What Do Pro Photographers Do When Not on a Photoshoot

There are loads of videos showing cool behind the scenes clips from photoshoots and exciting trips. But what do photographers actually get up to in-between shoot days? If you are thinking of turning pro, it is worth paying attention to how most of your time will be spent.

For most professional photographers, we do not end up shooting every single day. Even for those who may be doing documentary work for a month at a time, there is still the other side of the business, those days that kind of sit between pre-production, shoot days, and post-production. In some genres (mine included), there can be a lot of time spent in this state. The longer my career goes on, the less time I tend to spend shooting for clients, but the bigger the productions become. For me, a large proportion of my working life is spent neither shooting nor editing. So, what do we do?

In this video, I go over a pretty standard and what can seem like an uninspiring day. I explain the logistics of getting through all of the tasks that make a photography business viable while looking at how I test kit, check it over, look into new procurements, work on my portfolio, and plan future work that I need to complete in order to stay relevant to art buyers and directors.

Although the world is very different in a lot of ways and I have to perform some of these tasks a bit differently than how I may have done them last year, the general idea remains the same. 

How do you spend your non-shooting days?