A little over a year ago, I started an experiment to see if I could partially fund this website and my YouTube channel through Patreon. When I first started it, I’ll admit that I didn’t really know what I was doing, and so for the first few months I floundered. Now that I’ve been doing it for a while, it’s time to re-launch it, with more benefits, more tiers and a better experience.

I recently read an interesting post on Medium about the advantages of side projects. In the case of the article I read, it was talking about web development, but it occurred to me that the same thing can be true of photography. Depending on your business model, a side project could actually be quite beneficial to you.

Until this January, if you wanted to sell digital image downloads from your own photography website, and you were based in the EU, it was a relatively simple process. You could host your images on one of the services which offer simple ways to sell downloads to your clients, such as Photoshelter, SmugMug or Zenfolio. However, since the new EU Vat rules came in to effect in January, if you use any of these services to sell images to a customer in the EU, you may be breaking the law. The simple reason is that none of these services support the necessary vat rules.