Now available

Our growing collection of interactive business forms now includes

Terms & Conditions — the “fine print” to place on the reverse side of your estimates, confirmations, invoices, etc.

Assignment Estimate form — get all the important details down on paper. (PDF)

Assignment Confirmation form — record any modifications of your estimate and the resulting agreement that you and the client have negotiated. (PDF)

Change Order form — document the client's last-minute requests. (PDF)

Delivery Memo form — the paperwork that accompanies the images. (PDF)

Invoice — what the client's accounting department needs to send money to you. (PDF)

Home > Commerce > Legal Resources > Terms and Conditions

Terms & Conditions for your business paperwork

Good paperwork is of the utmost importance in your business. It helps prevent misunderstandings, protects your legal and financial interests, and conveys a crisp, businesslike impression to your clients.

Every few years, ASMP publishes a new edition of its manual Professional Business Practices in Photography. The sample business forms in that book represent the best business practices in our ever-changing industry. The medium of print, however, is entirely static and cannot convey the vast range of options that good paperwork must encompass. The Web, in contrast, provides a malleable medium in which the text can be varied to reflect the choices made by users. Hence this module.

What you can get here — and what you can’t

No bones about it: This module is not a replacement for a comprehensive business management program, nor is it a substitute for the advice your own lawyer can give. For starters, the information in this module is necessarily aimed at a broad audience of photographers who might be located in any part of the United States, who practice in many specialties and who work with a huge variety of clients. Your own attorney not only knows the state laws and local regulations that apply to you, but can craft specialized language to fit both your needs and your clients’ requirements.

What you will get here is a guided tour of the options you have in writing your business documents. You will also get a serviceable legal document that can be used as-is for most of the situations that come up in normal publication photography. Or it can be a sound basis for developing custom contracts.

If you are an ASMP member, logging in will enable you to change certain settings that, in turn, change the legal language. You’ll be able to delete clauses that aren’t applicable in your situation, insert clauses that are useful and, with a click of the mouse, alter the text to match your business practices. Then you can push a button to get a “clean copy” that is correctly numbered, uniformly spaced and suitable for sending to clients.

Using the results

The most straightforward way to put the module to work is to print out the clean-copy version of the document. The printing style sheets are designed to fit everything onto one sheet of paper. Below, we have specific hints for printing with some popular browsers.

More likely, though, you will want to print onto your own stationery, and you will probably want to fine-tune the fonts, margins, columns and so forth. Easily done: Just copy the text from the clean copy window and paste it into a word processor document.

Another option is to integrate these legal forms with your business management software (from HindSight, PhotoByte, Robin Road, etc.). In many respects, this is the most satisfactory approach. A good studio management program can do a lot for your business, such as formulating estimates, tracking payments, issuing reminders and storing the details that the tax authorities insist upon.

Reference and further reading

ASMP’s book, Professional Business Practices in Photography, 6th edition, is available in print from ASMP or Allworth Press. ASMP members can also get individual chapters in PDF form from the ASMP web site.

We also recommend:

Licensing Photography by Richard Weisgrau and Victor S. Perlman. Covers all the essentials of licensing your images in clear, up-to-date language. It has chapters on registering copyrights, getting model releases, writing license agreements, setting prices and negotiating deals. List price $20, available directly from Allworth Press or through Amazon.
Best Business Practices for Photographers by John Harrington. List price $30, available from Thomson Course Technology or Amazon

Print hints

Browser specific options in the Macintosh print dialog Macintosh browsers: Depending on which browser you are using, the Print dialog may offer options to shrink the page to fit or to turn off the page headers and footers. There's usually not much advantage in letting the Mac shrink the page. But it's almost always a good idea to shut off the headers and footers if you can.

Firefox: Firefox’s shrink option usually won’t help. Alas, there does not seem to be a way to suppress the page headers.
Internet Explorer on Mac: We don’t recommend this browser; use Firefox or Safari instead. That said, the way to disable IE's shrink option is to select "print wide pages."
Safari: Safari, for all its faults, does a nice job of printing. Headers and footers are set by the “Print webpage information” option.

Windows browsers: The standard Page Setup dialog lets you adjust all four margins of the page. Our style sheet assumes that you have left the margins at their default setting of a quarter inch all around. Feel free to adjust them based on what you see in the Print Preview. To suppress the header and footer, set the corresponding text-input fields to blank.

Internet Explorer: Certain versions of this browser have problems with ASMP pages, while other versions work just fine. If you encounter problems, try Firefox, freely available from Mozilla.org.