photo credit: PetroleumJelliffe

I was sent a link to a video on YouTube this week by a friend who laughed and said “this always happens to me”. I don’t know who made this video but it shows the kind of problems many photographers face on a daily basis. Especially in this current recession.

Take a look at the video below – heard this all before?

Unless I’ve missed the point, what this video illustrates so well is the way many clients want top class products for low class fees. They expect to get the best of the best for the least price possible. This is incredibly prevalent in the creative industries where creativity is often viewed as a commodity and not something of value.

In each of the scenarios we saw, the restaurant, the hairdressers, the game store; the client wanted to enjoy the creativity and art of the creator, but didn’t want to pay for it! I always find it astounding that someone can try to lowball a creative without second thought. Yet they wouldn’t try to buy a Mercedes if they only had budget for a Ford. They wouldn’t go into their local foodstore and try and buy a whole smoked salmon for the cost of a budget brand tin of tuna.

But when it comes to paying for creativity, production and ideas – they feel no shame. Some even ask us to work for free and pretend this is a good thing by offering us a credit line! See why credit lines aren’t worth the paper they’re written on here.

The lowballing usually comes in via a couple of different avenues. Either they want us to shoot for a ridiculously cheap rate or they want us to throw in “all-rights” granting usage forever and a day or even a combination of the two (that’s when you’ve got a real lowballer!).

So what can we, as creatives (and I include all those of us who provide creative services not just photographers) do about it? How can we fight back?

I believe we have two options.

Option 1: Turn down the assignment.

There is nothing wrong with saying “I’m afraid I might be outside your budget”. A client who can’t see the value your images may bring to their business is not one you want to be working for. You’re in business. Your business objectives are to make money. If you don’t you’re not doing this as a business :) If you book yourself up with low-paying gigs where you’re giving your time away cheap and/or you are granting a very loose licence for not a lot of money you’re working cheap and you’ll stay working cheap. It’s a vicious cycle to break because you get known as “the cheap guy”.

In business “time is money“. If your time is taken up with low paying gigs you’ll never make any money unless you work a 60 hour week. You could do that in an office but with all the added benefits of sick-pay, a company car, 4 weeks holiday and a decent pension. You get none of those business benefits for free as a photographer. So it doesn’t make any sense to work as a low paid employee when you run your own business. Make your valuable time work for you.

It’s a hard call – especially in a recession. I appreciate that. Do you take the paltry offer of a low day rate while signing over essentially an RF licence for a bespoke shoot OR say “No, sorry – the best I can do is £X for Y usage”. I believe the latter is the right course to take. You want your client base to come to you because of your photography and not because you’re throwing in everything for a cheap rate. But sometimes you might take the former because you want the gig and you can see it’s a low rate but there might be secondary markets to sell the work on to as well.

Option 2: Lower the production values accordingly.

If your client only has the budget for a Ford then shoot them a Ford. Don’t shoot them a Mercedes for the price of a Ford! PP get’s a lot of enquiries from people who see my website, love the images that have a high production value (by production value I mean styling, lighting, post-production and retouching) and want to hire me to shoot the same for them. Once we start pricing up the assignment it becomes clear that they can’t afford that level of production.

I then depends on how I feel about the project. That decides my next move. I always explain that the production values in the images they like are high and that for the budget they are offering I can’t produce images like that. Sometimes I offer to shoot for their budget or somewhere inbetween (always barter ok!) but at a lower production value if the project interests me.

I never shoot for all-rights though. Irrespective of budget, in the long term all-rights is always a bad deal for the photographer.

In conclusion then, either stick to your guns and seek out the clients who do see the value in your images or modify your shooting to fit the budget. Whatever you do, make sure that if you’re shooting a low budget gig then give the client low budget imagery. Don’t turn up with a crew and 10 packs if it’s the budget for a snapper with a flashgun. Make it quick to produce and get it out the door fast. Invoice it and move on. That’s what they’ve paid for. Give nothing more.

Don’t let the flattery that they “love your work” hide the fact that they don’t actually want to pay for it.

