

I am constantly trying to answer the difficult question, “How do you reconcile the conflict between art and commerce?” I give the long answer in my workshops. The short answer is, “Get paid to shoot what you love to shoot.” To achieve that, you have to build a solid foundation, step by step, to financial security.

Many photographers have a lot of fear around money; they think it will dilute their talent and corrupt their values, or they just can’t handle the math. I’ll provide pain-free financial management tips you can apply right away. OK, that statement was a lie — there is no such thing as pain-free financial management. But rest assured that my lessons will be less painful than if you did not learn these skills at all. Plus, you are benefiting from all the pain I’ve already gone through to get where I am today. Best of all, as you begin to learn and apply fundamental business lessons, you will find that you gain confidence and actually begin to enjoy the business part of your photography business.

In this “Seeing Money” column, I will discuss the steps you need to take right now to start (or save) your business. Check back soon if you wish you knew more (or didn’t realize you needed to know more) about:

• basic bookkeeping
• writing a business plan
• getting an SBA loan and line of credit
• working with an accountant
• managing cash flow through accounts receivable/payable reports
• insurance
• legal issues
• important business tools

• What would you do if you find out your family picture ended up in a billboard in the Czech Republic – without your permission? The story of Missouri mom Danielle Smith trying to figure out why her family photo appeared in an advertisement for a Czech grocer was getting a lot of interest on the web. This week, the story even got into mainstream news coverage. While it’s definitely a copyright infringement, no one knows for sure how the photo landed on the streets of the Czech Republic. PDN proposed a possible theory to the mystery.

• Yesterday started the Look3 Festival of the Photograph in Charlottesville, where thousands of photographers gathered to celebrate photography. The festival grew out of backyard photography parties at National Geographic Magazine editor-at-large Nick Nichols‘ home which he hosted for the last twenty years. Martin Parr, Gilles Peress, Sylvia Plachy are the featured photographers this year. Our editor Miki Johnson is there to support the event. Stay tuned for more about the festival here at RESOLVE.

• The new iPhone 3GS is here! Well, almost. Available on June 19, the iPhone 3GS has 2 times the speed compared to the iPhone 3G, a 3 megapixel built-in camera with auto focus, and video recording and editing capabilities. Plus, it starts at $199. What’s not to love? Maybe the $200 AT&T plan upgrade fee? Apparently, existing iPhone AT&T customers will need to pay an extra $200 “upgrade fee” in order to get the iPhone 3 GS and a new AT&T service plan. That might have some iPhone users thinking twice about snatching the new make.

• A Photo Editor posted an excellent video by photographer Alexx Henry, explaining how he uses the RedOne to turn his regular still shoot into a video shoot. We’re especially impressed by the quality of the video itself – we wonder if Alexx made it with his RedOne? Be sure to check out Alexx’s blog with the final results.

• This week marks the 20th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square Protests. The iconic image of the “Tank Man” is splattered all over the internet, except on the Great-Fire-Wall-bound Chinese internet. The New York Times photo blog, Lens, has a great interview with photographers explaining how their version of the Tank Man came about. Most interesting of all, though, is a follow-up post yesterday showing a never before published photo of the Tank Man getting ready for the confrontation.

• Have you seen The Vendor Client Relationship video yet? If not, you might be the last one. Go check it out now and we won’t tell anyone ;-) It’s a hilarious take on the real world situation for those who work in the photography and advertising business.

• A Photo Editor pointed us to another noteworthy new online video — Michael Almereyda’s documentary about photography icon William Eggleston on Snag Film, William Eggleston in the Real World. The fillmmaker followed Eggleston on various trips around the country, capturing his complex personality and how it affects his work.

• The winning images of the PDN Photography Annual 2009 are now available on its website. We want to give a big shout out to our friends and contributors Alan Chin and Ed Kashi, who won the Photojournalism/Sports/Documentary and Corporate Design/Photo Products categories respectively.

A composite image taken by Michael, with postproduction by GreenBox. The main images in the composite are below. © Michael Lamotte

The way it used to be for commercial photographers was, once we shot the film, it was given to the agency and we never saw it again. It was very rare that you were involved at all in any of the postproduction. Which was fine sometimes, but sometimes the end result was different than the original intent. Now, because of the advances in technology, there has a niche has developed between photography and pre-press.

