Toronto Photographer | Building Your Photography Book - Good & Bad Costs
RENimagines Portfolio book printing
Part of being a creative is building your book to be able to show your work to clients in a unique way. Building a book or body of work (digital or print) takes time, energy, time, hard work, more time - and all of that has a cost associated with it... Lately, I’ve been working on building my book by going back to old sessions and revisiting edits, producing (at my own personal cost) new sets and planning future sets (again at my own personal cost). As you can likely guess with my reiterating of the costs involved... investing in your book is certainly part of it, but it doesn’t have to cost as much as would think. Of course there are both good and bad costs associated with it, just like in any business analyzing what are good and bad costs will allow you to focus and produce even more work in the long run (less wasted $).
Recently, I’ve been looking back at a few of my sessions I’ve produced with a few different people and see that a studio rental, although the space is great is a bad cost. Big lesson learned – I DON’T NEED TO BOOK STUDIOS. I can set up a studio in the middle of the woods, down a side street, in an alley, a field, or I could rent a blank warehouse for a fraction of the cost. I’ve spent (not invested) a lot of money on studio equipment, so it just makes sense to look at alternative options for my “studio days”. Heck, even AirBnB has great options available for lifestyle sets... but another option for creatives in major areas is ThisOpenSpace.com. Here you can find anything from a meeting room to a full industrial set and it all based on budget. The other and most cost effective method is either shoot at home or get outside (where you don’t need permits) and work on concepts and options in those environments.
Regardless of what you’re doing (or buying), look at the costs associated with it, and really determine what the value is - going forward–is what you’re doing a good or a bad cost. I’ll certainly be looking at this closer and finding alternatives that work with my style.
Cheers!
REN
