The field of photography very often plays host to the question of whether it is acceptable to work for free.

The reason isn’t much of a mystery. Photography has a very low barrier to entry. Throw a couple hundred bucks down and you’ve got a decent point and shoot that’s going to capture all of life’s best moments. And the sad truth of the matter is that the willingness of people to pay for a shot (even of themselves) is incredible low. So you are left with a huge body of amateur photographers taking really good, but not great, photos. Consumers then eat up those images instead of the great images produced by pros.

For some professionals the very thought of giving away your work seems sacrilegious. The recent writer’s strike epitomized this type of thinking. Writer Harlan Ellison gave an impassioned critique of working for free on Youtube.

However, two amazing photographers jumped into battle on the other side of the fray. But, their response is much more articulate and deliberate than the typical knee jerk response that, “We’re so good, we don’t compete with amateurs.”

Instead, David Hobby, who runs the Strobist.com blog and is an accomplished photojournalist, eloquently lays out a framework of why working for free is not always evil. His words separate the issue of control from money.

Chase Jarvis backed Hobby’s idea of working for free. Jarvis is a commercial photographer working out of Seattle who consistently produces jaw dropping images. Chase rightly asserts that doing a job for free doesn’t destroy the pricing of an entire industry. In fact, he’s looking for a free project to take on.

My ideas fall more in line with Hobby and Jarvis. While stealing creative works for commercial use has absolutely no excuse. The limited sharing of work can benefit society. Whether it is open source software or shooting images for a free campaign, free definitely has a place.

Just like in the software area, free allows quality photography to be available to those who need it most. For example, consider the software that runs this blog–wordpress. WordPress is an extremely powerful tool to let anyone share their ideas with the world for free.

Since software requires some knowledge and work to develop while producing snapshots does not. Anyone can produce a image that is similar to Ansel Adams work–it might just be 20% of the original photograph. But, that last 80% might not be worth the thousands of dollars it would cost to have a real print. This difference requires that images be treated differently than software.

The key to Hobby’s idea of free is that you maintain control of your work:


You are not working for free because people asked you to. You are offering to collaborate on a project. And therein lies a huge difference.

When a company or organization asks you to work for free they may be (okay, probably are) taking advantage of you. When you are in control, no one can take advantage of you. You have the ability to offer your work for free, but you retain the ability to decline a request to work for free.


There is an important difference between letting someone take your work from you and you giving that work away. In the first case you lose control of your creation, in the later that control is maintained. And it is this control that allows the pricing power of professional photographers to remain intact.

Control allows the creator to maintain their connection to the work. Depending on the circumstance this connection might be explicitly enunciated in the form of a credit or the credit might be forgone for a different reason, like work done in the spirit of charity.

So maybe it’s time to stop seeing free as something that will put you out of work, but something that you can use to your (and society’s) advantage.

Filed under: chase, david, free, hobby, jarvis, Photography, strobist