ONE THING Holding Back Your Camera Career!

Cameramen are a dying career breed. The days of needing a wealth of expertise of lenses, exposures and film effects to properly light and capture a scene is now something that is being threatened by the most deadly competitive predator of all: automation. And the tool that’s killing the independent business is one you might have in your pocket. iPhones and other smartphones are adapting the high fidelity and high quality that cameras have worked toward for years with a suite of onboard tools and software to make it easy. It’s being made easy.

How do you compete with Easy?

Shifting Commodities

It used to be that, if you wanted something to look good, you hire a proper cameraman to film it or photograph it. Someone who knows about lighting and framing and has the right exposures and lenses, all the equipment of a professional company. Now? People just take pictures with their phones, and for them, that’s good enough. They can even take videos and upload them instantly to the web or the cloud or just to friends and relatives. No one needs a cameraman for everyday jobs anymore. But there is still value in the hands of someone who knows everything about framing that iPhones try to do by themselves.

Sell Solutions

Get out of the mindset of just selling your time with your camera as your main business. Clients expect more than that, and you have to give them more than that. They want full video production. If you’re a one-man business that means you’re wearing all the hats. You’re not just the filmmaker, you’re the film crew. You handle the lighting, rigging, gaffing, even the audio and editing. What you sell shouldn’t just be the footage you take, it should be the service that you offer to enhance that footage into a workable video that solves a problem the client has. Most of the time when someone asks you to film something, they’re not just asking for raw B-reel footage, they’re asking for a finished product they have in mind in their heads that they want to see realized on a screen. Work together with your client to be the expert they need in any subject matter so you can produce what they want and be an asset to them.

Stop Being Just a Cameraman

Going out with just a camera and a steady hand will not get you far enough. Anyone with a smartphone can take a “good enough” picture and it’s easy. But if they want something way better, something professional, then it’ll be hard for them to do. For you, it will be much easier, because you can do it all and fill in the gaps where “just a camera” doesn’t cut it. That’s the one thing you have to do: it’s everything. Show what all you can do, the things that clients know they can’t handle by themselves and pitch yourself as the solution to their problems that “good enough” can’t solve.