Days pass so fast! Catching up on a whole week of blog entries.

I completely didn’t keep up with my daily blog entires. I’ll try and write them all in one sitting.

Friday, 23rd February

We drove across San Francisco on Friday morning to do a quick photoshoot of one of Jason’s custom glass lampshade client projects. Its always hard to estimate how much time it will take to ‘just’ take a few photos. I probably have 300 images on my memory card and it will take half a day to sort through them, make decisions on which files to edit. In the end all we really need are just 1-3 final images.

This is why hiring photographers cost as much as it does. Like with so many services: they feel expensive to the customer but don’t actually pay that much for the service provider. Once I extrapolate the full amount of time that was/will be spent on this short photoshoot it ends up being a full day. If you ever see a photographer quote you $250+ for a 30 minute photo session and maybe 3-12 images (with potentially a separate fee to cover the editing process). Then I would love you to know that this really is just the price of running a business. It seems to expensive from the perspective of the client but as the photographer every day that doesn’t bring in a gross income of $300 is a day that didn’t earn enough to ensure a secure future. (Speaking from a California perspective where $300 day rate is on the low end, $300 a day actually equates to just a moderate middle class income, at best.) Anyone running a business knows that any business model that relies on a stream of clients each paying a day rate, is extremely uncertain because we never know if the next client will find us and schedule a service.

If you are considering starting your own business, it is best if you either have an agency that supplies you with a reliable stream of assignments or if you can build a subscription or contract model client relationship. Anything that makes income more predictable.

An absolute disaster would be to not be able to hold onto money as you earn it. That was us. We would earn it and it wouldn’t be enough, so we always ended up spending all of it. That left us highly vulnerable in times when we got no bookings. Let’s talk about business & life more in another blog post.

We also visited Stable Cafe on Folsom Street, the world’s best supermarket: Rainbow Groceries for a few select items we can’t get elsewhere; returned clothes Jason was gifted for his birthday to REI and swapped them for something he liked better (and he invited me to pick out something for myself). Went to Trader Joe’s to stock up on the main bulk of the coming week’s groceries and spent what was left of the day recovering from having been out for so long. Jason watched an old Buster Keaton movie from 1928 while I did computer things and late in the evening I gave an English language lesson on italki and finished off the night with K-drama.

That was Friday.

How was it? That was interesting..

(this is an insider joke that only J will understand.