The Freelance Slow Season
/If you know me, you know that I like to be active, productive & busy. Being so not only gives me focus, and perhaps this sounds counter-intuitive, but it also gives me energy. Inevitably, there are a few slow weeks in the winter, usually right after the holidays, where the number of estimate requests dwindle, there are no shoots lined up, and things sloooooow down.
In past years, those weeks have made me anxious. I like to be busy. There’s the fear that you are NEVER GOING TO WORK AGAIN, and then you remember: oh yeah, this is that time of year where this always happens. This is a cycle. Clients don’t like to spend their year’s advertising budget within the first quarter. Breathe in, breathe out. It’s going to be ok.
These days, I have a new approach to this. I try to relax into it, enjoy having more free time and focus on that ever-elusive work-life balance. For me, this has taken on a few different forms:
1. Take a vacation. And avoid burn-out. No major explanation needed!
2. Check off items from my personal mile-long to-do list. I run a business on my own, so it’s often easier to focus on my immediate projects rather than tackling my personal list. Now’s the time for that!
3. Get inspired. Find the time to check out new photo galleries, art shows and break out my tango shoes.
4. Do some strategic planning for my next year’s goals.
How do YOU deal with a slow season? What do you like to do with your down-time to stay productive or inspired?
There's a particular kind of confusion that shows up in production offices lately, and it isn't about budgets or call times. It's about a handful of terms — usage rights, likeness rights, digital replicas, AI training, derivative content — that have started appearing in the same paragraph of a contract, often used as though they mean roughly the same thing.
They don't. And the gap between them is quickly becoming one of the more consequential distinctions in commercial production.
This vocabulary comes largely from entertainment law, a world most photographers, stylists, producers, and models were never trained to navigate. It's being absorbed into advertising and commercial contracts faster than most of the industry has had time to build a shared, plain-language understanding of what it actually covers. The result is a lot of very careful people signing very specific language without a clear sense of what they've agreed to.
So it's worth slowing down and taking each term on its own.