Take care of the pennies, and the pounds will take care of themselves…

People often ask me how I spend my time as a wildlife photographer. Some assume I spend my whole life on expeditions to exotic locations. If only! Sadly, I only have the funds to go on a few trips per year, lasting two or three weeks each. However, I’ve learned that it’s easier to save money than make money, so here are a few money-saving tips that should help you spend more time in the bush.

Keep Proper Accounts

One cliché of the business world is that ‘what gets measured gets done’. That means if you want to be successful, you need to collect the right data and put it in a useful form for analysis.

If you can do that, you’ll be able to ask a few useful questions:

• How much am I earning?

• How much am I spending?

• Am I making a profit?

• What can I afford to spend on equipment?

• What can I afford to spend on travel?

I used to be a strategy consultant, so I’m comfortable using Excel spreadsheets to monitor my finances. I keep track of all my revenue and expenditure every year, which lets me see any patterns or trends in the numbers.

If you have an artistic rather than a numerical mindset, you might need help from a friend, relative or colleague, but it should still be possible. As long as you’re disciplined enough to keep your receipts and record every item of income and expenditure, you should be able to produce a useful picture of your finances.

Once you know what your cashflows are, it’s easier to budget and plan for the future. You might still need to trade in your old kit or get a loan to afford what you want, but at least you should know what’s possible.

Photography can be a money pit, so you’d rather be on the outside looking in than at the bottom looking up!

Don’t Splurge on Equipment

If money isn’t an issue, then you can obviously spend as much as you like on cameras, lenses and accessories. However, most people are on a budget, so you need to be sensible about any new purchases.

The major manufacturers have made great strides in developing mirrorless cameras and lenses, and you can now take advantage of frame rates, sensor resolutions and AF systems that simply weren’t possible a few years ago.

Everybody loves buying a new toy, and it’s easy to get excited about buying the latest mirrorless camera or long lens. However, you need to ask yourself if it will actually produce any kind of financial return.

Yes, it might be fun to play with all the bells and whistles, but are there any features that will actually improve your photography and allow you to charge higher prices or sell more pictures?

It’s very hard to make thousands of pounds from photography, but it’s very easy to save thousands of pounds by NOT buying the latest Sony, Nikon or Canon full-frame mirrorless camera!

Work as a Residential Photographer

This is probably the biggest discovery I’ve ever made in photography. I was surfing the internet in 2018 when I came across a wildlife photographer who’d managed to get 365 nights of free accommodation in African safari lodges in exchange for his pictures!

I didn’t even realise you could do such a thing, but I was immediately inspired to do a bit of research and see what would happen. I chose around 50 camps in Kenya and Tanzania and emailed them all, offering my pictures in exchange for free accommodation and game drives. I attached 10-20 of my favourite African images to prove my credentials.

After just a few weeks, I had 17 invitations! “Yes, what a great idea!” “Yes, we’d be delighted to host you!” “Yes, we’d love to have pictures of the local wildlife!” “How long can you stay for?”

This was a spectacular vindication of the idea of the ‘resident photographer’. In the end, I managed to arrange a three-month stay at various &Beyond lodges in Tanzania and a month-long visit to Cottar’s 1920s Safari Camp in Kenya.

It took a lot of sorting out, and I had to pay for my flights and the park entry fees—plus a very expensive Nikon 800mm lens! That meant what had started out as a ‘free’ trip ended up costing me around £25,000. However, it was a great photographic opportunity, and I’d never have been able to afford to stay for four months at five-star lodges charging $1,000 a night!

I came back with tons of pictures, and I had various once-in-a-lifetime experiences, such as seeing four male lions taking down a Cape buffalo. One of the other guests gave me a few videos to put on YouTube, and seven of them have now had more than a million views!

Based on that experience, I now try to arrange at least one trip a year as a resident photographer. Here are the ones I’ve been lucky enough to enjoy:

• 2019: Klein’s Camp, Serengeti Under Canvas, Grumeti Serengeti Tented Camp and Cottar’s 1920s Safari Camp

• 2020: Gabus Game Ranch and Etosha National Park in Namibia

• 2021: Antarctic Frozen Continent Expedition with Young Pioneer Tours

• 2022: Ol Jogi in Kenya and Muchenje in Botswana

• 2024: Muchenje in Botswana.

It’s hard to find lodges that want repeat visits. They end up with thousands of photos and videos from a stay of just a few weeks, so they don’t really need any more for a while after that. However, I have a good relationship with Muchenje in Botswana, and I’m about to fly there this evening…!

All in all, becoming a resident photographer is a great way to save money and improve your photography. If you want to find out more, I suggest you read this article.

Take Advantage of Freebies

Apps

Taking advantage of freebies is obviously a good way of saving money. There are plenty of free photography apps that can be very useful for working out the depth of field, say, or identifying rare species, and I regularly use SetMyCamera, Birds of Botswana and Birds of East Africa.
Even if websites charge a subscription fee, it’s often possible to sign up for a free trial period. I’ve done that with both Canvy and Mailchimp, and it’s been a real bonus.

You can also become an affiliate to get a free copy of certain applications. That’s what I do with Topaz Labs. As an affiliate, I’m entitled to download all their programs for free, including the latest updates. This is a great way to get the latest technology without having to add yet another subscription to your monthly outgoings!

Subscriptions

Like many photographers, I use Lightroom and Photoshop to organise and edit their images. It only costs around £10/$10 a month, but because I contribute my images to Adobe Stock, I get it for free!

Canvy is a website that allows you to create virtual rooms to show off your photographs (see above). It has a ‘freemium’ subscription format, which means you can use a few room templates for free. After that, you have to pay either $15 a month or $149 a year.

If you only have a few photographs you want to display, it’s easy to create everything you need during the trial period. Once it’s over, you can let your subscription lapse without having to pay for anything.

I’ve done something similar with Mailchimp, which is an online service that lets you send out newsletters to thousands of subscribers. Again, it’s a freemium service, so you can get started for free. However, you quickly run up against a limit of 500 contacts and 1,000 monthly email sends.

I have over 3,000 people on my photography mailing list, and I like to send out a monthly newsletter to all of them, so I’d need to pay at least $75 a month for the Essentials plan. That’s just a bit pricey, so I’ve got by so far by signing up for a couple of free trial periods.

After that, my luck will probably run out, so I’ll have to find a different solution…!

Verdict

Wildlife photography can be a very expensive hobby or profession, but, in my experience, it’s much easier to save money than make money. If you keep proper accounts, avoid splurging on the latest gear and take advantage of resident photographer gigs and other freebies, you should be able to spend more time in the wild, doing what you love.

If you’d like to order a framed print of one of my wildlife photographs, please visit the Prints page.

If you’d like to book a lesson or order an online photography course, please visit my Lessons and Courses pages.