I've been looking over my contracts that I send out to clients prior to a commercial campaign and have honed in on two specfic areas that are non-negotiables for me as a professional photographer.
In 20+ years of business, these two sections are vital to reduce client confusion, add clarity to project deliverables and eliminate lost revenue of work we would have done without additional pay.
https://jamespatrick.com/
There are two things that I have to ensure are in every contract that I send out to a photography client. And by including these two things, not only am I saving myself a tremendous amount of time, communication, and emotional energy, but I'm also saving myself from losing a lot of revenue on the table. Let's dive in. Are you tired of the endless stream of fantasy marketing and vanity metrics? Yeah, so am I. My name is James Patrick and I'm an internationally published photographer, media specialist, and marketing strategist. As a creative entrepreneur, I face the same exact frustrations you have, being bombarded by generic advice that promises success, but never lives up to the hype. We need to move beyond the posturing, beyond the facade, beyond the image, to navigate the unique challenges we face as creatives. Together, we're going to dive into real stories, real strategies, and the real work that can lead to the real results. This is the beyond the image podcast. What is going on? I thank you so much for tuning in to this early episode of the beyond the image podcast. I'm glad that you could take some time to get some information, get a low inspiration, help you in your creative entrepreneurial journey. Appreciate you sharing this podcast with a friend for your reviews on the Apple podcast app for subscribing on YouTube. All those things. Hey, thank you. It actually really helps a lot and I genuinely appreciate it. I've been thinking a little bit about contracts and I was looking over my contract as we entered into the new year and polishing it up and I realized there were two very important sections of contracts that I sent out to clients and the inclusion of these two sections has saved me a tremendous amount of agony and frustration and confusion and back and forth communication and lost revenue and that's ultimately the thing because overwhelmingly, and I've talked a lot about nefarious clients or clients that have ulterior motives or clients that have cheated out. My business or if attempted to cheat out my business or other businesses on a whole, most clients are amazing. Most clients are great. The problem is a lack of communication and a lack of specificity in an agreement and when you lack communication and when you lack specificity, there can be a misalignment in the expectations of a project. A client can expect one thing and you are expecting something completely different and if it has not been discussed and agreed upon, that can lead to a lot of back and forth arguments, a lot of frustration or you end up doing work that you believe you should be being paid extra for. So let's dive into these things. I break my contract into two main sections. My contracts are split into a page to discuss licensing and the price for the licensing and then there's a page for terms and conditions. Now, I'm not a lawyer so I can't give legal advice on contracts but I can say that these things have worked for me and have helped me and you can find so many templates or examples of this online and you can also consult with a lawyer as well to get additional insights to polish your contracts but the two sections. First is on the licensing page. What I do is I type out a licensing agreement. The licensing agreement has a few key components. One is I include the amount of time or the estimated amount of time I am on set doing the production. So if it's a half day, I say a half day, if it's a full day, I say a full day, if it's under a half day or if I'm not really sure how long it's going to take, I might say a partial day. So a partial day for my company to create a variety of or these types of photos, so I can say commercial photos, headshots and portraits, landscape photos, product photos, whatever it is I'm shooting and the reason I illustrate the type of photos is let's say for example, I was hired to photograph a product and all of a sudden they say, well, since we're already here and everything's already set up, can you just do a quick headshot? If you're out of me, would that be okay? And I want and the answer is, yeah, I'd happy to do a headshot, but it falls outside of the terms of this agreement. So this would be an addendum to that. So a variety of these types of photos at this type of location, I specify the location. The reason I specify the location is, oh, we were planning to shoot at the studio, but you actually wanted me to shoot your office and that maybe 80 miles away, well, maybe that changes my fee because I now have to travel, I have to pack up all the year and I have to travel or maybe you want two different locations, well, that expands the time it takes to do the production and the amount of time it takes to go from multiple locations setting up and breaking down. Then I state, upon payment in full, the following rights will be conveyed to this client and there are different types of rights that could be publicity. So you're using the photos for PR and marketing, could be advertising, so you're using the photos specifically for commercial purposes, it could be for internal collateral, you're just using it for your company's internal training