I’ll keep this as brief as possible, and then we’ll be right back to our regularly scheduled programming.
We love cameras and photography, and since 2014 we’ve been publishing some of the best camera and photography content around. As we’ve grown, doing this has become continually more expensive (we’ve got five writers, a large subscription list, and many other expenses). To now, these expenses have been largely covered by me, James, founder of CP.
We need the site to start supporting itself financially so that we can grow into an even more incredible resource for our readers and photo geeks at large. Our goals are to begin producing video content and podcasts, hosting community events, increasing our post frequency to a daily schedule (it’s every other day now), and much more. To do all of this with the same polished production value and focused quality you’ve come to value and expect from Casual Photophile will take money.
We don’t want to start running ads on top of our gorgeous posts and we don’t want to make the site subscription based – we want our content to be free and beautiful. So with extreme humility and reluctance, we’re turning to our readers. Utilizing Patreon will allow us to keep our content available for free for everyone, while allowing our biggest fans and those who appreciate what we’re doing the opportunity to pay us a small amount for the quality content we put out every week.
With small monthly contributions from our Patrons (think of this as a voluntary subscription), we’ll be able to pay our writers to produce more frequent content (those amazing articles you love), hire a video team to produce video reviews and fun features, pay a sound guy to produce a podcast, and develop a line of merchandise (shirts, hats, actual useful stuff to enhance your photographic lifestyle). We’ll also be able to reward our Patrons with exclusive content, discounts in our camera shop, free film, and more. All of this could spring from contributions of just $1-10 per month.
We think our content is the best around – fact checked, in-depth, entertaining, and well-written – a rarity these days. If you think the same, and if what we do means something to you or has helped you enjoy the hobby of cameras and photography, consider helping us grow so that we can offer you even more amazing stuff.
Whether you become a Patron or not, thank you for visiting Casual Photophile and allowing us to share in your hobby. And if you do decide to become a Patron, we’ll be sure to reward you with Patron-only content, special coupons at our camera shop, free rolls of film delivered monthly, and our eternal thanks.
If you like what we’re doing and want to see it continue and grow, check out our Patreon page.
Okay, enough of that. We won’t mention this again.
Follow Casual Photophile on Facebook and Instagram
[Some of the links in this article will direct users to our affiliates at B&H Photo, Amazon, and eBay. By purchasing anything using these links, Casual Photophile may receive a small commission at no additional charge to you. This helps Casual Photophile produce the content we produce. Many thanks for your support.]
The problem I have with Patreon is that, when I made monthly contributions to another site, I got hit every month for an exchange rate fee. If I was doing it wrong then some tips to non-US readers on how not to incur fees might be handy. However, if the fees cannot be avoided you may be preventing overseas readers from contributing every month. Perhaps an annual subscription might be a better alternative in this case.