After the emerge of the digital photography era, almost everyone has become a photographer, a good one too, with good lenses, lighting and skills of course; However, a lot of us know that breaking into photography as a career is not an easy thing, especially with a saturated market; and it requires a lot of skills not only in photography, but also and I can't stress that enough, "communication" or in other words "Networking".

However, newbies tend to do something that shakes the ground below the feet of the entire photographers community, which is shooting for a very low price, in order to build a client list and a worthy portfolio, actually I did that too when I started out, however there is couple of downsides to that approach:

1- If you give a client a low price for your services, it will be very hard for you to change price in the future with that very client, and will take your offer as a standard, and the funny thing is, they might hire another one who is far more expensive than you are offering the same quality, if you try to negotiate pricing. 

2- Also with other photographers like you adopting the same approach, you're giving that sorts of clients the chance to manipulate the market and stipulate their conditions, and lowering the bar for the other good ones.

So, what's the solution for those who are starting out??

In my opinion, there might be few options for those who wanna set their foot in the ground;

Let's say you're an architectural photographer who wants to start making a portfolio and contact potential clients in the market; you may start doing one of two things or both:

1- Travel to interesting locations to shoot good architecture as a basis for a quality portfolio, it's not only investment, you also get to spend some quality time doing the thing you love without a pressure from family or clients .. etc.

2- If you don't have enough savings to travel to some interesting locations, you may try to contact some clients and offer to shoot for "free" NOT for "low price", and you should tell the client that you're doing that to build a portfolio; don't hide your reasons, good clients will appreciate that and help you; but why do you think I said "FREE" ? 

Good question, actually shooting for free with explaining the reason will do a couple of things:

A- It's a win win situation for your client, if your images are good, they get to use it for free, if not, then they lost nothing right.

B- If they like your pictures, and they decide to hire you again, there's no way they can ask you to shoot for them again for free, then you can start negotiating prices on a solid ground.

C- You do not mess with the market's standards this way, which will come to your benefit in the future as well if other newbies adopt the same approach.

Hope you  find that useful.

Till next time, c ya.