Corporate Social Responsibility

CSR for a small photography business?

That’s what we’ve been asking ourselves for a while now, so today the 1st of June 2024, we felt that it was about time that we’d put our thoughts and past actions into words! After all we have lots in place already, so why not inform you about it?

“I am only small, so I can’t make a difference”

As a commercial photography business, it’s all about marketing, so it is fair to say that we have heard about the term ‘greenwashing’. Greenwashing is a way to make products more appealing to customers who care about the environment whilst doing things that are harmful. It’s a term that is often used against large corporates, for instance in the fossil fuels industry. If you are a big business you’re impact can be huge in both ways. As a small business we only have little impact, but there are lots of us, so every little helps.

So, are we greenwashing as well? That’s not for us to judge, we’ll leave that to you, so here it goes:

Corporate Social Responsibility at STUDIOVHF

Environmental sustainability

• Renewable energy

  Like any small office we have the lights on, heat the space in winter and cool it in the summer. So in that respect we don’t differ from any other small business. Of course we have camera batteries that needs charging and studioflashes, some with a power of 1200w/s, but as said, they only use energy a split of a second. What does set us apart, I suppose, from other small businesses, is our usage and storage of data. Currently we have about 20 TB of data on the main server and run a daily back-up on another server in a different location. So 40TB in total! In addition to that we have about 110.000 images online on the flickr website, equating 1,3 TB. Apparently the energy usage for storing 1 TB of data is 17.1 kWh per year for a HDD (source: Stack Exchange). So for us this means more than 706 KW. It is therefore good to know that our solar panels on both locations more then compensate for this energy usage. In addition to this, they power the heating, ventilation and air conditioning systems as well.

• Travel

  In theory we are a fan of local by local, so if we buy a product or a service we like to do that locally. Local businesses employ local people, support local events and sponsor local sportsclubs, cultural organisations etc. However we are also a fan of the so called global economy, because that spreads the wealth further afield. STUDIOVHF has been in the photography business for many years and the demand for images has increased tremendously. Obviously supply as well and not just by professionally trained photographers. Currently in the Netherlands, there are about 42.500 photographers registered at the chamber of commerce, most of them part-time. For STUDIOVHF this means that we need more jobs from national and international customers, otherwise we simply cannot survive. We also try to offer a variety of different photography disciplines and do our utmost not to be average.

  This means lot’s of travel. We are proud to say that we have assignments from Copenhagen to Southampton and everything in between. For years we have done this by road in an F-reg (‘87) Land Rover 110 and we’ve used a lot of airlines as well. I have always said that driving an old car is more sustainable than buying a new one, because the production of a new car is much more polluting than keeping the old one running. Obviously that is just an excuse to keep on driving the good old Landy! These days with the low emission zones in cities, the costs of fuel and the need for comfort and ergonomics whilst driving long distances we don’t show up in a cool car anymore, but in a boring full Hybrid, which to date is just as reliable as the Land Rover 😀. We have also limited air travel and use the ferry more. Taking into account our solar panels, the next car could be fully electric if the range improves (and the infrastructure in the UK keeps up).