As Jodie Foster once said: “Quid pro quo Dr Lecter…”

PP

If you found this article helpful you may also like to read:

• Alamy announce a ‘Find a Photographer’ service (1)
• Why photo credit lines aren’t worth the paper they’re written on (6)
• Fight for your right to licence your pixels for a proper fee (2)
• Assignment Photography: How to charge and price up assignments – part two (4)
• Assignment Photography: How to charge and price up assignments – part three (1)

photo credit: Lili Vieira de Carvalho

Welcome to the final part of the tutorial on pricing up assignment photography. This part is going to show you how to apply your base usage rate (BUR) to assign license extensions for re-use of your images in a real world example.

In part four of this tutorial we priced up an initial licence for a commission to shoot a Fitness Centre brochure.

We granted a one year use for brochures and web in the UK as our initial licence included within our shoot fee.

How to handle a request for re-use or a licence extension

The images are delivered and you’ve been paid. Six months later your client calls you and says they want to run the images again in fitness magazines in the UK as advertisements. They are also building a fitness centre in Germany and want to use your images in a German edition of the brochure and they want to reprint the brochure next year, but only for the UK, so need a one year extension to the licence.

Lets refer to our handy re-use fees table. This one is produced (and is ©) the Association of Photographers (AoP) based in the UK. The table shows you guidelines for how to price up the additional license uses. It is freely available to download as a pdf from the AoP copyright4clients site here. It is designed to allow you to take your initial Base Usage Rate (BUR) figure and use the table as a guide to price the licence extensions.

Lets look at this table in detail. Click the thumbs to enlarge.

List of additional media types and time periods

List of additional territories

Each table has a range of percentages (%) upon which to base your negotiations. The AoP recognise that in any business there must be room for negotiation so this table is used as a starting point for those negotiations. It gives you, the photographer the confidence to price fairly for additional usage. It gives the client the knowledge that you are not plucking figures out of the air.

Using this table to price up our assignment re-usage example

Our client wants to buy the following additional usages:

1) UK magazine advertisements for 3 months
2) German version of the same brochure
3) One additional year’s usage for UK only

In part four we set our BUR at £1500

1) UK Magazine advertisements: Call up the media types page and look down the column until we see “press includes magazines, newspapers etc.” Look along the row. Additional media types within the initial use period are charged at 100% of BUR. But our client wants 3 months use only for three ads in a couple of magazines.

In this case I would charge 33% of BUR for 3 months UK magazine advertising. 33% of £1500 = £495

2) German version of the same brochure: Call up the territories page and select “single additional country”. Look in the “principal media” column as we’ve already licenced for the brochure media type for use in the UK. The table recommends 20-100%.

In this case I would charge (depends on the client size of course) 50% of BUR for additional territory = Germany. 50% of £1500 = £750

3) One additional year’s usage for UK only: Call up the media types page and look down the column until we see “Brochures” Look along the row. Additional year after licence period is charged at 25-50% of BUR. Look down the media type column for “Internet”. Look along the row. Additional year after licence period is charged at 30-100% of BUR.

The client wants both UK brochures and internet for an additional year. Internet is fast becoming the most widely viewed advertising media (especially for high-traffic websites) so you should not see Internet use as being a lesser option than print.

In this case I would charge 75% of BUR for the additional year UK brochures and web use (giving the client a 25% discount on the additional year) 75% of £1500 = £1,125

Total cost to client for additional uses = £495 + £750 + £1,125 = £2,370

But hang on PP, that’s more than they paid you for the original shoot….how can that be right?

The golden rules of usage

a) Use of the image not time it took to shoot

Remember, the original shoot we priced up in part four was for one year UK only in two media. We undertook the shoot based upon that usage. We priced the shoot based upon that licence to use. This is the essence of usage. The more widely an image is used, the more you, the photographer should receive. This is not Royalty Free and this is why assignments should never be priced based upon time.

