Firstly the most amazing job in the world is being a creative Photographer and sole trader, waking up every morning with a feeling of excitement and learning from challenges and creating finished art BUT with every job comes its rewards and “hell were not running the show on fresh air” so its vitally important to understand and know what expenses you can off set for your business.

This may come as a surprise but anyone who attends courses, training, ups skilling events that can be directly linked to your business can off set to expenses, one of the most popular events in Northern Ireland is the Drenagh Wedding Workshop which aspiring photographers can build portfolios while ups killing and growing there skill sets.

Check out The Drenagh Wedding Workshop Here

With Apple being the leading choice of 95% of creative photographers it unsurprising that it comes with a heavy price tag with current model laptops starting at £2000+ and desktops or Apple Studio units starting at £3500 and up specs costing £6000 for heavy use users, also add on is additional hardware like external hard drives or NAS systems and cloud storage which is directly used for business purposes, its always good to factor £2000 per annum for expected upgrades to computer hardware and most photographers change up systems every 3-4 years.

So firstly its not uncommon to have a car or van as dual use, both personal and business, purchasing a car for work purposed is essential as you may need a jeep or crossover to store additional equipment and I’ve notices a lot of photographers own jeeps or large estate cars for these purposes.

I personally track my business miles via an app called Quickbooks which allows me to filter out the use of my business miles and tracks small and long journeys to events and mobile shoots, you’d be surprised how many miles and money is spent on the tax, insurance, upkeep, fuelling of a car which can be processed via the app.

Firstly if I could give the best piece of advice it would be “keep costing down” several times I’ve researched commercial spaces which would require me to have overheads of £700 to £1000 per week just to turn a profit and we all know the studio photography industry can somewhat be varied especially in January time, having a home studio is firstly a lot more cost effective and secondly much more convenient over a family life balance.

I often mentor photographers who wish to start out and build out house sheds to work from of spare rooms in there current residents, if you have a garage its amazing what some paint and replacing the shutter doors for PVC doors can do for your little empire.

If you did convert a room, shed or outhouse then track every penny and offset this to your earnings as prices can get somewhat high depending on what you aim for.

In todays industry every single photographer needs a chain of software either by subscription or one off payments and with AI breaking into the market these will only rise in use and cost.

A typical example would be in the regional of £110 a month for basic use software and one off costs for the likes of Imagen or subs like Adobe, Pic Time, Capture One, QuickBooks, Pateron “varied” Squarespace and Studio Ninja.

The BEST and most compersenive software I use daily and my business would be a mess if I didn’t use would be Studio Ninja, this just makes my life easy and for £10 per month it gives me control over my bookings, calendar, weddings from clients, quotes, payment reminders, followup emails and calls, scheduling and reminder to clients, contracts for weddings…. it even allows me to add a payment system via Stripe so clients and pay somewhat large sums of money online via card for weddings and other goods.

I would describe Studio Ninja as my digital secretary who organises my life and with this code MA165632Y you also get 20% discount off FOREVER on your monthly subs.

We all love getting gear envy and seeing the tog next to you holding your dream lens and playing it cool asking “O is that the new G master or new Art lens” having your gear is an extension of your craft and having the right camera bodies or glass to compliment your style is key… but expensive

The typical kit from a UK photographer can exceed £10,000 and more commonly i’ve seen kits hitting the £15,000 mark and above, keeping records of purchases made within the tax year is key to managing your taxation as this can typically be around £4000 per year if not more, a rule of thumb is your camera body is good for 250,000 “pre maintenance” shots however if your shooting 6000 images per wedding then simple math works out around 40 weddings before you need to consider changing your body to a fresh system or upgrading, a typical Sony a7V can cost £2500 or the new Sony A9III is touted at £5800 in the UK market so every time you use your system your devaluing it or moving closer to maintenance or repairs being required.

Its very important to subsidise a figure of say £80 a week from your profits to cover the heavy cost, this can also be used against flash, lenses, bags, tripods, off camera flash, triggers, service and repairs.

I’ve stated above that car travel can be tracked and used but also destination weddings come with costs to offset which again can climb to a somewhat big figure.

Example would be a wedding in Scotland I’d shot, with hotel booking 1 day prior and on the wedding night, car hire for 3 days, flights back and forth, travel to airport and airport parking “which is usually a rip off” and if your unfortunate enough to use an airline who again bog there arm into cargo prices your gear would need to be checked in also, this particular wedding accumulated an add on cost to the wedding of £700 of which I added £500 travel to the client and £500 to cover the additional time stayed which was only a total extra cost of £300 however the experience was awesome!

Collecting and recording all of your travel expenses is key as these can easily inflate.

As a wedding photographer the main item I sell is wedding albums, either as an inclusive part of a package or an after sale to a wedding couple, these are also classes as COGS aka Cost Of Goods - which would be for resale.

If I purchased a wedding album at a typical cost of £400 then added my time to design and process the order with a client cost of £500 then 80% of this order has accumulated COGS which is very important to record and process to HMRC.

Most vendors work off 2 areas which is COGS and CODB Cost Of Doing Business which includes your operating covers which is basically everything included in this blog and then some i’m sure.

We live in a digital world and there isn’t a photographer I know who doesn’t use GBs if not TBs of data each month on there internet plan, I’m somewhat lucky to live in a Virgin Media area and receive 1GB download speeds and 150MB upload speeds, a typical gallery of say 800 images in hi res JPEG takes around 12-15 minutes to fully upload and a large gallery of images takes a minute or two to download also while running 3 TVs and several mobile phones at home.