Instead of pre-press doing all the postproduction, today the photographer does postproduction on their own, or they hand it off to someone like GreenBox to do the work before it’s passed on to pre-press. One-way to look at it is: The budget is out there for retouching on every job, regardless of who does it. There’s nothing that doesn’t get touched by Photoshop these days. The question is, who is going to get paid to do that postproduction work?

If photographers want to do their own retouching, it’s a good skill to develop and I think it’s good to retain control up to the very last minute. But that only works if you’ve got the time and the deadline fits your schedule. When you get really busy, you end up thinking to yourself, “I’ve already shot this and sold it to the client; I want to do the retouching, but I don’t have the time to because I’ve got another shoot the next day.” And inevitably everyone wants everything delivered immediately, so you get to a point where you realize there is only so much you can handle. I’ve also heard stories about agencies getting burned by photographers who want to do their own retouching but are not really technically skilled with Photoshop and pre-press requirements. They deliver the file and then the agency has to source it out for someone else to fix.

Another option would be for the photographer to hire a freelancer, so the files can be worked on the next day while the photographer is shooting another job. That’s a possibility too. But again, then you’re relying on the availability of the freelancer. Typically if you find someone who understands what you want and how you like it, then you’re much more dependent on that person. If you call them up and say, “I need you to do this tomorrow,” and they’re booked for the next three days, then you might have to go to someone else whom you’ve never worked with before.

The third option is to have someone on staff full-time to do retouching, but then you have to be shooting enough to support that. Having someone in-house to do retouching is a great option for a photographer because the Photoshop work is a good second revenue stream, if you can find additional clients who only want retouching services.

The ebbs and flows for a postproduction studio run along the same lines as those for a photography studio. But when you’re a photographer specializing in a certain area, that’s the only source of income coming in, as opposed to this model with GreenBox, where we could be drawing from several sources. So even now when a lot of people are really slow, there’s always somebody working — and they need retouching services. That way you can becomes less dependent on just one circle of income.

If you’re going to start your own postproduction studio, it’s good to have a focus, an area that you specialize in, just as you should as a photographer. I’ve always felt that, if I were a client and I looked at someone’s portfolio and they had some fashion, they had some still life, they had some landscape, even if they’re all good, I really don’t have a clear picture of what they love, where their passion lies. But then I might interview someone else and they only have food — well it becomes obvious that person really likes doing food photography. And if I needed food photography done, I think I’d want to go to that person instead of someone who says, well, yeah, I do food photography too. And that directly translates to what we do at GreenBox Imaging.

No matter how photographers do it, I think it’s important that they always include retouching as a separate line item — I cannot stress this enough. Because no matter what you do with digital files, it takes time to process them and prepare them to be handed over to the client. Even simple processing, renaming, and organizing your images without any retouching can take some time. The big danger is if photographers include processing and retouching in their photography fee, clients start to think, why should I pay extra for it, it’s included. Just like anything else in business, it’s always a good idea to have it called out as separate charge, even if you’re doing it yourself.

Pricing for retouching can be all over the place, but it generally runs from $150 to $300 an hour from a postproduction house. In my experience, that is what agencies and design firms typically budget for retouching and postproduction services as part of a project. We try to look at it on a per-project basis and quote it that way, but in general if you go somewhere with your files, that’s the range that’s out there.

The client explains what they want and you try to estimate how many hours it will take as closely as possible. Sometimes that’s very difficult to do; you never know what’s going to happen down the line during the postproduction process. Maybe the designer goes through the image and gets it the way they want it and only then it gets passed on to the client. The client may say, “That looks great,” or they may have a bunch of changes, and those are the things that are unpredictable. All you can do is estimate as close as possible; then when we get to that point where we start running out of time, we notify the client and say, we have this much time left. The request you just sent is going to push us over, or it’s within the budget but anything after that we’ll need more hours added on. That’s all you can do, to keep the client informed of where they are money-wise and time-wise, and in the long run it only makes you more respectable as a postproduction studio.