Also realise that in this example, your client’s spend for advertising in magazines and printing/distribution of a second language edition is going to be far in excess of your additional usage fees.

b) Use the BUR system as a way of creating building blocks of pricing so that you can handle any request for any use, any time, any territory with confidence and the ability to negotiate.

Final thoughts….

That just about wraps up the five part series on pricing assignment photography. I hope you found it useful and it has given you a methodology to be able to price your photography based upon the benefit it gives to your client; not the time it takes you to shoot.

If your client is buying extra usage, multiple medias, territories or time then by all means haggle, barter, negotiate. Assignment photography is a business like any other. Businesses do deals every day of the week. Nothing wrong with negotiation, just make sure you always get something out of it.

Quid pro quo Dr Lecter? ;)

PP

p.s. if you need to start from the beginning here’s Part One

If you found this article helpful you may also like to read:

• Assignment Photography: How to charge and price up assignments – part four (16)
• Alamy announce a ‘Find a Photographer’ service (1)
• Fight for your right to licence your pixels for a proper fee (2)
• Why photo credit lines aren’t worth the paper they’re written on (6)
• Understanding licensing types: Royalty Free image licences (1)

photo credit: Lili Vieira de Carvalho

Welcome to the next part of the tutorial on pricing up assignment photography. This part is going to show you how to apply your base usage rate (BUR) to assign a license in a real world example.

The previous three parts of this mini tutorial showed you how to:

1) avoid pricing by making it up as you go along
2) work out how much you need to earn to stay in business
3) understand the need for a constant figure for each assignment to enable you to fairly price usage licenses

Base Usage Rate (BUR)

I’ve already mentioned that the BUR figure is a constant BUT that it can be a different constant. Indeed it has to be, else you’re going to end up charging a PR shoot the same as an advertising shoot and that’s not right. So using you NTMPD figure as a base I want you to arrive at four separate BUR figures for assignment types:

PR
Editorial
Commercial
Advertising

My test NTMPD figure was £480 GBP ($960 USD). This is what I need to make per day if I shoot for 104 days a year, just to break even.

So our BUR figure needs to be more than that right?

Not necessarily! Why? Because we have a range of photography assignments we undertake. We do everything from PR to Advertising so our BUR should suit the job. This is so that:

a) you don’t price yourself out of the market
b) you don’t undercut yourself
c) you can charge according to the value to the client (i.e. usage)

Here’s my example BUR figures:

PR £250 ($500)
Editorial £500 ($1000)
Commercial £1000 ($2000)
Advertising £2500 ($5000)

Remember these figures are your “creative fee” only. They do not include expenses or the hire of equipment , models, catering etc. These should be charged separately on your invoice at cost or a reasonable mark-up. Every job will have different expenses attached but your creative fee should remain fairly constant within that area of operations.

Here’s where this gets tricky. There’s a big difference between the USA and the UK. In the USA usage fees are often charged on top of the creative fees and expenses. In the UK the initial usage fees are normally included in the creative fee. However, the concept of BUR still works for the US.

Okay let’s make up a fictitious assignment and test this out.

A small local design agency has called you and asked for a price to do a shoot for their client. It’s a series of shots in a newly built fitness/health centre. The agency is looking for about 10 shots to be delivered. They estimate it will take half a day (note: never let the client tell you how long it’s going to take!).

So where do we start?

The first thing to rule out is charging on time. Charging for your time is not going to make you rich, and it’s very unlikely even to make you a living wage. Charging for your product is what you are aiming for. If you want to know why charging time is bad business for photographers read this post here.

The first question you should ask the agency is about the usage of the images. Brochure, web, advertisements in the press?

The three key things you need to know are:

1) Where are the images going to be used? List all “media” (where media = each type of placement i.e. brochure, web, press ads would be three media)

2) How long are they going to be used for? You need to know the length of time the images are going to be used for.

3) What territories are the images going to be used? (i.e. state/county, national, international or country, europe, world) etc.

Armed with these three pieces of vital information (you shouldn’t be pricing without knowing these) we can start the formula.

