Short YouTube clip (Eric Deeran) giving practical advice: use everything you have—include work you created for free in your portfolio and say you’ve worked with the client—unless the client explicitly paid for and restricted reuse. Speaker frames this as a personal rule-of-thumb about leveraging work for business benefit.
I would use everything you have, man. I honestly, I would take everything you have because even though you created it for free, so, like, you have to use it to benefit yourself. Now, if they paid 20 grand for it and they specifically said, I don't want you using this in your stuff, that would be a different story. But in this case, the whole purpose of shooting it is to benefit you and your business. So I would use everything you have, and I would say that you've worked with them because you officially have worked with them. Nobody needs to know that you weren't paid for it or it was spec. That's my rule of thumb. Like.
