Wednesday, August 04, 2010

Coffee With Morgan: The Business Side of Photography

Protecting yourself and your clients should be top priority on the business end of your photography. To do this you need the proper permits and/or licenses required by your city, state and county you can contact your county clerk's office to get in touch with the proper channels to apply for everything you need to run a legitimate business.

The other things you will need will be releases. You should have a contract, model & liability release as well as a print release if you offer CD/DVD's of images. Your contract should have everything expected of your client and required by you as well. Your model release should make it clear that you retain the copyright of all images captured by yourself and your heirs will continue to retain the copyright. Your liability waiver should clearly state that you are not liable for conditions beyond your control and that the clients are voluntarily participating in the portraits. Your print release should make it clear that you retain the copyright of all images, and that they cannot be altered by the clients.

If you would like to download the templates for the releases I use you may do so here .

Feel free to ask any questions pertaining to this topic.


Meet Morgan! I am from a small town in southern Texas, but now live in central Texas, Fort Hood/Killeen area to be more specific. I am a stay-at-home mom and do photography in my spare time. I am married to a wonderful man that I was lucky enough to meet and be able to spend my life with. We have two beautiful children, Payton 4 years old & Amelia 1 year old. The thing I love the most about photography is that you can take an intangible moment in time and make it last forever. I don't have any formal training, I just learn from experimentation and research.
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14 comments:

  1. Thank you so much for these! I'm trying to start my own photography business, so these are really helpful.

    Here's a question for you, my husband is military and we live overseas, do you know how I'd go about getting permits since we are overseas?

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  2. Hi Morgan! Thanks for touching on this topic! I could view all the files but the Contract one. Anyone else having any issues? Any other way I could view it?

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  3. Thanks so much for your time and expertise!

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  4. This comment has been removed by a blog administrator.

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  5. Thank you! I have been looking for versions of some of these. You have perfect timing!

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  6. Great timiming!! I am redoing my website with integrated forms so reviewing all of my paperwork as I rework and resize it! Thank you so much!

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  7. Hey Morgan - thank so much for these! I was only able to view the contract example when I downloaded, were there supposed to be others? Sorry for the trouble.

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  8. http://www.mediafire.com/file/cgc7rlbs7yap605/Legal Documents.zip'


    All files in a zipped folder

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  9. I would love to download but I'm not able to anymore. Can you post the link again?

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  10. I am unable to download the files and I would love to have these. Can you repost them?

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  11. Thank you so much for sharing these. This kind of information is so hard to find and time-consuming to try to create from scratch. I really appreciate it.

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  12. THANK YOU for posting this!!! I was searching for awhile to find some examples to work with since I'm just starting out. This is fabulous! :)

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Thank you for taking the time to leave a message, I love reading them! All comments are personally moderated by me and I will post and answer them them as soon as possible.
Rita