Pricing the example job

Lets look at the roster of BUR charges we set again:

PR £250 ($500)
Editorial £500 ($1000)
Commercial £1000 ($2000)
Advertising £2500 ($5000)

The usage needed is for a brochure, website use and possibly adverts in the press in the future but they are not sure…..

PP note: this is very common. Often clients request copyright or “unlimited use” because they don’t know exactly what they are going to use the images for. Sometimes, if you have produced some great images, once seen the client decides to use them in extended advertising or point of sale, or other media. By licensing your usage, you can charge for each extension of use. But if you granted “unlimited use” at the outset because they said it was “just for a few leaflets” then…….you just lost a load of cash….

So now we know the usage the client needs we pick a BUR creative fee figure to work from. Keep in mind that although the BUR figure is constant (for the purposes of the formula) it can be whatever you like. The BUR is a way of estimating future usage fees. This job is what is known a “below the line” advertising. Its a small local design firm, its a local fitness centre. It’s not a major agency and major client. Its one of those jobs that falls in the middle between regular “commercial” work and true “advertising” work.

So for this example I’m going to set a BUR figure of £1500.

My estimate shows £1500 as the creative fee. This is also noted as the BUR for future usage rates to be based upon. I then add my post-production fees for the 10 master files, a fee for hosting a web gallery, etc etc (this is a whole new tutorial in itself!) plus my expenses.

**Important Bit!**

Under the line item “license to use” (or “licence” if you are in the UK!) we set out what rights are granted. If you need a reminder on what a license looks like:

Download a blank licence to fill in

PP note: as mentioned before – this is where US and UK/Europe seem to divide. There’s no “law of charging” but in my experience US photographers then charge for usage separately from their creative fee, whereas UK/European photographers include the first usage in their creative fee.

Here’s how I would do it.

Licence to use includes: Brochures and web use for 1 year, UK. (Remember its use/time/territories in that order).

Had they only wanted brochures I would have granted: Brochures, 2 years, UK.

Initial Licences: In the UK the AoP (Association of Photographers) recommend granting either one media, one territory for two years – or – two media, one territory for one year

In the US those inital licences would attract further “usage fee” payments. I’m all for usage fees but I do think clients like to see a base usage built into the estimate. Comments from US readers on this would be appreciated.

.Job done…..and that’s all there is to it.

You have set your BUR fee and attached usage conditions to that fee. You have now controlled the usage of your images and charged accordingly. You have rights-managed your images and have the mechanism set up to be able to charge for licence extensions further down the road.

Next time on “How to Price Up assignments”…..

So, we’ve done the fitness centre shoot. It went great. We’ve got ourselves 10 stellar images. Client loves them. They love them so much that six months later they call you and say they want to run the images in fitness magazines in the UK as advertisements. They are also building a fitness centre in Germany and want to use your images in the German brochure and they want to reprint the brochure next year so need a one year extension to the licence.

Q. What are you going to do now? A. Get out your handy re-usage fees table and work out the additional usage fees to charge…..and that will be the subject of the final installment, Part Five.

p.s. if you charge on time or give away unlimited use of your images to clients don’t bother to read part five, it won’t apply to you….. ;)

PP

If you found this article helpful you may also like to read:

• Assignment Photography: How to charge and price up assignments – part five (6)
• Alamy announce a ‘Find a Photographer’ service (1)
• Fight for your right to licence your pixels for a proper fee (2)
• Why photo credit lines aren’t worth the paper they’re written on (6)
• Understanding licensing types: Royalty Free image licences (1)

photo credit: Lili Vieira de Carvalho

In this part of our pricing photography tutorial I am going to start to describe a system for pricing up any assignment you are asked to do based on usage of the images you produce.

In Part One of the tutorial I showed you why making it up as you go along is not a good idea and in Part Two we discussed how you need to know your costs of business to be able to break even before you price to make a profit.

In this section we are going to discuss the pricing strategy. A method that can be applied across all commercial assignment photography sectors.

