Alice Smeets | Blog

Financial advises for young photographers

August 9th, 2009 at 21:03 (general)

After I have written my last post “advises for young photographers”, I would like to add some more financial advises. It is hard to start out as a young photographer, as it takes a long time to find and get paid work.

So let’s start:

-first of all: it is not important where you photograph. You can find really good topics at home. For my witchcraft topic, I didn’t have to travel far. It was all in Europe. Think about what could be interesting to photograph.

I started out with photographing in busses in Liege, Belgium, I also photographed in a small bar where only immigrants went.

-if you nevertheless decide that you want to travel elsewhere, I will give you my secret for finding cheap flights: this is my travel agent, who always finds the cheapest flights: info@orion-reisen.be. Even on the internet I have never found any cheaper flight. His name is David Bocher and he speaks English.

-if you are not in a hurry to get to your destination: flight companies often overbook their flights. If you wait until the end to check in, it is possible that there is no space left. Is that the case, the company will pay a good hotel to stay over night, you will get good amount of your money back and you can take the next flight possible.

-this is not only a way of  getting a free place to sleep, but also of meeting the most amazing people: www.couchsurfing.org - I am using it for 2 years now, i never had a bad experience and I made great friends. The network is growing and today you can even find a lot of couches in developing countries.

-if you have never been to a developing country and don’t want to go on your own, you can contact a small charity organization (the big ones won’t help you). As I did with Haiti Care. They came, to pick me up from the airport, showed me around in Port-au-Prince and gave me a place to stay. In return they could use some of my pictures to collect donations.

-don’t be too proud to photograph commercial work or weddings. This could be a good way of practise. A lot of great photojournalists do commercial work at the site. To live only from photojournalism is really hard.

-don’t think you need a professional camera to start out. I took the picture, that won the UNICEF Phote of the Year, with a semi professional camera and a lens that many people say has a bad quality. (Canon 400D, EFS 17-85mm). It is not the camera that takesgood pictures, it is your eye!

So I think that’s it for the beginning. I hope I could help you out a little bit.