The Most IMPORTANT Item in a Photography Budget / Image Licensing

in my last video i talked about copyright and how authorship affects copyright and how moral rights are tied to authorship if you haven't seen it click on the first link in the description of this video to check it out now then come back to this video i'll wait just we're not gonna wait let's keep going when you own a copyright no one can lawfully reproduce or copy your images without your express permission only you have that right the only way for someone else to use your work is if you give them permission to do so through a license in doing so you're giving them a license to use your work based on the rights that you have assigned to them this is a big part of how we make money as photographers as commercial photographers we have our creative fee and then we have our licensing fee now i'm going to go into more detail about shoot budgets in a future video but for the most part the two most important line items on a photo shoot budget for you are your creative fee and your licensing fee so first thing people often use the terms usage and licensing interchangeably that's fine they mean different things but we all understand that they are referring to the same thing because we are licensing our images for specific types of usage but first technically licensing refers to providing someone often a company but sometimes a person a license to use the images and that usage of the images comes in a variety of types and is fixed to a specific period of time you might grant the licensee the right to use your images for a set period of time such as six months one year three years five years or whatever time constraint you apply for what they need and they will pay you for the usage of your image according to that time period if the images are for an advertising campaign you want to make sure that you are granting them usage for the duration of the campaign only if they wish to extend their campaign and the use of your images they will have to pay you for that additional usage now we could also grant usage of our images in perpetuity and the only time i ever really do this is for headshots for actors and small businesses since actors have to keep their headshots current and updated with their look a headshot that is two or three years old is typically no longer of any use to the actor with small businesses with small budgets that are typically putting their work on a website and linkedin it's likely not worth our time or effort to chase them down for additional usage fees and since they can easily hire someone else who will give them perpetual rights now this is going to be a point of contention for some people and i can already see the comments the issue here is i'm referring very specifically to small small businesses maybe it's a person maybe someone who's a mortgage broker who operates their own business look in such cases you're better off just approaching them about updating their images with a new session to keep their branding images current i have a client that's been with me for seven years and they love working with me and just keep hiring me back i have a shoot with them on thursday i built a relationship with them and they trust me to keep them looking great sometimes the people hiring you will want or even need to own the copyright on the images you can sell the copyright of the images to them this is called a buyout in that case you would no longer have any right to use those images even for your portfolio unless you explicitly agree to that in the contract when you sell them the copyright now i talked about copyright in my previous video and so you really should check that out to understand what the implications are for you and your images so go back and check out that video if you haven't in my experience the companies that want a buyout on your images are typically clients who need to manage privacy concerns now these could be medical and healthcare companies or companies that need the images for internal use to protect trade secrets i've actually been on shoots where i cannot photograph specific pieces of of equipment at all even though the client is retaining the copyright of the images because the equipment is classified as trade secret so in such cases you're probably also going to have to sign a non-disclosure agreement companies will pay you to protect their clients and their secrets charge accordingly and i guarantee you're just not going to care about being able to show images from that one shoot in your portfolio in many cases someone working at the company might request a bio because they heard from a colleague that their colleagues company buys the rights to its images so they think that's something that they should be doing maybe they do and maybe they don't it really depends on each case what they might actually be requesting and what they might actually want is exclusivity typically you're going to give companies exclusive usage of your images for the period covered under the license agreement that simply means that during that period you cannot license or otherwise make commercial use of the images you license to them during the period for which they are licensed so when you are licensing your images the first thing that you really need to know is how long they need to use them and the second thing is what types of usage do they need and to learn more about usage subscribe to this channel and turn on the notifications so you'll get notified when i release my next video which will be covering the common types of usage you will encounter as a photographer [Music] you