Pricing Professional Photography Jobs

One of the ongoing challenges in professional photography is setting your prices. Charge too

much and you won't have enough customers, charge too little and you can end up not eating.

First accept that there are always going to be people willing to undercut your prices. While

you need to be competitive in your pricing, it's more important to be flexible. There's a risk in

low-balling estimates for jobs without attaching conditions to the work as some jobs can

balloon out of control; flights can get held up, illness strikes, and traffic happens. All those

can make jobs cost more and take longer than you anticipated.

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If you have more than one way to price a job, and you've worked these out in advance so

you know they're all profitable, you can sometimes save a job you might otherwise have lost

and not put yourself at risk of working indefinitely for little money.

Flat Rate Jobs This pricing model is simple and convenient and clients like having an amount certain theycan count on the job costing. Sometimes called a “day rate” for photographers, it usuallyincludes rights to all the images you take, which you basically hand over to the client aftersome basic post-processing. While it's simple, it's also the kind of bid that's most likely to run into extra work. It's not at allunusual to have events run long and sometimes, when someone finds out there's a paidphotographer on board, they'll want group shots after the event, which can run into hours ofextra work. With a flat rate job you need to have a written contract that spells out exactly what the clientis getting for their money and what is not covered. It should also cover how and when you getpaid and include at least part of the payment up front. Depending on where you live, it mightbe a good idea to throw in a clause that says if you have to sue to collect that you can alsorecover attorney fees and collection costs.

Hourly Jobs Bidding an hourly rate can be very effective and it puts pressure on the client to minimize theamount of time you spend hanging around. The risk is the client will figure out how to pack allyour work into 30 furious minutes of shooting. Again, a contract can be a lifesaver and should set a minimum amount of time and spell outthings like breaks, lunch and delivery times for the completed product. In my contracts is aclause that says if everyone else is being fed, the photographer gets fed, too. That's fair, butit's also negotiable if the client complains about it. Itemized Jobs These kind of gravy jobs are becoming increasingly rare. It's basically your opportunity tocharge a small upfront fee and then tack on fees for every line item on an invoice. I don'tknow anyone outside of the big shops shooting for advertising agencies that even getcontracts for these kinds of jobs anymore, but you should know what all these costs are aspart of running your business anyway. I tend to use this type of contract when a client has grand expectations and wants to useagency models, permitted venues and other really expensive add-ons. Charge By The Picture I would only use this as a last ditch attempt to salvage a client determined to lowball thecontract. Basically it says you're charging X amount per image the client ends up using,hoping the client ends up liking the photos and chooses to keep a lot of them. Again, the devil is in the contract details. I would try to set a sliding scale so the first 5 or 10cost a lot and then get progressively cheaper the more they opt to keep. You can tryspecifying a minimum number of photos, but that sort of defeats the purpose of per-imagepricing. One clause to definitely include, is that you're the exclusive professionalphotographer for the event. Otherwise, you're going to find someone there taking picturesand charging by the hour while they use you as a per-image backup. To do this you need to track your costs per image on flat rate and hourly jobs and then add afudge factor for clients motivated to select as few pictures as possible. In any of these job bids you have to know your costs and profit margins. You have to knowhow much time you spend doing post-processing and how much add-on services cost toprovide and arrange. Always, always insist on a written contract and keep pages of clausesyou can cut and paste to make contracts specific for the job. Be flexible, be negotiable, but don't give anyone a blank check as far as your time goes.