Change of plans

After meeting with my financial advisor, I have decided to scale down my photography business rather than close it this year. What does that mean? Reluctantly, I have ended my studio lease in Minneapolis. When I need a studio I’ll just rent by the hour or shoot on location and charge my clients for any related expenses. I also have eliminated my expensive, redundant online backups. I’ll just do manual backups and store the data off-site so that if disaster strikes my network-attached storage (NAS) drive — which already creates a mirror image of all my work at home — I’ll still have off-site redundancy.

So what prompted this change? The year started out strong with several clients seeking photos, ranging from portraits to marketing images to documentary style photos of group dance classes. This is the kind of work I would have continued to do in any case. Of course, I would have declared all of the income, but keeping my business open allows me to continue deducting expenses, which I have scaled back, for income tax purposes.

So there you have it. I am happy to take on any portrait and headshot assignments. I also will be doing a lot more personal work, including dance photography and street photography. I might even throw in some abstract, landscape and still life photographs. The point is, I will let creativity drive my decisions of what to photograph.

Our time on this earth is short. Let freedom ring.