Why You Cannot Work for Free

I'm sure this has happened at least once to most of you who share your photos online. Someone sees your work and contacts you praising you for your great photos. They want to use them for a commercial purpose, but here's the catch...they have no budget. They will however give you credit and supply a link to your website. Sound familiar?

Check out the following excerpt from an informative article on why photographers should not work for free.

Getting “Credit” Doesn’t Mean Much


Part and parcel with requests for free images premised on budgetary constraints is often the promise of providing “credit” and “exposure”, in the form or a watermark, link, or perhaps even a specific mention, as a form of compensation in lieu of commercial remuneration.


There are two major problems with this.


First, getting credit isn’t compensation. We did, after all, create the images concerned, so credit is automatic. It is not something that we hope a third party will be kind enough to grant us.


Second, credit doesn’t pay bills. As we hopefully made clear above, we work hard to make the money required to reinvest in our photographic equipment and to cover related business expenses. On top of that, we need to make enough to pay for basic necessities like food, housing, transportation, etc.


In short, receiving credit for an image we created is a given, not compensation, and credit is not a substitute for payment.

For the entire article : http://jimgoldstein.visibli.com/share/ow6jR0