A Pro Photographer's Honest Review of 2024

it's the end of the year so I thought it would be a good time to do a year in review a a little wrap up I did this last year I think I'll probably do this every year moving forward where I want to start is I want to start talking about uh money right that's the key issue in running a business and so uh we might as well start there I made more money this year but it feels like less than I've ever made it's literally more than I've ever made made but it's less doesn't go as far right just doesn't it just doesn't go as far the Canadian dollar is really weak right now uh it's at $42 Canadian dollars per one1 us do or 71 cents for every Canadian dollar right so things here in Southern Ontario in Canada but in Southern Ontario just a lot more expensive the cost of living is a lot higher than in the US I see a lot of people in the US doing really well and things go a lot further in the US if you look at for example a Canon R5 camera in the US that is like a $4,400 purchase and in Canada that same camera is going to cost you almost $6,700 so it's a lot more expensive if you're making purchases for your business or just if you're trying to like get by everything's more expensive uh interest rates mortgages so discretion Ary income is a lot lower for people I want to clarify the difference between disposable income and discretionary income a disposable income is what you have left after you've paid your taxes and discretionary income is what you have left to spend after you've paid your living expenses such as your mortgage your grocery bill your utilities your internet your telephone all of those things what you have left is the discretionary that's your your fund money photography always comes out of the discretionary income that people have and when people's income discretionary income is a lot lower then they don't have the money that to spend on photography Services photography is almost always uh a luxury purchase even if it's a commodity purchase when you're doing something such as you know simple corporate head shot so that leads into me working on minimizing my expenses and and for me that includes the things like not making as many uh purchases that I would make not investing as heavily unfortunately in my business that I would like to in terms of like marketing dollars advertising spend I've uh reduced my software expenses by renewing at around Black Friday reducing my internet plan so that I actually have reduced speeds I made sure that I had the the minimum 30 megabit per second upload connection but I I went from a 1 gabit per second download to a 200 gabit per second download cuz it's just me here I don't really need a gigabit my phone plan I was able to basically just cut the data in half and save almost 50% on my bill as well so just those three things alone moving into the next year are going to save me about $1,000 a year and that's pretty significant in terms of savings I've also sold off some of my old photography gear I sold off my old lights I sold off my Canon 60D was the first camera that I used and started my business with but I no longer need it and I don't I'm not really a Sentimental person so I I don't hang on to things like that for sentimental value so it didn't make sense for me to you know just keep it sitting in a drawer here doing nothing so I I sold it and I sold some lighting gear and the photographers that have those things now I've been in contact with and they are really happy with their purchases and it's improving uh their life rather than just sitting in a closet or a drawer to give you an idea of how the economy is affecting a number of other photographers here there are two photographers in the facility where my studio is who've shut their Studios down and my friend Alex is in the process of selling his Studio not his business he owns the commercial space the commercial retail space that he is in and he is in the process of selling that space it makes Financial sense for him to sell the real estate investment that he has the revenue he was generating was just servicing the debt on that space so he's not going to have that debt anymore and all of his income will go into you know contributing to his family income instead of just uh paying for a commercial space which has increased significantly in value and I think him and I are going to do a video on that in in the future as far as purchases and Acquisitions go no new cameras no new lenses no drones no action cameras I have what I need already and so I didn't purchase uh anything but what I have purchased here I'll itemize I bought uh some casters for my SE stand made by newer those are great I love being able to just roll my stands around the studio I I either lost or had my tripod stolen last year somebody gave gave me a set of manf legs old manf legs probably older than me but they're they're classic and they work so that's great but I had to buy a new tripod head so I picked up a newer 44mm tripod ball head and that is perfect on there I picked up a second amaran 150c LED cob light so now I have two of those and I can do uh some more color work that I'm interested in doing I also picked up an ecoflow River 2 max portable power station which I picked up uh mostly so that I could run my LED lights on location so if I'm doing a shoot and the power goes out I have a backup also it's really good at just conditioning the electricity that's flowing through so if you have a a battery like a power station like that and you plug it into the wall and then you plug your lights into the Power Station instead of directly into the wall it's going to condition the current that's coming out of that power station and so you get a cleaner current and I also picked up a newer 33in parabolic soft box which is uh right here and it is staying here that's not my photography business that's my YouTube business but the modifier that I had up here was a portable collapsible modifier that I use frequently and I was just tired of taking it down and putting it back up taking it down putting it up every time I needed it so now that modifier is in the studio so I bought this to replace that but I also think this light looks better here so the intention of the lighting is being better served in in both places I think the best purchase of the year is a new duvet it's not not photography related but that duvet has dramatically improved my quality of sleep and I think that has improved my life just in general so if you're going to invest in yourself invest in in things to like make you sleep better invest in good pillows invest in good duvet that's my rant about good quality sleep what I've also started doing this year is investing the taxes that I've collected and my income taxes instead of just taking that money and socking it away in a savings or checking account where it's going to sit and do nothing I