The year in Review 2025
Here we go again. I’ve looked back at the many years I’ve been doing this annual review, and the theme remains identical - I got through it somehow. I’ve grown my revenue steadily year on year, with 2024 being the pinnacle of them all, but at the end of that year, the elimination of my biggest client came as a shock to the system which proved to be more damaging than I’d imagined.
My revenue (sales) figures dropped by a smidge under 30%, but profits before tax plummeted because of increased expenditure (mostly car related), and swiftly rising costs for pretty much everything else. I’ve not calculated it yet - I’ll sort that at my year end in March - but I’d estimate that my pre-tax earnings are approximately what I would make doing a minimum wage job (which is about £24K at current rates). That’s shocking.
I’m still in the game though. The multi-branch agency who decided to go in-house have now taken on extra staff to cope with holidays/sickness etc. so I’m hardly ever called into play. I do maybe 3 or 4 local jobs a month for them. All the prestige work has dried up in the meantime. I predicted this last year, so I was careful with excess money throughout 2025, and squirrelled away a years wages so I wouldn’t have to worry about the winter hiatus. It’ll be fine.
My main client is hyper-local, so the days of travelling to the depths of County Durham are now thankfully behind me. My car mileage and associated costs have dropped dramatically - which is a godsend. The final cost of sending my previous high-mileage lease car back to the finance company was nothing short of legal-extortion, and they’re still sending me invoices for silly stuff six months later. When both of my nippers leave school in a few months, my mileage will drop dramatically again as the 14 year torture of school-runs finishes forever. In retrospect, I could have obtained my current car on a lease which involved way less than the 20K annual milage originally anticipated.
Best new gear of the year.
It’s got to be my cheap Laowa 12mm zero-D lens. I’m using this more and more as the smaller, “run of the mill” properties are taking over the majority of my working day. The 15mm was just too tight for those ex-council bedrooms and bathrooms, so that extra 3mm just manages to get the view looking great. The difference doesn’t sound like a lot, but at shorter focal lengths, it’s significantly wider. Some of the exterior views are transformed as well. It’s a completely manual Chinese lens which I keep at f8 and at a preset focus of 1.25m. This means it focuses from 0.7m to infinity and never needs to be touched.
Least favourite gear of the year.
Although it was on my wish-list, the Hasselblad X1Dii-50c medium format camera has proven to be a royal pain in the arse. I’m determined to make it work to my advantage this year despite the many setbacks with Hasselblad equipment. The many posts devoted to my struggles getting into the groove with the system are easily readable in the blog archives.
Best Property of the year.
It’s been a strange transition moving from shooting a high percentage of prestige properties to virtually none in a twelve month period. Nonetheless, there’s one which has to stand out - the “live, love, laugh Final Boss house” on Trinity Mews in Durham. I was asked to shoot it on the insistence of the owner whose prior developments I’d taken care of despite the protestations of the estate agent. It took two days to finish, and created some buzz on social media once listed. I really enjoy working with the owner, who has a very, very distinct style. It ended up being rented out to a Sunderland player along with the house next door which I shot for the owner’s brother on the day that another SAFC player was moving in. I was forced to rush through that one as some wanky architectural photographer had to pretend to be worth £300 an hour by pissing about spending two hours on each single photo. Honestly.
Worst Property of the year.
It seems to have been a year in which I’ve visited a whole bunch of rickety places with structural problems, decorative nightmares, and odours ranging from animal pee to engrained cigarette smoke. Consequently, there was no single instance of a house that stood out. You have to keep in mind that every place you visit has been a home for someone, and you need to maintain a respect for that fact and shoot it to the same standard as you would for a £2m superpad.
Most Difficult Shoot
Has to be the place clad in varnished orange pine which was adorned with gigantic stuffed animals and bizarre memorabillia including half a million quids worth of Nazi collectables (thankfully stored away in the garage along with many huge stuffed African mammals which wouldn’t fit in the house). I’m not sure if it’s sold yet, but the sheer effort put into the shoot and subsequent post-production should have earned me a medal.
Biggest Change.
Without a doubt, it’s the frequent utilisation of generative artificial intelligence within my daily production workflow. I use the third-party AI models within Adobe Photoshop to remove unwanted furniture and objects, I use a system called Apply Design to strip all contents of a room, and replace it with modern furnishings when required, and now there’s Magnific which upscales and adds detail to images which require a special touch. It all costs me about £80 a month just to subscribe to these three, but the increase in demands for perfect results in less-than-perfect conditions means they have to be used. The US real estate market is undergoing some changes in how these AI applications can be used legally after some ridiculous operators using AI to fundamentally change the appearance of properties started to become problematic. I can now see this problem creeping into the UK - agents have requested changes to exterior shots to alter backlit fascias so that it looks like the sun is shining on the north face of a building etc. It’s ok for “proof of concept” images, but not for actual marketing shots of an actual property.
Things that just worked.
Getting rid of trying to colour balance my social media videos and relying on auto WB and exposure using my trusty Osmo Pocket-3 gimbal was the best thing ever. I was previously trying to calibrate white balance, changing light bulbs for my own daylight bulbs, doing sophisticated zooms and slides, and all sorts of rubbish when all I needed to do was keep it simple. I now shoot a video in minutes by following an identical workflow in each property. The videos are simple (without all that slow/quick crap), and gives my main client a consistency in marketing output. Everyone seems to be chasing style over substance after looking at some Tiktok slop from other estate agencies. Just stop.
Using Google Gemini to finally address my Photoshop scripting needs has worked a treat. With each version of the chatbot, the understanding of my requests has improved, and with the last iteration, my step by step requirements were absorbed and converted into code which allowed me to bulk-process multi-layered files with ease. The ability to automate tags and then backup my client files is amazing too. The only obstacle to further automation is my ability to clearly convey what I want to achieve. I’ll work on that. I also asked the AI to check my online presence with a view on eliminating any negative views.
Investing my reserved tax provision consisted of sticking it in a Premium Bonds account for the last ten years. I used to win the odd £100 here and there, but just after the new tax year began I decided to change the way I stored my tax reserves by using a stocks and shares ISA. In six months, I amassed a 20% gain which has paid for my December/Jan shortfall in income. I actually got spooked at the end of November when loads of social media dickheads began talking about huge crashes in AI stocks and so forth, so I moved it back to a Premium Bonds account, but I’m going to restock the ISA this month and see what happens.
The year ahead.
I’m 61 in a few days, and the idea of stepping back a bit is beginning to become more attractive. To do this, I’d need a lovely big pension, and all I have is £150 a month from my Thomas Cook days so it’s never going to be on my list of possibilities. With that in mind, I need to stay fit and active, and will continue to walk long distances, eat sensibly, and adjust my diabetic meds in accordance with my doctors orders. My diabetic control hasn’t been great over the year, so let’s get it sorted.
I do need another good client to get back into the prestige shooting game. Where I live is an economic and cultural desert to be honest, so I may have to sacrifice my local focus to get to that point. Marketing isn’t my strong point, so I’ll take that one step at a time.
My kids will finish their schooling in June, so that will make things slightly easier on the work front. We’ve basically sacrificed the last 15 years to accommodate school runs, childcare, and whatever else. My eldest is considering university or maybe a year doing some advanced apprenticeship, and our youngest is just lost in a world of anxiety/sleep deprivation and bewilderment approaching GCSE exams that he probably won’t even attempt. I think that spending some time with him would help, so I’ll try and get some wild camping adventures sorted.
Whatever the year holds, it’s going to be the start of a new era without the children being dependent upon us, and I look forward to bleating on about stuff throughout the year.
Have a great one!