guides or internal communication or newsletters that only go out within your office to external collateral, hey, we are creating some brochures that we want put out on rack cards throughout the Valley. And then I put a time limit of all of these files delivered or the specific numbers, so let's say they're getting 16 files of the 16 final files for and then a time limit. And that's the usage. One year, two year, three years, five years sub indefinitely, that's up to you and your client how you're pricing that, but stating that in that order, I'm spending this much time shooting these types of photos at this location. And I'm transferring the rights of this number of photos for these specific uses for this amount of time. And in the last sentences, additional rights and usage may be negotiated separately. Now after that, I type out an estimate or what the project estimate is. And once again, the more specificity I can have in here, the better. And the reason I do this is, so for example, I'm looking at a contract over to my just off camera and I'm doing a couple of team portraits and I had a price on that. And I'll just use a round number. I'll just say the price is $1,000 for portraits. This way, if they say actually a fifth person came up, well, it's very easy for me to scale that because I've calculated out at, you know, 250 a person and then says a separate line item is the post production fee. So that was the fee for me to shoot it. The fee for me to edit it is $100 per person. Okay. So if you had another person, I know that I can add in $100. Okay. Then I have a line for usage. I have a line for any additional things and then the total at the bottom. So this is how I format my estimate and licensing page. And that is the biggest thing because any time there is a misunderstanding, we can refer back to the licensing page that we both signed. Oh, you know, I need to add in more people. That's totally fine. We can add in more people, but that is an addendum to this agreement. You know what? Actually, I need to adjust the usage or I need to add more time to our production. Absolutely. We are doing it as an addendum to this agreement. So now both you and your client are on the same page, have the same information and thus have the same expectation of output. And that's ultimately what the goal is to get to a point where you and the client have the same expectation of what they are getting. And thus you have reduced any potential of there being a disappointment. So that was the one main thing. The second main thing was something that I learned after years as a photographer is it was unclear how much Photoshop I was willing to do under a post-production fee and how much Photoshop was beyond that scope. And this was not a common occurrence, but every now and then we'd have a client who would come back with very intense, very laborious, very overly detailed post-production requirements for their imagery that we were not anticipating, that we were not assuming would be part of our workflow. And as you know, post-production can take a lot of time. And if we were not prepared for that time and we did not price that accordingly, we are losing both time and money in that. That could be very frustrating when you get a photo to a place where you think it's perfect and then the client comes back and say, "Actually here's a full page of additional edits I need you to do these photos." So in our terms and conditions, I added in a clause for retouching. And it states that post-production and the reproduction of the chosen files include basic cleanup only, which means color correction, toning, and light skin editing. Any additional retouching requests by client will be billed at X amount per hour. What I've done is I've clearly stipulated what is included in the post-production. I'm willing to do XYZ. But if you want anything beyond that, basically what I'm trying to say is I'm getting this photo to be market ready, to be viable, to be printed, to be viable, to be used. But if you have very detailed, very specific post-production requirements that were not discussed beforehand, because if they were discussed beforehand, we would have adjusted our pricing accordingly, they were not discussed beforehand. We can absolutely do it, but there is an hourly rate for that work to be done. And that's it. To do things, so to have a very clearly written licensing agreement, the more specificity the better. Here's what we're doing. Here's how many assets you're getting. Here's what you can use the assets for, and here's how long you can use them for. And a clause in your conditions that discuss what post-production means. Those two things have cleared up innumerable confusions, discussions, frustrations, or lost revenue that we could have with clients. And because we're transparent about it, and we get clients to read the contracts, there's no sleight of hand. No one feels taken advantage of. Everyone gets to be on the same page. Everyone gets to have the same expectations for what the output and what the deliverable of that project is going to be. So let me know your thoughts, or if there are other things that you make sure to always include in your contracts that have really helped you out, feel free to reach out any time at J Patrick Photo on Instagram, you get this podcast, wherever you want to get this podcast. Please share it with a friend, leave your reviews, hit that subscribe button, hit that follow button. Thank you so much. We'll talk to you on the next episode. Take care everyone. [BLANK_AUDIO]
