About Shutha Business Courses

Photography is an art form, but professional photography is also a business. Your professional photography will only be sustainable and successful if you also manage to get the business side of your photography working.

Engaging with this Business Department assumes that you have already read the Introduction to Photography Markets, an essential precursor to this material.

Read the Introduction to Photography Markets 

The Business Faculty is geared towards giving you the essentials of running a photographic business so that:

• Your work is sustainable: you can do the work you really want to do, because you have the means to do so.
• Your work makes you wealthier, not poorer: you do not have to borrow more and more money just to keep working.
• The value you create by your work is not 'stolen' from you by others: you do not unwittingly give away control of your assets, whether that is the money you generate or the intellectual property you create.

Many photographers do not want to deal with the business side of photography. They consider themselves to be creatives, artists or journalists and they feel they should not have to deal with the business element of their work. Some even consider the mere act of having to deal with business as somehow sullying their creative expression. The problem is that more often than not this attitude leads photographers into poverty, losing their money, losing their ownership or losing their career. If you do not actively take control of your money, your photographic collection and your time, you are bound to lose one or all of these things. The tragic outcome is so often the loss of the ability to continue working as a photographer. So these Business Courses are vital to ensure you can keep doing what you love doing.

There are four basic courses within this Business Faculty:

Business Basics
Licensing and Legal
Marketing
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