Why bother with photography insurance?
The Lloyds TSB banking and insurance building at the heart of the City of London
Today's blog post is on a subject that no serious or sane professional or hobbyist photographer should do without, and it's a topic that a lot of people find rather mundane and uninteresting.
As a professional photographer, your bags and bags of camera gear become the tools with which you make your livelihood, and as such you ought to do everything you can to protect it. Ok so you may not be great at putting those lens caps back on, and sometimes you find you have butter fingers when it comes to handling two grands worth of glass but if it were all to go missing what on earth would you do? How would you pay the mortgage or feed the kids if you had no camera at all?
If you are a studio photographer and your business model revolves around bricks and mortar premises, surely you ought to treat it the same as you would your home? If you have a mortgage on your home, then by law you have to have buildings insurance, with good reason.
A taxi driver has to make sure his cab is insured, a mechanic would be mental to not insure his tools, as would a plumber or an electrician.
Photographic insurance covers a variety of fields including:
Equipment insurance - covers against loss, theft, & damage to equipment. Professional Indemnity - covers you if you are found negligent or make a mistake which causes a client's business to suffer financial loss. Public Liability - covers your business' potential liabilities to third parties for personal injury or property damage if your business is found to be negligent. Employer's Liability - If you employ an assistant, or an office manager then you'll need to have employer's liability insurance. This'll protect you in event that one of your members of staff suffers an injury or accident. Loss of earnings / Business Interruption - If there's an interruption in normal business activities as a result of damage to your premises or equipment then this can cover a loss of earnings.
These are just some examples of the kinds of insurance you may need. InFocus Insurance provide a dedicated photography insurance service offering policies which cover everything from studios and their fixtures and fittings, to travel photographers who wander the globe.
However where InFocus excel is that if you need to phone them for what ever reason, you'll get straight through to a human, in an office, in Altrincham and not an answering service somewhere off in Eastern Europe where your only possible access to a real person is after going through so many voice prompts that you've lost the will to live by the time someone deems you worthy enough to take your call. In the unfortunate event that you need to make a claim, they'll steer you through the process doing their utmost to make sure that you get a prompt and accurate payout and that your day to day business is disrupted as little as possible.
With service like that, why would you trust one of the most important aspects of your business to anyone else?
Finally, many apologies for the lack of a post last week. I got so involved in the re-design of the website and it ended up taking up so much of my time, that before I knew it the blogging window had well and truly closed. On the plus side, the new design is much cleaner and far more intuitive to use. It's all thanks to Amanda Sosa Stone over at Agency Access with whom I had a great chat last week. I hope you like...