First PP rule of pricing: there is no rule of pricing

That’s not to say there aren’t methods; like the one I’m going to show you here. But photography is an unregulated business and nearly all practitioners are self-employed and thus there are quite possibly hundreds of ways to price photography assignments.

Over the years my methods changed too. To reflect changing times and copyright legislation. The 1998 Copyright Act in the UK gave us photographers back our copyright. Prior to that the copyright on our images was automatically given to the person paying for the assignment.

So the method I’m going to discuss here is pertinent only to those photographers creating images in countries of the world where copyright is automatically assigned to the creator of the image. For those poor photographers having to hand over their copyright, my commiserations and I hope you charge megabucks for the privilege!

Second PP rule of pricing: you need a constant if you’re going to licence usage

Why?

Well without a constant, a reference point, an agreed baseline, your client is going to think that you’re making it up as you go along. That leads to distrust and that’s the last thing you want. You’re going to be quoting your constant as an agreed creative fee.

Its upon this creative fee that the licences you grant for usage are going to be based.

We’ve already got a constant. But its not the one we quote to the client.

In Part Two we worked out your “need to make per day rate” or NTMPD rate. That was based on 104 shooting days a year. It shows you what you need to make on each of those 104 days to break even.

If you haven’t got this figure yet – go do it now.

That figure is constant. It is a baseline that you apply to the variable (104 shooting days). You shoot more days, you can afford to earn less and break even. You shoot less days, you need to charge more to break even. Except we don’t want to play it like that. Nobody wants to work 365 days a year for $50 a day do they? :) So the constant we got for break even should stay rooted and fixed. If we shoot less then our constant is wrong and should be higher. If we shoot more then we make profit.

But we are going to work out a profitable constant for our markets that makes us profit on our projected 104 days shooting.

Third PP rule of pricing: sectorize your market

PR grin and grab photography is not going to pay as much as above-the line Advertising photography. Editorial is not going to pay as much as a below-the-line gig shooting a brochure for a local manufacturing firm. That’s how it is all over the world in every industry. A Kia car is cheaper than a Lexus etc etc..

So although we have a constant we need different constants for different sectors. It’s OK, this is quite common. In fact, IMHO its the best way to know that you are always pitching your prices so that you remain:

a) profitable; and
b) accountable to your client; and
c) with a system that can be applied not only to the assignment and its usage, but to repeat and additional uses of your images too.

The constant you are going to be working with is called your Base Usage Rate (BUR) and I’ll show you how you apply that in Part Four.

PP

If you found this article helpful you may also like to read:

• How to deal with clients who want your photography for the cheapest possible price (3)
• Assignment Photography: How to charge and price up assignments – part two (4)
• Assignment Photography: How to charge and price up assignments – part one (2)
• Alamy announce a ‘Find a Photographer’ service (1)
• Why photo credit lines aren’t worth the paper they’re written on (6)

photo credit: Lili Vieira de Carvalho

Part One of this mini tutorial showed (by way of a rather spliffy video) the way not to go about pricing up an assignment. Poor old Mark Focus (great name eh?) decided that making it up as he went along was the best policy. And with disastrous results. He ended up pitching so low that he not only lost the job – he lost all the respect of his potential client as well.

So where do we start pricing up an assignment? What is the basis of our calculations?

How much do you need to earn?

Yes indeed this is and should be the base of all your calculations. As every business knows, it cannot spend more than it earns else it shall go bankrupt or insolvent in a very short period of time.

The whole basis of business in a capitalist economy is that you charge more than you spend in order to make a profit.

…and in order to do that first you must know how much you need to earn.

Note (and this is really important): need not want.

How do we calculate your base expenditure so we can see what you need to earn?

Remember when you got your first job. You got paid a salary. You took the job based on that salary and for a while you were happy. Then you looked around for another job because you wanted to earn more money.

Capture that feeling.

Now, as a self-employed photographer, what salary do you want to pay yourself?

Write that figure down in whatever currency you use.

