Over the past few weeks, I’ve been speaking with a range of micro and macro photographers and one idea that keeps coming up is the notion of Earnings by Shoot and time to break even. The goal here is to track the performance of all images from a particular shoot over time and record the total costs of the shoot to get an understanding of profitability and also time to break-even – how quickly does a shoot pay for itself.

One of the challenges here (in addition to tracking) is interpretation. For example, if Shoot A has earned $10k & Shoot B has earned $5k you might think that A is better unless Shoot A earned it’s sales over 5 years and Shoot B has earned it over 2 years. Alternatively, if time to break-even for A was 2 months and B was 2 months, they might seem equivalent unless A cost more than B in which case, you might have to adjust your assessment. (my apologies if I sound like Captain Obvious)

One mistake that is easy to make (and I’m guilty of this on occasion too) is not putting a dollar amount on your time when thinking about expenses. Time is extremely valuable and the less time you waste, the more you can spend on activities that generate value. Experienced shooters understand this and that’s why they talk about things like shot lists, planning, careful prop selection etc. Their goal is to waste as little time as possible and spend as little time as possible retouching etc.

When tracking the cost of a shoot for your break-even analysis, it’s important to track total cost. This includes things like editing time, retouching & keywording time and also uploading time. In general, anything you do to the images has a cost whether or not you spent cash on it.

The quicker you can go from camera to sites, the quicker a shoot can start paying for itself.