Don't work for free

Someone posted this response to a “work for free” Craigslist ad. Emphasis mine.

Hey Students,

Don’t be naive and work for free. Doing a commercial job like this in no way increases your chances of paid work over simply working on your portfolio for you own sake. You don’t need images in your book that were done for someone else in order to get paid work. You just need great images and business sense. Nothing else.

Look around professional photographers websites. How many of them bother share their tear sheets? How many of them feel it is necessary to put work in their portfolio that is in its final layout for print? 

All you will see are the unmocked up photographs. Largely, devoid of who the client was. You’ll just see their best images. It’s the quality of their images and their ability to conduct themselves as a professional that gets them paid work.

And, what do professionals do? They charge money for doing work like this.

This start up marketing company is using you for their direct gain. They are making money doing jobs for their clients. But, refuse to pay you outright what you deserve.

What does this mean? Well, to me, it means that they don’t know how to run their business. They are either working with very cheap clients with no budget for original photography and they SHOULD be finding imagery in lame royalty free stock banks OR they are scumbags that are greedy and want to keep the entire payment from their clients that should include a budget to pay a photographer for original imagery.

In either case, this work won’t benefit you in any way. You’re not building contacts with people that either know how to help you or are willing to help you. If it is the latter, they will take advantage of you and when you decide you want to start charging they will find someone else to take advantage of.

Keep this in mind: If someone wants to use your image(s) you deserve to be paid. It’s that simple.