What to charge for pro photography?

[Music] hey this is an episode of picture this our photography podcast you can check it out on your favorite podcasting app this week we're talking about what you should charge for your photography services so zooming you want to go pro we're gonna walk through all the different elements of pricing models and pricing and checking out the competition and whether you should even list the price or not this episode is brought to you by Squarespace whether you need a domain website or online store make your next move with Squarespace they have beautiful award-winning templates and all in one platform it's super easy to use if you can drag and drop you can make your own Squarespace website if you'd like to start your free trial go to Squarespace comm / Toni and you don't even need a credit card it's not a trick you just sign up you get your 14 days and if you decide you want to buy it you can get 10% off with the coupon code portfolio not a trick and you know what you could set up your Squarespace portfolio and actually set up a little store so somebody could give your session fee like right online and book you that's pretty cool I wanted to talk about what to charge because it's a question that we get quite often the most common questions yeah people ask what should I charge for portraits or what should I charge for a wedding and it's a really complicated question and a complicated answer it's 42 the answer to everything yeah I mean it's gonna vary right there's that's the problem there's no one answer we can give there there's no one answer but I realized it was an important topic to cover when we had a friend who was an excellent photographer an excellent person a good business person and they weren't surviving off of their photography because they realized when they did all the math they were charging so little that they couldn't sustain themselves off of their prices so we're gonna take you through everything we're going to address all of your fears whether you're charging too much whether you're charging too little well people take you seriously well people think that you're out of your mind with your prices we're gonna get to all of that we're gonna walk you through it you're gonna feel so safe after this okay talk about the anxiety that people will feel with pricing in general like if you go and you're on one of these forums or people sell cameras probably half the people won't even list a price with it they'll be like I have a D 500 I don't know contact me and talk about the people have a lot of anxiety around naming a price for anything but especially their photography we've learned talking to people about their portfolios like people will choose not to put a price up on their portfolio not because they have some tech like that's some of their sales approach but just because they're too anxious to set a price in stone you might think what if it's too much and then they think it's too much and they don't even call me but maybe I would give them a discount or maybe you think Oh what if it's too little and then someone really rich approaches me and I could actually make money this time and wow what am I going to do people freak out yeah they're afraid their friends are gonna see it and think they're gouging or they're cheap or something and you have to set a price though you don't get out of this you have to set a price even if you decide not to put it on your website that can be okay you said you have to know yourself what the price is gonna be is that when somebody calls you you know what to tell them and you're so certain you don't want someone the calling you go oh wow I don't know maybe I could do it for cheaper if we did this that's nice now you'll know your price and you're gonna feel confident about it after this podcast I believe yeah you can always add discount you guys isn't only 300 but I'll give it to you for a hundred and fifty because you sound nice something like that okay one thing to consider is your location okay it's gonna be let's say you're shooting a wedding or you're doing engagement portraits in New York City you have more people to choose from so you have a bigger audience so if you have a higher price there's probably more people that make more money if you live in a very very small town with no large cities around it sounds like 2,000 people everyone kind of knows each other you might have to take that into consideration when you're pricing your photography if you live in another country you know we know American prices but I don't know what people are doing in India really necessarily so you'll have to do that research and find out what your location can support yeah like if you're in Oklahoma you have to decide how many goats you should charge oh my gosh are you seriously just saying Oklahoma again and we got so many hey it's just an old Texas Oklahoma or I overthink I don't at all I'm just kidding your time right cuz you have to it's gonna take you some time to do this stuff and people undervalue their own time they people especially guys not to be sexist but guys especially think every project is gonna take much less time than it actually takes are you saying that based on our office cuz you in just Center always like this should be done in 20 minutes like it's gonna take a week it's gonna take a week I have a whole lifetime of experience with dudes under estimating things like oh no problem I yeah I live just like 10 minutes away from there I'll meet you there in ten minutes then half an hour later it's optimism but also it sounds really obvious I promise you you don't know exactly how much time things take you you can even get your own even if you work for yourself you can get your own time tracking app as though you're working for someone else and then when you're actually editing clock in and when you're done clock out and I think you'd be really surprised to find you spend far more time than you imagined especially if you enjoy it sometimes I edit a picture and I think all that took me like five minutes and then I actually look at the time and it's been 40 minutes yeah cut to the fast-forward scene of the hands are spinning around the clock and the calendar pages are flying off and the seasons are changing I've grown a beard oh so you might be saying oh 40 minutes maybe you can't charge that maybe that means you have to be more efficient maybe that means you have to find a better workflow maybe it means that you're just not charging enough either way you have to really understand how much time