[Editorial Note: This post is the third part of Professional Nature Photography: The Price of Admission, and continues directly where Professional Nature Photography: The Price of Admission, Part 2 leaves off.]
Do you really need all that gear? You don't absolutely need every piece, but each item less will mean types of (frequent) photo opportunities which you won't be able to take advantage of, and/or will mean reduced work efficiency, and/or worse picture quality. You'll quickly find that saving money by handicapping yourself with insufficient equipment doesn't pay.
After buying all that gear, you'd be wise to insure it. You'll be using that equipment on steep mountainsides, on slippery moss-covered intertidal rocks, in turbulent riverbeds, in trees, in dark holes, and in close proximity to wild animals. You'll need coverage against accidents you may cause. And because you won't be able to keep your gear on your person at all times, you'll need insurance against theft, too. In other words, you'll need all-risk coverage. You will probably need the insurance to cover full replacement cost. Since this is for a business, you will need it to be a commercial policy. And since nature photographers usually travel a lot, you may need that insurance to cover you internationally. A policy like this will cost you at least a few percent of your total gear investment, annually.
After you've bought and insured all your gear, next come the costs of taking pictures. Professionals tend to take a lot of pictures. In one of Galen Rowell's books, he recounts an anecdote about his first photo assignment for National Geographic, to document the first free-climb of El Capitan, in Yosemite National Park. After the several day climb, he turned 70 rolls of exposed film over to National Geographic's photo editor, who then remarked to him that nobody had ever taken so few pictures on an assignment, before!
It's exceedingly unlikely that National Geographic will ever be covering your film expenses. They can only hire a handful of photographhers, while thousands vie to be among those chosen few. For that matter, you should probably dismiss the notion that any magazine will ever be sending you around the world and covering your every expense--or at least the notion that it will happen very much. Most professionals, most of the time, are on their own. Nature photographers usually get their pictures on their own initiative, and with their own money, then sell them if they can. They usually favor contrasty, fine grained, high resolution slide film. For small format (35 mm film) this will likely run you 30 cents per shot or more for high-quality film and developing. (It will be considerably more expensive for medium or large format.) This adds up when you start taking tens of thousands of pictures per year, as professionals commonly do. This can become a larger expense than the whole photo kit. To drive this point in: I recently bought a 7+ thousand dollar digital camera, top-of-the-line laptop computer, and all the necessary extras, largely for the reason of saving money compared to what I'd otherwise have to spend on film!After you've paid for all this, you need to have enough money to get you through the lean times while your business starts up. Before the money starts trickling in, you have to go out and take enough salable pictures to build up a decent collection of photos to sell. (In the book The Business of Nature Photography, John Shaw estimates that you can expect to make about a dollar per salable photo in your stock library per year; that figure has eroded some over recent years.) That'll probably take a bare minimum of several months, even if you start out with a substantial collection from your amateur days. Then you'll have to sell enough to get money flowing in regularly. If you are selling for publication, you will probably not receive your checks until after the publication goes to press--several months to a year after you make the sale. Your business is unlikely to really take off until after you've built up a positive reputation among the photo editors in the publishing industry. Even if you manage to launch a successful nature photography business (few do), it could easily take a couple years before you are able to earn a normal, middle-class income. So, you better have enough of a financial buffer to sustain you for at least a year or two.
While I've glossed over as much as I've covered (travel expenses, photo archiving and storage expenses, office operations expenses, spare camera body, etc.), this should be enough to get the point across that the profession of nature photography takes more than negligible money to operate. It sounds plainly apparent, but some may need to be reminded of the obvious: that this business really is a business. Would you try to start up a business as a mechanic when you had little mechanical knowledge, experience, or tools? All I'm saying, here, is that the same common sense applies to starting a nature photography business as any other business.
Should lack of financial wherewithal stop you? That depends on you. It's not my intention to dissuade you, just to give you a realistic overview of what lies ahead, so that you can decide sensibly for yourself. Someone with enough determination may well find a way to make the finances work.
Shooting Stars
All pictures and text are © Mike Spinak, unless otherwise noted. All pictures shown are available for purchase as fine art prints, and are available for licensed stock use. Telephone: (831) 325-6917.
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