Author: Anthony Tagliaferri

If there is one thing to be creative about – seeming you do not always have to spend all your creativity on your work – it is making it as cheap as possible to get your work done in the first place. Creating a project on a budget is something basically every beginner in photo or video ends up doing – especially if they move towards more intermediate projects. In this post I will try to give you some ideas on how to spend less while still making good quality projects that will allow you to hone your production skills.

Personally, I was lucky enough to have an older sister with a DSLR that I could borrow from time to time so long as I did not break it. The reason I bring this up is because there are many families who have DSLR cameras (even if they are rather low quality) that you may be able to find hidden away in a closet. Do not be afraid to use an older camera, if it has the ability to set shutter speed, aperture, and ISO, then it is a great start. The second place I would look is sites like letgo.com which is where individuals sell various items that they no longer want or need. Getting used gear is a great way to get your hands on some pretty good quality stuff without burning your wallet. For example, I was able to find a Nikon D5500 on letgo.com for $400 with a 18-105mm lens and lens hood. While the D5500 is a few years old now, the newer (and marginally improved) D5600 goes for roughly $650 and comes with a lower quality kit lens. Granted you may miss out on some newer fancy autofocus technologies, but we are balling on a budget here so we cannot be too picky. There are also much cheaper options from Nikon that can teach you the basics, that said the D5500 is a few steps up from the base level cameras and has a few extra bells and whistles you can grow into as a photographer.

One other thing I would like to quickly touch on is audio because this is a place where I have been able to save a lot of money in certain situations. For one, I made a post previously about how to save money on recording a podcast which you can check out but I want to now focus on recording a person’s audio in a shot. Now there are a couple options: you got lavalier microphones which are attached to the person and then there are also boom microphones which are easier to hide but are not as close to the person’s mouth and therefore require much quieter surroundings. There is a trick I learned a few years ago with regards to lavalier microphones which saves a bunch of money seeming they tend to be pricey. So instead of using expensive stuff you could instead use something you might actually already own – wired earbuds. If you have an old pair of apple earpods (when they had wires and a volume rocker on the wire itself), or any other brand for that matter, they tend to have a microphone built into the volume rocker. All you have to do is plug that headphone into a phone, put the phone in your pants pocket (or off camera without showing the wire), tape the volume rocker to the inside of your shirt near your collar so it is close to your mouth, and then run the wire under your shirt. Then it is as simple as recording your phone’s audio with something like the default voice memos app on iOS and doing a quick clap sync when you start recording. 

Both of these ideas have saved me some major money and hopefully they can save you money as well. That said, there are plenty of ways to save money and it all comes down to being creative and finding ways to do X idea without Y equipment because Y equipment is going to make you broke.

History has shown us many changes in the way people consume content. Many centuries ago it was printed words, one century ago it was the radio. From there it went to television and finally the internet took over. The internet was and still is very visually focused, however in recent years audio content has been gaining traction quickly. With inventions like Amazon’s Alexa and the Google Home, along with the integration of smart phone capabilities into car entertainment systems like Apple’s CarPlay, audio content is becoming easier to consume and distribute in a way that will allow you to reach as many ears as possible. A few months ago a few friends and I wanted to start recording podcasts and sharing them with the world (or as many people as would willingly listen to us) and I am going to share how I taught myself how to produce a podcast and how I was able to save some money but still create a good-sounding audio.

Let’s start with microphones. The cheapest option, from what I have gathered over the past few months of recording and editing podcasts, is if you plan to have a podcast with people who are in different rooms or even different houses all together. There are free applications that can make most microphones sound perfectly acceptable for a podcast. Will they sound like perfect studio quality? No, but they are more than good enough to give a podcast a shot and see if it is an idea worth putting more time and money into. 

I recommend using Discord. It is a gaming-focused communication application but it works extremely well for really any kind of communication – and it works wonders for people with lower quality microphones. It has features that let you virtually mix the audio as well. This means that if one person is louder than another you can adjust their individual volumes so that the audio is all balanced and nicer on the ears. Furthermore, it allows there to be one main “host” in charge of recording the podcast and balancing audio while the others only have to worry about opening Discord and speaking. The only catch is that the “host” will likely have to pay up for a better microphone than the rest of the people on the podcast. This is because their audio will be recorded locally and Discord’s audio quality magic will not apply to their track. (A work around could be recording from a separate computer through a separate Discord account which will be a dedicated recording account, although this does complicate things slightly).

Finally, recording the podcast. Once everyone is logged into Discord and balanced it is time to open an application for recording the discord and the host’s own audio. I would recommend Open Broadcasting Software (OBS) which is free to use and is a rather powerful application – though for the purposes of a podcast it is quite simple and we will not be making use of the majority of its capabilities. All you have to do is set the program to record your desktop’s audio as well as your microphone’s input and you have both the host’s audio and the other people on the podcast’s audio. From there, you can balance the host audio to match the other audio by using OBS’s input volume adjustment sliders and everything will be all nice and level once more. After recording, export the file to your favorite editor – something like iMovie works well if you have a Macintosh or DaVinci Resolve for Windows users. All you need to do is adjust audio levels and/or make some cuts at the beginning and end of the podcast and then export.

Many individuals and businesses get into the realm of photography and video / audio production and immediately jump to trying to come up with creative ideas that will interest as many people as possible. Now I am not about to discourage this, especially for those who are naturally creative, but for those of you – like me – who are excited to learn and attempt new skills but lack the creativity to come up with a project to apply them to, let me offer an alternative. Personally, I would much rather see someone gain real skills in the production world instead of “waiting for an idea to hit them in the face.” 

So how do you gain those skills? If the title was not clear enough, the answer is one word: document – which applies extremely well to businesses and freelancers. Content for marketing helps businesses extremely well, and the content they have to produce is simple – them making, growing, and/or running the business. By documenting the process of starting a business you are providing yourself with so much. Not only are you able to cut it up into small clips and post it to social media platforms for posts but you are also building a brand image that encourages your customers and community to be more involved. They can feel like they were a part of some of the meetings you have and can comment or like what it is that was said. Additionally, you have recordings that you as the business leader can look back to and learn from or simply be able to show where it all started and how far you have come to your staff and your customers.

As for freelancers, showing the process of being a freelance video producer, photographer, etc. can really make your clients feel connected to your journey and more willing to hire you for work. You may seem more like a friend that they want to support and they get good quality work out of it as well. Even creatives agree that documenting provides many more minutes of content than creating something. When a director says cut and let’s do another take they are spending hours on maybe a few minutes of the overall film whereas with documenting it is all real-time one take and you just cut what you do not want to share / is not relevant to the post you are trying to share.