If your an Apple lover then you’d typical be expected to pay around £40 per month for a new iPhone on a decent plan however you can pay a little extra for cross border calls as a bolt on as a lot of my clients live in the south of Ireland and nothing would knock you off your day as much as not being able to call a ROI mobile number or get hold of them incase you’ve dropped out of 4G range.

If used for business use you can have these offset on your books which could tally to £1000 per year.

If I could give you one piece of advice it would be to get insured ASAP folks, I know the first thought when reading this would be “how am I going to hurt someone with a camera” or “what kind of accident could I have” unfortunately in todays society its nearly impossible to estimate what can and could go wrong as Murphy’s Law applies to everything that it never will happen until it does and when it does just be ready!

I read on another forum about a photographer back walking at a wedding on the aisle and the grooms grandmother sidestepped to get some images over the photographers shoulder and the photographer accidentally knocked the grandmother over and she sustained a severe head injury which required 12 weeks hospital care and permeant brain damage to the lady who unfortunately passed away several weeks after leaving hospital, the photographer had full coverage and the insurance company ended up paying several million dollars to the family and all medical expenses.

This was obvious a freak accident but again you’d happily think “its only a camera what harm am I doing” and you really never do fully know what can happen.

I use Policy Bee which is a UK company and specialise in photography insurance “QUOTE Mark Hamill Photography FOR £20 DISCOUNT PER YEAR”, I cover my kit, public liability and accident damage or loss but a note is they don’t cover theft from your home, only theft from a mobile job and the grand price of £17 per month is a brilliant figure to have you rest easy at night, even a catastrophic loss of photos is covered and thankfully i’ve never lost all of my back up cloud and hardware based but you never know and your well covered.

I’ve used the same account for the past 5 years and one of the big bonuses is he works as an approved QuickBooks accounting and can verify and correct via the software any errors on my books and records to HMRC, the price of a good account varies but I feel the £250 fee Braid charges is fantastic vs my previous experiences and chasing I’ve had to do with other freelance accountant.

10/10 for Craig from Braid and I’d defiantly check them out plus the cost is offset to HMRC

Having a good second shooter is like having a Robin to your Batman, cream to your coffee or the wingman or woman who just takes that bit of pressure of you when things get hectic!

I’ve set up a Facebook group called Second Shooters NI which some photographers and videographers have thanked me over and over with last minute saviours coming to the rescue especially on wedding day emergencies, we are completion but were also community!

A second shooter can range price wise from £100-£150 start out to £250-£300 seasoned pro for 6 or 7 hours coverage on a wedding day which falls under a staff wage which can be bank transferred or invoiced by the second shooter.

Let’s jump back 20 years and your main advertising was magazines, TV, newspapers, radio, door to door flyers, billboards… fast forward to 2024 and social media is king with 60% of the UK population spending 2 hours 24 minutes per day “ON AVERAGE” and its increasing every month.

Meta was formed to specialise in ads on Facebook and Instagram and making Mark Zuckerberg a bizzionaire however it’s one of todays most effective ways to market your services and gain new clients.

Example would be I released my xmas mini shoots and just spammed online for 7 days and acquired 3 bookings in, the following 7 days I spend £20 per day on a nicely formed ad with direct links to book which gained 24 booked shoots due to advertising so it roughly cost £6 per booked client on advertising which is also known as ROI Return On Investment.

Every penny your spending on work related advertising via SEO, Facebook and instagram, TicTok, Google Ads and so on can be fully off set.

I attended a wedding as a guest a few years back and noticed that the second shooter/assistant was wearing black Adidas track suit bottoms, they looked so comfy but IMO really unprofessional even there might have been a medical reason behind it.

If your a wedding photographer then its highly likely you have a batch of suits to blend into the crowd on the day and totally acceptable to have these as expenses, even for the ladies if you purchase a batch of dresses that will be used as work blending clothing this is also acceptable, another mention for the men is chinos, they have great stock at M&S and really well put together material as your suits back arse end can easily rip as there not designed to be stretched out for low shot photography.

Other clothing may include uniforms you might have printed on clothing and branding good you used day to day, ive noticed some photographer have jackets, coats, t shirts, event bottom branded to be a walking advertisement for there business.

So this cost is very vague in some ways however clear in others, If I were to hold a workshop and purchase a few trays of sandwiches for participants to consume then yes, or the bride and groom at the hotel just had their meal and I purchased a drink on behalf of my business then yes but some photographers i’ve spoken to get confused into what level of deduction you can impose, if your studio provides tea and coffee and refreshment then its a weekly cost claimed or you take a client out for a meal you can off set there meal cost but not your own.

Its important to monitor your entertainment costs as your accountant and HMRC may deem these excessive and not falling under the correct usage, if we employed a group of 20-30 employees with a large expenditure it would be larger but trying to pop in your weekly shop at Tescos is not valid.

So that’s a wrap folks hopefully you found this blog interesting and informative and take advantage of some of the discounts active above and look forward to seeing everyone at a workshop in the near future!

THIS BLOG IS INTENDED FOR ENTERAINMENT PURPOSES AND NOT PUBLISED AS FINANCIAL LEGAL ADVICE

15 TAX EXPENSES YOU CAN CLAIM IF YOU’RE A PHOTOGRAPHER

MARK HAMILL PHOTOGRAPHY

15 TAX EXPENSES YOU CAN CLAIM IF YOU’RE A PHOTOGRAPHER

CLODAGH + STEPHEN

MARK HAMILL PHOTOGRAPHY