Commercial Work

The majority of my photography business is portrait work for personal use: I am hired by an individual or a family to preserve personal memories for them. However, one way I can diversify my income is by also doing commercial work: taking images for, or selling images to, a business entity. 

To get my start in this field of work, I practiced taking photos of random products that I already owned. Commercial work varies from portrait work in many ways, and I needed a new skill set to make the inanimate object the “hero” of the image. I tested out new lighting scenarios, new settings, and new ideas to build a portfolio of commercial images. 

Once I had confidence working with products and a portfolio of images, I started by working with a few small businesses to provide the marketing images they needed. These businesses generally came from my circle of contacts: they were acquaintances of mine who owned or worked for small businesses. Some companies needed “stock images” that I had already taken and produced. In these cases, I would sell them a license, which is essentially just a permission slip that allowed the entity to share the image. Other companies needed headshots of their team members, photos of them in action, or images of the products they sell. Sometimes they would send me products to shoot on my own time, and other times we would need to coordinate a small shoot to work together. 

Eventually, the projects I took on grew in scale and company size. I learned where I added the most value and the types of people and products I enjoyed working with.

Are you thinking of adding commercial work to your photography business?

Check out my NEW Introduction to Commercial Work course!