Now add how much you need each year to pay for your

>studio rental
>business & equipment insurance
>advertising & marketing
>rentals
>transport costs (be that car or van or both)
>employees
>investment in new equipment
>other regular expenditure associated with your business

Got that? Good. Write that figure down.

Lets call it: Annual Expenditure

OK, now for the basis of this I’m going to use an example figure. Yours may be way in excess of this or way below it. Different photographers will have different expenses in running their business. I recognise that. But whatever your figure is – the principle remains the same:

You must know what you need to earn just to break even before you can understand how to make a profit

Take your Annual Expenditure figure and divide it by 104.

Why 104?

104 is the average amount of billable days that a commercial photographer can charge for in a given year (of 365 days obviously!).

Lets call the resulting figure our “need to make per day rate” or NTMPD rate

Update: 5th Feb 2008: Many thanks to Bruce Elliott for pointing out a web resource that will do this calculation for you!

Click the link below and fill the table in then input 104 shooting days. This will ensure you don’t miss any expenditure that you pay but forgot about!

https://www.nppa.org/professional_development/business_practices/cdb/cdbcalc.cfm

Example:

My Annual Expenditure rate is £50k GBP ($100k USD)

Divide by 104

My NTMPD rate is £480 GBP ($960 USD)

Still with me?! I hope so. I’ve just shown you how to:

Calculate a figure that will allow you to break even based on a shooting year of 104 days.

But what if you don’t shoot 104 days a year? Then simply replace my 104 with however many days you shoot and bill for. The 104 is the average and in our calculation its also the constant.

But we don’t want to break even do we? We want to make a profit? That’s what companies do right? That’s what part three is going to address.

How to take your NTMPD rate and use it in calculations and negotiations with clients to not only let you break even but make a healthy profit; while (of course) retaining control of your copyright and rights as a creative.

One final thing…..

Your NTMPD rate is not a “day rate”. It is simply a way of arriving at a figure we must be aware of (your client needs know nothing about what you need to make – its nothing to do with them).

We don’t charge day rates. Day rates and charging on time loses you money.

Why?

Bone up on this post until Part Three to see why:

Don’t base your photography rates on time

PP

If you found this article helpful you may also like to read:

• How to deal with clients who want your photography for the cheapest possible price (3)
• Assignment Photography: How to charge and price up assignments – part three (1)
• Assignment Photography: How to charge and price up assignments – part one (2)
• Alamy announce a ‘Find a Photographer’ service (1)
• Why photo credit lines aren’t worth the paper they’re written on (6)

photo credit: Lili Vieira de Carvalho

Just how do you go about charging for your photography? Is there a secret to pricing assignment photography work? How much can I charge? Is there a formula?

All these questions and more are asked on an almost daily basis by new photographers and those just starting in the business. Its a question that you must get to grips with if you are to survive in the very competitive world of assignment (also known as commissioned) photography.

Part One: What not to do

Part one is very, very simple. There’s not a lot to this part. There’s one thing you can do to completely kill any chance of getting decent work and its portrayed nicely here in the video.

Watch the following video clip and do not ever do this either in person or on the phone to a client!

Part two will show you why making it up as you go along is likely to lose you money and lose you clients; why negotiation need not be a desparate scrabble to the bottom as we saw in the video; and why charging what you are worth can earn you respect and repeat work from clients.

There is a formula for pricing photography, its not hard and its not a secret.

Bookmark this blog or subscribe to our RSS feed to see the next part of the tutorial – Part Two is here and follow the links at the end to parts three four and five.

PP

If you found this article helpful you may also like to read:

• How to deal with clients who want your photography for the cheapest possible price (3)
• Assignment Photography: How to charge and price up assignments – part two (4)
• Assignment Photography: How to charge and price up assignments – part three (1)
• Alamy announce a ‘Find a Photographer’ service (1)
• Why photo credit lines aren’t worth the paper they’re written on (6)

photo credit: fdecomite

Lots of people make the same mistakes everyone makes when they start out shooting commissioned photography……they charge on their time.

