Dos & Don'ts For Freelance Photographers

Visual poet and photographer Danny Bittencourt shares interesting advice on how to manage your career as a freelance photographer

Choosing which themes to explore in your work, developing your own visual language, managing your routine and timetable, being your own boss... Sounds pretty good, right?

Of course, being freelance has a lot of benefits, if and when you can avoid the most common problems. Visual poet and photographer Danny Bittencourt (@dannybbittencourt) is an expert in freelancing. In this post, she shares her dos and dont's for freelance photographers. Discover more in the video below:

Freelance Photographer–Dos

1. Organization and discipline
Staying organized throughout all stages of production will help guide you through your work. Create folders for all of your projects, keep your calendar up to date, and make the most of your time to prevent tasks from piling up.

2. Know yourself
How an independent production unfolds will be determined by your timings, mindset, and way of working. It’s therefore important to know yourself and adjust your creative processes to suit your personal needs.

3. Goals and challenges
It’s important to always step outside of your comfort zone and keep reinventing yourself. Setting goals–and achieving them–will help you in this process.

Freelance Photographer–Don’ts

1. Don’t force yourself to adopt a formal work routine
Often, freelance professionals adopt rigid work routines thinking it will make them more productive, when really their work ends up suffering as a result. Your way of working, as Danny says in her list of Dos, should be determined by your personal needs.

2. Don’t focus solely on producing
The way to be successful is to produce a lot of (quality) work, right? Well, no. There are many other tasks involved in the day-to-day workload of a freelance professional, such as planning, sharing work, looking for new clients. Get to know these other parts of the process.

3. Don’t sabotage yourself
Don’t become your own enemy. Postponing tasks, not knowing how to plan ahead, or failing to share your work–and not believing in it–our signs of self-sabotage. Be careful!

If you want to learn to convert your photographic self-portrait into a tool for self-exploration, while developing a unique visual language, sign up to Danny’s course, Fine Art Self-Portrait Photography.

English version by @eloiseedgington.

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Intimate Photography Portraits, a course by Marta Mas Girones
Creative Lighting for Portraits, a course by Victor Idrogo
Artistic Self-Portrait Photography, a course by Cristina Otero