Business Insurance—Don’t Leave Home Without It

February 01, 2012 — Insurance exists to cover risks of loss that each of us could not afford to cover on our own.  Most adults carry several kinds of insurance, no matter what line of work they may be in: health insurance, long-term care insurance, home owners/renters insurance to cover both casualty losses and liabilities, life insurance, automobile insurance to cover liability (required by most, if not all, states), and often casualty/comprehensive losses. Many people who are employees carry disability insurance to replace their salaries in the event of medium- or long-term disability.  However, if you are a working pro photographer, there are several types of insurance, often bundled into a comprehensive insurance package tailored for pros, that you really, really, really should carry.

As a photographer running a business, you should always have the appropriate types and amounts of insurance to protect yourself, your clients, your employees and assistants, and everyone else you have to deal with. If you have any employees, worker’s compensation and employer’s liability coverage are obvious examples of what you absolutely should have, and I will not go into any detail about them in this article.  Here are some of the other, less obvious, types of coverage that I generally recommend, in no particular order. Many of these apply to any kind of business, but some are particularly applicable to working photographers. Much of this information has been provided by Scott Taylor of full service insurance brokerage Taylor & Taylor Associates in New York City.

Office Contents: This kind of insurance covers business personal property that is located within your office, such as furniture, computer equipment, copy machines, fax machines and improvements and betterments.

Miscellaneous Equipment: This is designed to protect your cameras, lighting and computer equipment outside of your office, plus your darkroom equipment.  It usually covers losses from things like fire, theft, water damage, breakage and so on.

Negative Film and Faulty Stock; Camera and Processing: This coverage pays for expenses to re-shoot a job due to lost, stolen or damaged digital media or film and/or digital media or film that is rendered unusable as a result of processing errors and/or camera malfunction.

Props, Sets and Wardrobe: This kind of insurance protects you in case of damage to or theft of other people’s property that is in your possession and is being used as a part of your photographic set.

Extra Expense: This covers any additional expense, such as equipment and/or studio rental, that you have to incur in order to complete your photo shoot if your cameras, props, sets and wardrobe and/or location sustain direct damage from a covered loss. Coverage usually includes things like the mechanical breakdown of your cameras, generators and computerized systems.

Third Party Property Damage: This kind of coverage protects you against unforeseeable damage to a location that is in your care, custody and control while the location is being used temporarily as part of your photographic set.

Business Interruption: This covers the actual loss that you sustain over a specific period, often for up to a year, as a result of direct damage to your business property by a loss from certain specific causes. That is, it provides at least a partial replacement for the revenues that you lose temporarily because you cannot operate your business until the damage to your business property has been repaired.

Portfolio and Case: This coverage protects the cost to reproduce prints, slides, chromes, tear sheets, etc.

General Liability: This kind of insurance provides protection against your legal liability from lawsuits for bodily injury or property damage. One of the important aspects of this coverage is that it affords coverage both on your premises and other locations within the territory specified in the policy.

Non-Owned and Hired Automobile Liability: This protects you from bodily injury or property damage claims that arise from use of a hired, borrowed or rented vehicle. This coverage applies only after the policy insuring the vehicle involved in the accident has paid its limit.

Loss Payee and Additional Insured: A Loss Payee is a person or organization that has a financial interest in any property that is given or leased to you and for which you have agreed to provide insurance.  This is often required as a result of your contracts with your clients.

Errors and Omissions Liability: Last, but far from least, this is a coverage that I consider crucial for pros who advertise their services and/or publish their photographs. It usually includes media liability insurance against claims for defamation coverage and copyright infringement. A valuable aspect of this type of coverage is that the legal defense costs may also be covered. This is what you need when it turns out that you never got a model release from the person whose face now figures prominently in multimedia advertisements for you or one of your clients.
Remember, if you don’t buy insurance for a particular risk, you are nevertheless insuring against those risks—except that you are self-insuring instead of relying on an insurance company’s assets, and most of us simply cannot afford to do that if we ever face a claim. In our litigious society, those claims are, unfortunately, a real and ever-present risk.