Professional Nature Photography:
The Price of Admission

[Originally published on www.photo.net on 30 January 2003]

I've been an avid nature photographer, both for pleasure and some income, for several years. I have just recently become a full time professional.

Lots of people want to be professional photographers. Making a living expressing your creative vision can be compelling. Among those who want to be pros, probably more want to specialize in nature photography than any other specialty. Many people see nature photography as an ideal way to mix business and pleasure. For some (I'm taking my shot at being one of them), it's a career that allows for a great deal of travel, exploration and adventure, witnessing of spectacle and splendor, and attuning oneself with the rhythms of nature.

However, like most other dream careers, the good stuff comes with some hitches, too. Pro photography in general, and the nature specialty in particular, has rather high start-up costs and ongoing business expenses. Also, with far more people entering the field than the modest press demand and fine art markets can support, it is fiercely competitive, and generally pays poorly. You would be remiss to embark on a career in nature photography without due consideration and sensible assessment of these realities of the job, and of your abilities (and desire) to accommodate them. Yet, seemingly, many people do decide to initiate nature photography careers without clear ideas about what they are entering into. Herein, I'll sketch out expenses to start and run a nature photography business.

The blunt fact of the matter is that it takes money to make money with a professional nature photography business--enough money that it will be prohibitively expensive for many.

Can you take salable pictures with a minimal gear kit, composed entirely of second or third rate equipment? Certainly! Some of my early stock photos were taken with an old point-and-shoot camera. Many were taken with Nikon's (then) bottom-of-the-line SLR camera. Most were taken with a couple of "cheap" third-party zoom lenses. Frankly, my photography gear kit was modest until quite recently.

But the fact that you can take some great pictures with beginner gear can be deceiving. Believe me, I know. I've been fooled by the misapprehension that I didn't need all the heavy, bulky, complicated, expensive gear that all the professionals were using. I could do it all with a light, cheap, simple point-and-shoot. I knew I could because I was already getting some great shots with my P&S. I'd slip it into a pocket and go fast and light, deeper into the wilderness than the pros could under their weighty burdens; and I'd bring back the pictures they couldn't reach.

Yeah, right....

It may take a fair amount of actual field experience with your camera gear to realize that asking, "Can you take salable pictures with a minimal gear kit, composed entirely of second or third rate equipment?" doesn't ask enough. Better questions are: Can you take salable pictures with a minimal gear kit, composed entirely of second or third rate gear, of every eye-catching subject you come across, from close-ups of tiny alpine wildflowers, to birds in the tree tops, to broad scenic mountain vistas? Can you do it with the necessary control to capture the pictures precisely as you envision them? Can you take those salable pictures by the dozens, even by the hundreds, day in and day out, every field work day for years to come? On rough scrambles and climbs, or in pouring rain, dust, fog, ocean spray, high-wind, and well below freezing, or in the blazing summer sun?

Unlikely. To do all this, you'll need better than consumer level gear. The MTBF (mean time before failure, i.e., average number of activations before it breaks) of your typical consumer P&S camera is probably within the range that many professional photographers shoot in a couple weeks, or so. Consumer level snapshot cameras also generally are not optically acceptable for professional work, due to vignetting, chromatic aberrations, insufficient contrast, distortion, insufficient resolution, and flare. (Sure, if the subject matter and composition of one of your P&S pictures is special enough, you might be able to sell it, despite its shortcomings. But to build your entire stock library out of pictures which are rife with severe optical quality problems is tantamount to crippling your business before it even gets off the ground.) Besides, fully controlling your picture-making technical decisions--focus point, depth-of-field, amount of exposure, and angle of view--will require a more sophisticated camera.

To put it concisely: Professionals need professional level gear for flexibility, durability, and optical quality. I've learned the hard way; you don't have to.

Quality costs. Professional level gear often costs an order of magnitude (or more) higher than consumer level gear. A fast lens with high telescopic power is likely to cost you thousands of dollars, even if you buy a used model, out of production. Even your least expensive lenses are likely to run hundreds of dollars each. Most professional photographers' tripod systems, alone, cost more than many would-be pro nature photographers believe they'll need to spend on everything together.

You'll not only need better gear, you'll need more of it. Many particular photo opportunities require specific photographic tools. To make a full frame image of an animal at a distance, or to make the sun or moon a large proportion of your frame, a lens with high telescopic power is necessary. To make a full frame image of something very small, a lens set-up with adequate magnification is necessary. To photograph an animal in dim light, you may need a flash. And so forth. Because the diversity of the subject matter and the extremity of the shooting conditions are so all-encompassing, "The right tool for the job" translates to an especially large number of tools for nature photographers.

Even when you realize the need for more and better gear, you probably still won't fully grasp the quantity of secondary items which are necessary for efficient work as a professional, until you collect everything yourself. I sure didn't anticipate how much I'd need to get. In my mind, I had a basic concept that I'd be getting the lenses and camera and tripod. Then I'd be set. I didn't realize that every major item had a full entourage which accompanies it. When you get a flash, for example, to maximize usability you'll likely want to also get a flash bracket, a flash cord, a flash extender, and perhaps a device for wireless control. For your lens, there will be a circular polarizing filter, a clear protective filter (for harsh environments like saltwater spray or windblown sand), maybe a warming filter, a lens hood, a 1.4x teleconverter and/or a 2x teleconverter, an extension tube or two, and perhaps a quick-release plate. For your camera, there will be an electronic cable release, a double bubble spirit level, a quick-release plate, perhaps a spare battery, and memory cards and card reader if the camera is digital. You'll probably have a "light" tripod and a heavier tripod, and each will probably have its own specialized tripod head, its own quick-release clamp, perhaps its own leveling base, perhaps padded leg covers, and perhaps a carry strap. Once you've amassed all this gear, then you'll need to get the protective bags and cases to carry it all around in. Even for your slides, there will be a light table and loupe to examine them, a blower to remove the dust from them, a scanner to scan them, slide pages and filing cabinets to store them in, and so on... This may look to the beginner like an exhaustive list, but someone with experience will know that it just goes on and on. The costs of the secondary items will probably sneak up on you, and be significant, all by themselves.

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.