I’ve opened a Patreon today to help fund operations on the site. While my writings about concepts in toy photography come with no cost except for years of my life, picking up toys to show off does indeed rack up some bills. Keep reading to find out more about the campaign and what your money would be going towards.
Support Play With Photography on Patreon!
As of the present time, there’s just the one support tier. I want to add more tiers with patron benefits as we move forward, but that’s details that will need to be ironed out later. For a couple dollars per month, you’ll be pitching in to cover assorted costs of keeping the site going:
Content!
Okay, I recognize that on some level this sounds like asking you to pledge in order to finance me buying myself more toys, since gallery content involves me buying myself more toys. Maybe one of the extra patron tiers to be added later can involve a monthly random drawing of something I’m finished shooting so everyone who contributes at that level has a chance to get something tangible back out of it. It’s definitely an option I want to explore in more detail once we actually have a decent number of people on board. But regardless, what it boils down to here is that if you like my photos and want to see more stuff get in front of my camera, you can help make that happen.
Equipment
I use the word equipment pretty broadly here, because it covers not just the camera, but things like lights, tripods and other mounting solutions, backdrop/background materials, and also consumable maintenance items like camera cleaning supplies. You’d be alarmed at how frequently I have to swab my camera’s sensor compared to what the safe sensor cleaning swabs cost. Other things under this heading could be storage media like memory cards or backup drives, for instance. Oh, and let’s put software here too. Leaving aside piracy, Lightroom and Photoshop aren’t free, and are important to the workflow of getting the pictures that you see here. You can get them in Creative Cloud for $10 per month, but that’s $10 per month forever. Getting to mitigate that cost down would be fantastic in particular.
Operation Costs
Software costs could fall here as well, but we’re considering this as the costs to keep the domain name and hosting account going. I’ve paid for a couple of premium WordPress plugins already too, so I suppose we could count that? Though we’re getting back to blurring the line with equipment via software again. But I figure you get the idea.
It’s hard to rank those things in order of what comes before what in order of spending patron money, but contributions will all get put toward these costs before going anywhere else. If there should ever be a surplus above the operating costs…
…tacos.
Thank you for visiting the site, and thank you for reading this. If you do like what I do, then please visit my Patreon page and make a pledge. It doesn’t cost very much, and you’ll be helping make sure that my art and other madness can continue going forward.