Note: Photographers’ Friday is a weekly blog series directed toward professional photographers, and in some instances, serious amateur photographers. All Photographers’ Friday blog posts will assume that readers have a basic working knowledge of digital SLR cameras, but if you’re left with questions or don’t understand any of the information, don’t hesitate to ask. We love e-mails!

—

It’s a topic that’s near and dear to my heart, because it’s the way I want to live my life. I want to be a person of integrity. We all should. Our businesses should be a reflection of that, and it hurts me when I hear about photographers running their businesses without integrity.

What do I mean? Photographers undercutting other photographers’ prices — finding out the number another photographer quoted to a client and offering the client a discount off that price. Photographers offering steep discounts when clients pay cash or offering to “eat the tax” — which usually translates to photographers simply not paying sales tax. Photographers badmouthing other people in their industry — to peers and clients alike. Photographers “borrowing” other photographers’ work (it’s also known as “copyright infringement” and “stealing”) and passing it off to prospective clients as their own. Photographers promoting their businesses as legitimate and legal — without filing for a business license and paying taxes the way every other legitimate business must.

Those offenses might seem petty, and in the grand scheme of things, they are. But it’s how we live and behave in our day-to-day lives that defines our character and who we are as human beings. We can’t separate the “business self” from the “real self.” The way we run our businesses is the way we live.

(Thank you to Caroline from Frost Photography for this sweet picture on the beach in Santa Barbara! We’ll be sharing more of these in the future!)A lot of times, it’s easier to skip the whole integrity thing. When another wedding vendor makes your life difficult, it’s a lot harder to keep your mouth shut than to complain to your network of peers, and reporting your full income — and then turning nearly thirty percent of it over to the IRS — is a lot more painful than quietly pocketing cash. But no one wins any commendations for taking the easy way out. It’s doing what’s right, even when it’s hard, that builds us all into better people.

For a while we might be able to fool ourselves into believing that the way we handle our business won’t bleed over into our personal lives. But that lie will make itself known all too soon.

We all become who we pretend to be every day. If we’re running our businesses in a way we don’t want the world to see, that becomes the pattern for everything else outside of work. If we’re running our businesses in a way we’re proud to hold up as an example of integrity, it becomes a standard we will try to live up to after we’ve shut our office doors behind us.

For Danny and me, living a life and running a business that is based on integrity in everything stems from our personal convictions of right and wrong, our Christian faith, the values our parents instilled in us growing up, and wanting to lay a good example before our clients, our peers, our friends, and one day, our children. Does that mean it’s always easy? Of course not. That just means it’s essential.

So why do you want to run your business with integrity? Define your reasons — they will make you much more determined to stick with it.

~ Laura