Failed hard drives, corrupt SD cards and the privilege of capturing life's most important moments. It's a lot to carry on your shoulders as a photographer or filmmaker. Having an insurance policy can assist with worrisome moments when equipment fails or your shoot doesn't quite go to plan.
We love photographers (With Jack’s founder, Ashley, used to be one!), but given how often you’re out and about with your kit, there’s always an opportunity for theft, loss or accidental damage.
We don’t say this as scaremongering. It’s a fact that photographers and videographers account for most of our equipment claims. It’s not just contents insurance that’s of value to a photographer, loss of photos or failing to capture an important moment can lead to difficult conversations with clients.
Photographers have big moments riding on them. It might be a wedding that someone’s poured their life savings into, or it could be a commercial shoot a brand has heavily invested in.
The photographer’s job is to take a moment that’s happening in real-time and turn it into beautiful deliverables for their client.
Usually everything runs smoothly, but when issues do arise they tend to be caused by:
We’ve got examples of all 3 happening to With Jack customers. If a client is unhappy and tries recovering compensation from you or threatens legal action, your policy would assist in resolving it and ensuring you’re not financially impacted and your reputation is intact.
It goes without saying it’s not just professional indemnity insurance that photographers benefit from. Contents insurance is our most used product in terms of claims, covering:
Our average contents claim for photographers is £2800. We’ll go into more detail in the next section about the policy features across all products that photographers benefit from the most.
Photographers add lots of products to their insurance package because your job carries a range of risks. Not only are you physically dealing with members of the public, but you’re reliant on kit and providing photos of a certain standard.
Whether you’re a wedding photographer, specialise in family portraits or are a commercial photographer helping brands, commonly we see photographers buy:
Let’s look at the most used features of these products.
Negligence
If a client feels you’ve been negligent with capturing their event or wedding, they can try to recover damages from you. In our experience this can be the cost they’ve incurred in hiring you or the expense of the event itself. Your professional indemnity insurance would spring into action.
Data reconstitution
The contents policy we arrange includes data reconstitution costs. If your hard drive or CF card suffers accidental damage and the photos become corrupt, the insurer will pay for a data recovery company to recover the files. These costs tend to be expensive, averaging around £1500.
Accidental damage
You’re out and about with your kit every week. Camera bodies get dropped, lenses are smashed, laptops take a knock. If you don’t have the capital to repair or replace your kit, get contents insurance.
Bodily injury
Whilst most photographers have public liability insurance, we’ve yet to have a claim for this product. It’s a good idea to have it in your arsenal since you’re interacting with members of the public and the risk of accidents is always there. Certain venues require you to carry public liability insurance before you step foot inside the place.
There’s also the legal expenses add-on, but this seems to be less popular with photographers because many avoid payment issues due to getting paid upfront. However, we think it’s worth considering for the legal advice helpline alone—and there’s some contract dispute cover thrown in for good measure.
One With Jack customer had a situation that saw them claim against two of their insurance products—contents insurance and professional indemnity insurance.
Part one – contents insurance
It started with a hard drive failing whilst on the job. The photographer took the hard drive to a recovery company, but they couldn’t salvage any data.
If you have contents insurance there’s a ‘Reconstitution of electronic and non electronic data’ clause.
This covers the cost of “reconstituting the data that Your Organisation needs to continue the delivery of its Professional Services if Your Organisation’s business records and electronic and non electronic data have been lost or distorted as a direct result of Property Damage”. It’s one of our favourite policy features.
The insurer covered the cost of attempting to recover the data, which was over £5000.
Part two – professional indemnity insurance
Unfortunately no data was able to restored. Since the client had paid for travel, accommodation, fees and models they looked to recover this cost from the freelancer.
This triggered the professional indemnity insurance. In this instance the client was looking to recover over £3000. The insurer covered this, minus the policy excess.
Between the data reconstitution feature under the contents policy, and the client recovering damages under the professional indemnity policy, the claim was around £9000.
Had the freelancer not been insured, their options would have been limited to closing their company to write off the debt or selling a valuable asset to pay for these costs. This is why we champion insurance for photographers—to help keep you in business.
By now you should have a better understanding of what insurance is and how it can help you, but how much is it going to cost?
With Jack can arrange £1,000,000 of professional indemnity insurance for photographers from £168 per year. Payments are interest free so this works out to just £14 per month.
Public liability can cost as little as £2.80 per month.
Contents insurance is trickier to price. Photographers tend to own and carry a lot of equipment with them, so this will definitely bump the price of your policy up.
In average, photographers using With Jack to arrange their premium pay £457 per year.
If this feels a lot, it’s important to remember a few things:
The insurer we work with price based on turnover, products selected and level of cover. Every insurer is different and it’s important to find one inline with your budget. Remember, insurance is tax-deductible so you can deduct your premium from your profits each year.
“Is £1,000,000 of public liability insurance enough?”
This is a common question but insurance exists for unforeseen circumstances so nobody can say with absolute certainty. However, With Jack has been in business for 8+ years we have a lot of claims data to dig into.
Statistically speaking £1,000,000 is a sufficient level of cover for photographers, but here are some reasons you might want a higher level of cover:
As a freelance photographer and videographer your reputation is everything and is the key to filling your calendar each year. You’re responsible for
Being insured not only puts you in a better position to fix a wrong, but it gives clients confidence that they’re working with a trusted professional.
We’ve talked about what features insurance has that can help you, real stories from photographers that have had to use their insurance and how much it costs. You can take the next step and get a quote.
With Jack helped me through a stressful situation. They bent over backwards to help me! They were very patient with me and always stayed in contact throughout my claim to make sure everything was dealt with accordingly. They explained everything clearly to me (I’m not really good at this sort of stuff!) and were a delight to work with. It's clear to see how much With Jack cares for their clients. I’m really grateful for their help.
Suzanne Li
Freelance photographer
What do we want out of an insurance provider?
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