things take and that's not just editing photos that's packing your gear into your car that's talking on the phone with your client and deciding what they want your consultation that's I don't know showing up and setting up the studio or finding the location the actual shoot itself and then of course calling through your photos that takes long and always surprises me how long that takes and then the post-processing yeah plus the delivery and the inevitable percentage of clients that will want you to go back and re-edit something there won't be a hundred percent of them but it's going to be some percentage of them so you have to figure that out I also want to say you mentioned the pre-sales consultation that you're off to do but you have to also factor in the the ones that don't end up being sale your own sales time where you talk to people on the phone and you spent 20 minutes and then they never call you back I think that's part of it that is your time you have to factor in your sales time - yeah not necessarily charging every person for that but you want to find out how many dollars per hour you would potentially be making with a certain amount of clients so that at the end of the year it's not some unliveable amount of money you need to survive I would prefer if you all lived honestly and had food and stuff yeah you and it is like figuring out capacity because most morter photographers aren't going to be working like square 40-hour weeks yeah there's gonna be weeks where you're working five hours I taught piano lessons before this job and I would do the math on how many students I could possibly fit into a day and I just feel like I can't live like I need to make more time on what I'm charging so this could be that type of thing you have to figure out how many clients you could actually serve and and what you'd have to charge to to live and perceived value is a big thing especially in something that's so subjective and so artistic as photography if you were to show people two bottles of wine this is a great example - yes yeah if you get the two buck chuck it's a bottle of wine that's two bucks and you put it up against a bottle of wine that's fifty dollars the client if you said they're both on the house which one do you want everybody's gonna take the $50 one if you said you've already paid for this have a sip of each of these which one tastes better it's the more expensive one that's gonna taste better even if they're exactly the same most of the time people can't tell the difference with wine they might not be able to know the difference with photography but if you are the bargain-basement photographer if you're charging ten bucks and everybody else is charging 200 bucks people are gonna treat you like that I'd think you were junk yep even if the portfolio looks good she's like there's a reason it's cheap right there's some reason we actually kind of ran into this problem with our business because we under priced our books so much yeah that people didn't realize how much of a value actually was I really look a little plug in there but stunning digital photography that you book is ten dollars with 14 hours of video and then we look at all the competition they're charging like 500 dollars for something like for Janelle it's a bit yeah ten dollars we do it is such a bargain I am dumb okay what's our next thing Oh one way you can make yourself look fantastic and really make your pictures look good and increase your perceived value is by presenting your pictures in a good way it's like food right it's all about presentation it's not just the image but it's everything that surrounds it is how the user interacts with it and I think the best way to do that is to set up a website that works really well but you don't want to be a super nerd because you don't want to put hours of your time into learning CSS the easiest way to do that is to go to squarespace.com slash Toni and get a 14-day free trial for a website it'll work on mobile devices it'll have analytics it'll have a store where people can either buy prints or book a session with you and all that is built in for a pretty low monthly fee set it up make your pictures look awesome if you decide you like it only then do you have to give a credit card you can use the coupon code portfolio and it will save you 10% that was an awesome plug thanks and I applaud you for that alone you're a true artist you can see a sample I just updated my north or photography.com your Chelsea NORTHCOM yeah but a ton you should updated it took me like five minutes to switch to a whole new more modern template I know but I always forget until we're down here and I can't leave right now because I'm kind of in the middle of something yeah we get all we get all wait you know a good time hold on let's just have a few moments okay here's another one that seems obvious but you really need to take the time to make sure you know what all of your expenses are sometimes they can be hidden and you haven't really thought about it so you know it's not just your gear and your training it's your gas mileage if you're going to consult with people or deliver prints or take the photos themselves it's the wear and tear on your car it's your office space it's the software updates that you do it's the plugins the tutorials is everything it's when you drop your lens in the middle of the shoot and it's gonna get to send it into an icon it's a four hundred dollar repair or when you have to rent a lens or a camera for a specific shoot props testing out printers and canvases and all of those things yeah the Geek Squad when your computer fails and you have to get the photo at home done yeah and updating that net access and your smartphone and all these there I love your second shooter your hair and makeup person yep so much yeah plan for things to fail and repairs and your insurance you'll you know contactor renter's insurance or your home insurance and get all your equipment added on you might need extra insurance if people are coming into your home you know so they don't slip and fall on the steps and sue you yeah these are things that you need to factor in that's gonna be expensive and the just the general expenses of running a business if it costs you X amount of dollars to run your business you know you have to make something over that so you have to know all of your expenses and then that'll help you figure out what your prices should be and maybe now you need a bookkeeper maybe not you need an account it starts to go keeper yeah sources to escalate like that let me