Spring has sprung
That was a tough winter. I’ve not been posting regularly as it’s been so quiet that there’s nothing i’ve felt particularly inspired by, and a recent family issue has negatively impacted my ability to put a few paragraphs together.
My revenue for the last 3 months has been the lowest I’ve endured for a long time, but it seems that March might just see a resurgence which will get me out of the financial doldrums of the winter. The multi-branch agency which replaced me with several in-house workers - to presumably save money in December 2024 seems to be having a bit of a re-think. The high-end jobs are now starting to re-emerge as a consequence.
Unfortunately, most of these jobs are miles away from my home base, so I’m going to have to try and manage the booking requests so as to avoid the thousands of miles of excess mileage and the accompanying destruction of personal time wasted on the roads. Having a balanced life makes everything so much better (note to Farage - piss off with your obsession around forcing normal people have to work 70 hours a week to make you and your billionaire mates richer - dickhead). There has been no official decision made on the future of their photography yet, so I’m not counting any chickens, and will continue to focus on my local work for the time being.
My local work has actually been given a small boost due to the addition of social media video capture to almost all jobs. It adds a fair bit of post production time, but I can always automate some of that with the help of AI to suggest ways of workflow smoothing, just like I did with my stills production. A quick, well presented prompt to Google Gemini has already resulted in an immediate time-saver, so it can only improve things going forward.
My holiday-let agency work has also dried up entirely now, and it seems that the vertical integration of my longstanding local client into a larger corporate entity (only interested in money-savings) has left me ghosted as is usual. Given the amount of new properties on their books with poorly exposed, and wonky imagery, I suspect that they’ve started to rely on owner-submitted images (and all the hilarity that produces), so that actually gives me an opportunity to reach out to owners directly for way more money. I was under-charging the agency by 70% at least when doing the styled shoots - which were all timed right in the middle of the working day - stopping me from doing anything else on those days anyway. In terms of marketing, the UK holiday-let market is going the same way as the real estate one - just cost. Quality simply doesn’t matter anymore.
This job is definitely not for the anxious or faint-hearted. As well as the recent decimation of my client list, my tax savings are in an ISA which has suffered a £700 loss in two weeks due to the ridiculous war in the middle east - an incident no doubt pre-empted by Trump’s involvement in short-selling those stocks negatively affected by such crises, and investment in those stocks positively affected by such crises. Imagine being able to predict stock market falls and rises because you can cause the falls and rises without any threat of prosecution for insider-trading? Nice to know that the money I’ve worked really hard for is going into the pockets of those knackers. Once the fund reaches it’s original value again, I’m going to transfer everything to some sort of government bonds so that they’re safe (ish).
So, it’s a weekend off. I’m taking some time to catch up with some saved TV, and I’m going to tackle the gear cupboard this afternoon. wish me luck.
