This is a question I am asked often…well, not exactly like that, but more like “how much should I charge?”. Sound familiar?
What some budding photographers do is decide to price from the bottom up. They calculate the cost of product they produce (prints, albums, DVD, etc) and then mark it up a little and that’s the price.
If you want to live the life of a starving artist, that’s exactly how you do it. But, if you want to live a decent life, make decent money, have children, travel, drive a good car, and enjoy your life, you have to think differently about what photography is, and what it is that you are selling. First, I’ll start with prints, because that seems to trouble most new photographers. If you want to get into the paper business, then go ahead. This way, you can buy paper in bulk from a large paper mill, mark it up, and sell it. But, in order to be profitable, you’d probably have to sell quite alot of paper. But, photographers don’t sell paper. Photographers sell images. It just so happens that the images are typically delivered on paper. But, we’re not selling paper.
The reason this point is so important is because now you have to figure out what your images are worth. The worth of the image is independent of the paper it’s on. So, if a 4×6 piece of paper cost you $.24 or something, it would be silly to sell that for $1. Clients will pay quite alot for a 4×6 of little Johnny on that 4×6 piece of paper; because they are buying the image of little Johnny, not the paper.
I’m not going to tell you how to price, you have to figure that out on your own. But, I am telling you to stop costing-up your pricing when it comes to prints. Sell at a rate where you are happy; the sky’s the limit.
Regarding services: how much you charge has alot to do with what you deliver. What I mean by this is the more you are valued in the market, the more you can charge. However, don’t let that discourage you as a new photographer. In a recent PPA (Professional Photographers Association) study, most photographers barely make enough to live. This is not the market doing this, this is artists doing it to themselves. Nothing is free. Everything you do has a cost associated with it. The cost is your opportunity cost; that is, what is the price of doing something else. In other words, if you’d rather spend time with your family on a Saturday, rather than work, at what price would working make you happy to go work instead of being with your family? Think about it.
Also, be sure when you are pricing your services, to include everything. I see photographers only pricing the time they are shooting, forgetting that there is processing time, meeting with the clients, shipping costs (of shipping prints, CD’s, or whatever), and simply your value. Make sure you consider everything. If you go shoot a portrait session, and that shoot takes 2 hours. Plus, you had to drive 45 minutes to the location, then you come home, download the images, work on the, categorize them, prep the proofs for viewing, and all the other work you do; that’s YOUR time. Charge for it. If you only charge for the 2 hour shoot, you are losing out on a ton of opportunity. You might have spent an actual 5 hours on that 2 hour portrait session. So, you should be charging for 5 hours.
Some photographers will have various rates for calculating their fees. For instance, for a portrait session, you might decide that you charge $200 per hour for shooting, and $100 for non-shooting time (getting everything ready, driving to the location, meeting, etc). So, in the above example, you might charge $500 for the session. There are various ways of doing this, but the main point is to always keep your time in mind.
Another thing to consider is to become as efficient as possible with your time. So, don’t waste it. Get in there, work, and get out. This way, you maintain your profitability as planned.
Lastly, when pricing your services, remember your overhead. You had to buy cameras, lenses, insurance, a computer, monitors, software, fax, phone, car, etc. All these things need to be paid for, and usually, upgraded over time. So, you must charge for them. It’s hard when you are new to the business, but after your first year, you should have some idea of what things cost, and you can now start to include overhead in your pricing model.
There is really no process or standard for how to maximize your profit. It depends upon the goals you set for your business. Just be aware that this is not a commodity business. We are not selling things. Make sure to uncommoditize your business as much as you can. It’s not about the stuff clients get when they hire you, it’s about the images you can produce for them. The more you focus on that aspect and less on the price of stuff, the more successful you will become.
Cheers,
Jerry