just say it's it varies depending on where you are what country and and what state you're in but you can generally deduct some portion of your expenses against your income so if you spend a hundred dollars a month on your smartphone and internet access and you use it exclusively for work then the first hundred dollars that you make in photography will be tax free and there's all sorts of complicated rules about that talk to an accountant and get it worked out that some people will go for being a photographer for years making tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of dollars and not realize oh I could have been deducting you know 25 percent of my electric bill this whole time yeah where we are anyway you can write off whatever percentage of your house are using towards your business you can write that off on your taxes yep and it just reduces your taxable income it's not like it's free you still have to pace but that can be a lot it can be half it adds up yeah so definitely talk to the accountant about it let's talk about pricing models okay but there are so many different ways to price your photography and it's interesting you really have to look into it and see what you think would work for you you might even have to try a few different things or go into some forums and talk to people and see which different pricing models they like some people do just the flat fee but it you know just sit down I'll take the pictures and do the retouching and give you this many digital copies and that's it yeah people like that because they know exactly what it's going to cost it'll be you know $200 and they'll get there for digital images at the end there's no surprises yeah and some people do a session with the parentheses session maybe it costs $100 just to get into your studio and then whatever pictures they end up liking they they buy that and they buy the prints or they buy the digital files sometime to be a surprise they know it's going to be a hundred bucks but in the back end when they're looking at the prints and they might get pulled into spending thousands of dollars on print sometimes people will spend $10,000 on prints which means the photographer can now make a whole bunch more money than they ever expected well that works out really well so this isn't a model that I use but I like to look into these things just to stay abreast for all of you there's a an IPS an in-person sales group and people go out and they take pictures and they do not give their digital files which I respect because then someone can change them and edit your work what they do is they go to their clients house and they show them canvases or metal prints or acrylics you really have to see the final product and they show them on their walls or they let them pick out books and they can take just this simple I've seen some of them take a simple family shoe and end up making $10,000 just by making beautiful Campbell canvases or whole arrangements of photos frame photos that go behind a person's couch or on a very specific wall so you're making a final product right it's not just about giving them a picture and saying hey yeah I get this printed at Walmart hope that works out for you you're making sure that your final delivered item is beautiful and that your client loves it you know what I've seen done is though the prints like a 24 by 30 print of the family and it'll be big and beautiful and they're like you want this print it's a $400 and they've like whoa I wasn't planning to spend $400 then I'll take the print those rip it in half so you what does that where did you see that done did you go to hell for a very small amount of time without me knowing at that point people are like heartbroken and then you hold up the the I don't know 14 by 12 picture and you're like this one's a hundred dollars and they're like that's much cheaper because now they've had the price set at a high point they had a high expectation so now this seems like a real bargain but also they're afraid of that negative emotional range it's it's definitely a hard do it I could not uncomfortable make sure you like right over the cutest child's face you're like sorry Billy okay that's psycho advice we're not gonna give that another approach is just to charge hourly some people just say my time is you know $100 an hour the shoe will take an hour and then the post-processing will probably take two hours or we can work in some way differently that's great especially for recurring clients like businesses you know you might have to come in and shoot a headshot for every new executive that they hire or you know if there's a car dealership and they have ten different dealerships and they need you to go to each one you they can kind of predict how much they're going to pay you and you don't have to negotiate it every time they just hire you and you go out there and you do the work another one is people instead of just doing it by hour they'll break it out by half and full day rates that's really common in the video world my day rate is $800 as a common one or my day rate is for my half day rate is $400 and whether you're shooting or you're editing or you're traveling that's what it is and it's it's the same as hourly basically except you aren't trying to break your day into lots of little chunks like the minimum amount of time you can book some videos for half a day or a full day and as a contractor that's like a huge relief you know not to be like oh I have to deal with five different clients for one hour each today yeah I just say like Tuesday I'm working for a Comcast they are paying me my day rate yeah and then you better be productive if you're a person that charges by a day or a half-day you know not always I mean not the people we've worked with always throwing shade the most common when I see is just contact for pricing in that people don't put a price up at all they want you to they want the client to just contact them let's work it out by a phone call or email or something I think that would work if you know you have clients if you're in demand all of the time and you don't necessarily need to fill your day you're like um I'm booking months out if you want to try to fit in there you're gonna pay a premium so yeah or if your work is just so customized that there's absolutely no way you could pin it down you know if you're Annie Leibovitz and you know you're going to be bringing in a staff of anywhere from 10 to 40 people and you know finding a location that could be anywhere in the world like Annie Leibovitz doesn't have a