have a wealth simple account that I've opened and I have a non-registered account and I have a tfsa account which in Canada is a tax free savings account and we can make contributions to that account up to a certain limit every year then then that income is non- taxable with every invoice that I get I take the sales tax that I collect here in Ontario that's an HST which is a harmonized sales tax and that collects the provincial sales tax and the federal goods and services tax a federal GST and that's 133% so I take all of that that I've collected from every shoot and that goes directly into my wealth simple account so I don't touch it I don't spend it it goes into my investments either into the the non-registered account or the tfsa I don't have a managed account I just handle everything myself it's not a ton of money but the idea is that that money is instead of just sitting in and being dead money in a a savings or checking account that's earning like a fraction of a percent it's actually making and earning me more money on top of what I've I've put in there so allows the money that I collect in taxes to earn more money while it's waiting to go to its new home in the government to pay for you know trivial things like roads and universal healthcare I like both of those things so I'm happy to pay the taxes but I because I only need to pay annually I'm allow that money to uh sit and accumulate and grow while it's waiting to get handed out to the government and uh that's going really well so far to be clear this is not Financial advice this I'm just telling you what I do with my money what I actually do with that in uh wealth simple is that I have some whole stocks and some fractional uh investments in stocks and ETFs such as the vanguards S&P 500 fund Nvidia Tesla Novo Nordisk and some other stocks and try to balance things out one thing that I do is I use an app called autopilot and autopilot is really great I'm going to open it up here so in autopilot there are these different portfolios that you can see there are uh politicians there's a GPT portfolio and you can see how much they're uh growing and you can also uh select a different uh portfolio you can look at the Active ones and you can just uh pick one see what it's doing see what the people are doing take a look at like let's see what Nancy Pelosi is uh investing in uh 28% of her Investments are in Nvidia politicians have an inside track on you know what's going to happen with government contracts and so that's a good way to I think figure out what to invest in I released a video earlier this year about looking for an agent uh looking for a photography agent to represent me here in the Toronto area there hasn't been much progress on that I I have spoken with an agent who I really like while I'm not signed or repped by her officially she has submitted me for a couple of projects couple of one for an online casino and one for a very large social media website who you have all heard of I didn't get either job but what this has done for me is it has shown me what my portfolio is missing and what people are looking for so not only do I know like how to fill the gaps or like what where the gaps are and and how to fill them but I know specifically how uh the agent has been marketing me so that I can continue building in that direction my portfolio in that direction it's very much in alignment with like me my personality my identity as a person I know what I need to do have I been doing it my portfolio development has been lacking this year I find it's it's hard to work on moving in a New Direction when you're busy servicing existing work just to pay your bills that's something that people just don't talk about they talk about here's what you need to do here's what you need to do go do it go do it go do it but if you can't do it because you have other work that needs to be done it's hard to find the the scraps of time and you know to be maybe a bit lame about it at my age I lose the energy and I'm worried that at my age I'm Losing My Edge and I'm losing my voice and and the thing that people are interested in so that's a conundrum and that's like a big sort of um existential crisis I'm dealing with internal mental conflict like like how is is who I am is that going to be relevant or how can I make it relevant I think is a better question and how do I continue creating work that people are going to be interested in or how do I create more work that people are going to be interested in if if maybe the work that I've been creating hasn't been good enough but I recently saw a video from a tin house Studio here on YouTube I'm going to link to that video in the description below from Scott Chino and Scott has some great advice he one of the channels that I really enjoy watching and he talk about treating your photography career like a musician and uh treating your portfolio like your your body of work like an evolving collection of albums spending time every year basically to release a new album and then that is the album that you use and shop around for client work and so I'm going to be taking that advice to heart and I'm going to be working on planning and and building my next album in like I know how to do this too right like I've talked about this in another video which I'll I'll also link below um about creating a dogma and identifying and and creating a set of criteria and then executing on those criteria so you build a consistent body of work but I I just want to wrap up by saying you know I'm very thankful for channels like Scots because I personally haven't had a lot of guidance in the commercial World here in Toronto my previous life was teaching improv comedy before that it was journalism and so trying to you know spending 10 years trying to break into this industry is hard man it's hard espec especially hard when you know most of the last 5 years have been spent like either in lockdown or trying to recover from the repercussions of that in in a way that has you know not been good for my physical health or my mental health and so these are these are things that we as photographers have to deal with on a regular basis and I just wanted to to share my year with you and let you know how things were how things were going how things evolved this year and give you a sense of like where where I'm at mentally with my career and how the industry is here where I live how the market is where I live and uh what I have in store next or at least what I'm going to try to do next let me know in the comments how your year has been and what your next year is going to be like I try to read every single comment that I get and if you stuck through this whole year endend rant then you might as well subscribe to the channel because this is me this is me in probably my rawest form that you're you're going to see me so yeah stick around I I'd love to have you here take care