“Oh yes I think that will take about an hour” they say. And they charge an hour. This is a natural reaction when a client asks “what’s your day rate?” or sometimes the client will say “I think it should only take an hour”.

I’m going to show you why this way of pricing photography is likely to make you less money in the long run and give your clients the opportunity to question your business practices.

The primary reasons photographers and other creatives should not charge on time is because:

• You’re not a plumber or a mechanic, you’re shooting something to make your client money. Your image has a value beyond that of your time taken to shoot it.
• It has your creative input regardless of whether its a widget on a white background or a multi lit set up location shoot. And your creative input is going to make it look so appealing that your client will sell more widgets….etc.

**If you price on time, you shoot yourself in the foot big time. The faster you do something, the less you earn.**

Even though they may not know what goes into photography (let’s face it – most have only experienced a point and shoot) your clients will have a certain “expectation” of what you can achieve. Of course they won’t know anything about the work that goes into lighting those tricky reflective macro objects they want shot, or lighting that group shot outside in the noon sun – but they’ll think “Oh its easy he’s got all the gear” he should be able to do it in X hours.

The problem you get from the very start is that its possible to get into arguments about how much you should be producing per hour. When really the onus should be on your client to be working out that at a charge of Y per shot, they can afford Z shots in their budgets etc etc. If you charge per shot delivered you’ll immediately overcome any tricky negotiations. More importantly, you’ll give your client the ability to budget the shoot properly.

n.b. I’m concentrating on time -vs- a per-image cost in this post and not factoring in usage of the images though the usage would only affect the unit-price of each image and not the rationale of charging per image instead of time.

But don’t most people work on time?

OK, so employees on a production line work on time. They get paid a set amount for a 40 hour week regardless of output. But think about their employers for a moment? Their employers (the big company, the owners of the business – just like you) don’t sell you a widget in the shops based on the amount of time it took for their employees to assemble it do they?

No, they sell you a unit price. Else when they went automated or outsourced to India years ago they would have gone out of business fast and you’be choosing to buy the pair of shoes that Mary made because she was twice as fast as Jack at putting them together so the company sells them cheaper. Don’t see that happening do you?

Can you see what I’m driving at here?

After all the photography, lighting, retouching are done (however much input you’ve had) – and whether you deliver images electronically or prints we are selling a product like a manufacturer – our images – for specific uses – so price them per shot (based on the usage of course which is another post entirely..!!).

“OK PP“, said a poster on DPReview, “just how do you work out how much per shot then?“

How I do my estimating is to:

• work out the complexity of the shoot
• ask myself whether I’m going to need any assistants, extra gear, lighting etc
• look at the usage that the client wants to buy
• guesstimate the time it will take to shoot (you can’t avoid this – you’ll know if its an hour or a day believe me)
• estimate theretouching/computer time needed per shot
• add all this up and cut by the number of images to be created
• +/- a % for discount on volume

Advantages of the per-shot approach:

• If you finish early nobody is watching; if you want to take more time that’s up to you. Either way – no penalty.
• Additional shots ordered/delivered are charged at the full or discounted rate yet they’re already captured
• It will stop the “we want everything on CD” type client in their tracks or you’ll earn a lot of money…
• Clients hate paying “digital fees” so roll them up into the per-shot rate
• It allows your client to budget the shoot properly (focusses the buyer on the value of each image)

Conclusion:

If you levy a charge per shot delivered then when you get better and quicker a few months down the line (and you will as technology advances) then you earn more money in the same time taken – not less;

or if the shoot is quicker than you expected (from your in-head estimating) then you earn the same money for less time taken (and no arguing with the client over whether you sneaked off early…!)

PP

If you found this article helpful you may also like to read:

• How to deal with clients who want your photography for the cheapest possible price (3)
• Assignment Photography: How to charge and price up assignments – part two (4)
• Assignment Photography: How to charge and price up assignments – part three (1)
• Assignment Photography: How to charge and price up assignments – part one (2)
• Alamy announce a ‘Find a Photographer’ service (1)