day rate yes you would have to contact her I think she costs I'm scared to ask her it could be like hundreds of dollars hundreds of must be nice Annie but that's not the thing I see what I see is people who have very beginning photographer level portfolios you know you see a handful of people who are clearly their family and their portrait sessions and then they just say contact for pricing yeah and I feel like they they feel shy they're just shy about it and that's kind of what we talked about earlier with the anxiety for those people you're probably better off setting some sort of price you have to consider your competition so if you are a portrait photographer maybe you do senior senior portraits or family portraits and everyone in your area is charging between 100 and 200 dollars and you come in with charging two thousand it's gonna be hard it's gonna be hard for you but you may also want to think you don't want to be at the bottom I don't think I think you want to be somewhere near the middle and what else would you save keeping in consideration your competition yeah you're deciding how you're positioning yourself you can be the premium person maybe you have a really shiny portfolio and you can charge more and people will there you're a lot of your customers will go through and check the prices of lots of different photographers in the area and they'll be like Oh everybody is $200 but this one guy's $400 and they might be like well he must be the best you that higher price will immediately eliminate you from the running for a lot of people that like that's out of my budget I'm just gonna go for one of the cheaper photographers but then there's some portion of your audience who that higher amount will be fine well one of the photographers I talked to I talked to a few photographers before making this podcast they said that they didn't want to be the person hustling doing mini sessions all day every day they'd rather find a few good clients and really enjoy their work and really put the extra time in and and make something that they're very proud of and find the maybe 1 in 10 person rather than trying to be right for everybody you can't be right for everybody so go for the audience that you want yeah especially if it's maybe you have another job so you're not needing to pay the bills with it you can kind of be a boutique person who has you know a very specialized style and attracts a very specific type of client if you're in your first year and you haven't really built up portfolio maybe you decide to go for the low end and pick up the people who are blown away by the average price photographer and you can be the you know bargain basement photographer in order to build up a client base in order to build up some word-of-mouth in order to build your portfolio and get some experience at it and then later you can raise your rates I did a sampling of the photographer's in our area and I probably looked at 40 different websites and like I said most of them did not list prices on their websites and shockingly a lot of them didn't have websites like they were listed on Yelp or other website had they just had a phone number oh geez and this is our area I never talked on the phone I would rather cut off at least one finger before I called someone without knowing anything about them they should go to squarespace.com slash tony and get a free trial for a web site right yeah but you'd be shocked how many people are very old-fashioned they might even have like a physical building where their studios are but they might not even have a website this happens in 2018 still time Chuck anyway so this is the prices that I found the very cheapest was a hundred and ten dollars and they would give you digital files you come to their Studios there's no retouching done it was like JCPenney JCPenney they are still doing portraits in this area I'm gonna leave it at the crystal mall that was just all people did in the 80s which you'd go to Sears or a JCPenney or a Montgomery Ward you could sit down and get your portrait taken and and they would make so often make prints for you proactively and try to sell them someone they're decent can I just say that those portraits someone got pictures taken of my daughter my sister when my daughter was really little she surprised me and she brought her to the mall to get pictures and then gave them to me later they were in focus they got a good expression and the light was decent it's like formulaic it's not the newest and the greatest or artistic but it was real decent compared to some things I've seen out there I've seen a lot take that into consideration but it was okay I have some insight into this because when we first started SCP I talked to somebody who had just gotten a job at Sears I think it was and so they wrote to me and be like I I've never really used a camera before maybe I can learn some photography and I was like wait you said you just got a job as the portrait photographer it's serious I'm like yeah they said they were gonna like show me you know the cameras on a tripod and the lights are set and stuff but they're gonna show me like how to squeak the parrot and make the kids laugh and stuff like that cuz they probably just have everything set for the lighting and exactly and that's how they can do it for one hundred and ten dollars that's why it was by far the cheapest cuz they have this sort of workflow everything is very much automated and they don't need a skilled photographer they literally will take a high school kid who's never used a camera and just shove them in there and be like tell people everyone must be dying right now are you guys okay okay I was shocked by it too and I was like well I camera do to use I think it was like a t3 or something like it was just bare bones entry-level camera that was just hardwired into a computer but these Chinese clean and up fine like people are happy with those that's fine that gets the job done everybody else in the area beyond JCPenney that cheapest one was a hundred and fifty dollars and that included some amount of retouched pictures usually like two to four pictures which is not many people want all the pictures they always ask for all the pictures don't do that that wasn't of your raw unretouched pictures new hole ya know really like you want the ones where you're blinking or making a funny face it's just that I'm the ugliest one of themselves and be like that's what you get you never ask again the highest price I found was somebody wanted $350 for a session that included digital images so that person decided they were going to be like the premium service but a couple of people had charged per session like $250 per session and the session included the follow-up where you would come back and you would then see the prints and they would sell you some prints yeah I only see a few people selling prints there which that's pretty rough you're not actually delivering a physical product to anyone how are you gonna charge I was surprised only one person in our area was print focused everybody else was delivering digital's I do think that that's reflects what requests we get people always just want to digital files because they imagine you know sometimes it's just going on their business website or their whatever website but sometimes they also imagine they're gonna make the prints themselves so some photographers go for the model where they are not giving away digital's like the IPS and person sales and they're just doing the prints is actually a great way to make money I were doing IPs I'd have to hire someone because I'm a terrible salesperson yeah it that final post meeting after the session is done after you've done all your editing that's when the sales kick in and you have to be able to upsell people and I haven't either the person I've never been comfortable upselling people you get them to buy the metal prints you confess that it's worth like $200 we charge nine dollars because it's dumb hello I'm a terrible salesperson all right you're experienced take that into consideration maybe you've been shooting I don't know for 20 years just as a hobbyist or maybe as a professional portrait photographer but now you want to do sports photography like that doesn't count make sure you're doing the thing that you're charging people for for a while you've got some weddings under your belt maybe you were a second shooter make sure you have the experience that you're not charging people a ton of money for something you're not very good at good point the final product we've been talking about prints and stuff people don't see digital files as being worth anything that's why people pirated movies and music for so long they can't see anything they can't see the hard work it should be free no make sure that you control your art you don't want people doing crappy extra edits you don't want people just taking your digital files and sharing them on Facebook and not knowing about file compression and sharing this blurry monster with your name on it sell them a beautiful print show them where it's going to end up work with some print makers make sure they come out really nice the final presentation is super important your name is on it and word of mouth is probably is most photographer's number one sales strategy you make some good prints for somebody they show it to their friends it's a very easy to share type of medium and if you just give all your pictures to one person I know exactly what's gonna happen they go into Facebook and they take the entire 500 picture session and then they put on it you wonder why yeah and it looks like garbage because nowadays good post-processing is as big a part of it as taking a good original picture so I would strongly encourage people not to just give away all their pictures if you do sell digital's make them only carefully selected and edited pictures this is an example of a picture that I have the I took and you can go in you can do a print simulator you'll put in your picture and it will superimpose it that can show people the power of a large print so you're not just trying to make them imagine it now you're showing it to them I think you can also superimpose it into their actual house if you wanted to do that but this print costs like three three fifty and you would of course charge maybe like four fifty five whatever works for you you know yeah people sometimes try it for like a 250 percent marginal charge way more yeah it's worth it guys just another example of what that might look like these are markups yep you might have some extra fees like a sitting fee we talked about that maybe a post processing fee fee if they want digital's and then of course the fees if they want prints so those are all things they want to take into consideration with your pricing model but the objective here is not to gouge anyone it's to make sure that you're getting a fair amount of money for the work that you're doing so if you're making the prints of course you're putting time and energy into that if you're taking a long time to set up the shoots to make sure every shoot is unique it's not JCPenney you're not the same picture over and over again they're getting an artist's work they're getting a personalized piece of artwork and it's of them and it's in their home that's worth something your time is valuable yeah and it's a good way to keep your initial fee down because it's the initial session fee that people will usually use to compare you with and they won't necessarily add in those extra fees and that's why you know cars have options and your airlines will charge you extra for your bags and stuff that keeps that initial entry fee down so our final takeaway from this podcast please please everyone take the time to figure out what your worth look at what other photographers in your area are charging think about your business model and how you can deliver a final product to your clients and then charge enough to live you deserve it Photography is a valuable skill so put the energy and to figure out a great price for you I hope we helped you figure it out thanks for joining us on the picture this photography podcast and thank you Squarespace for making this podcast possible if you'd like to take your pictures and put them into a portfolio so your clients can see them you can go to Squarespace comm / Tony you can make a free website for 14 days no credit card needed if you decide that you like it you can use the coupon code portfolio and get 10% off thanks [Music]

Channel: Tony & Chelsea Northrup

Views: 241,827

Keywords: photography, photography price, pro photography, professional photography, photographer pricing, photographer price, portrait photography, wedding photography, wedding photography price, photographer charge, what to charge for photography, photography prices, photographer prices, portrait price, portrait prices, wedding prices, how to charge for photography, how much do photographers make, how much do photographers charge, portrait session, ips, in person sales

Id: ISOLGAZRuWE

Length: 30min 7sec (1807 seconds)

Published: Mon Mar 19 2018