Perhaps the biggest challenge you’ll come across as you move into professional photography is working out how much to charge for your services. This is crucial to your success. Much more so than your photography I would argue for the simple reason that if you’re not profitable you’re not going to succeed as a professional.
Before you even begin to think about how much to charge you need to understand two things:
- The value of your work
- Your costs to produce it
Why these two things? Basically…
- if you don’t understand the value of your work, you’ll ever be able to charge enough for it.
- if you charge less than it costs you to produce your work, you’re on a one way ticket to insolvency
How to value what you do…
Putting a value on what you do is tough. It’s not how you value your photography but how others value it that matters. Unless you understand how others value your work you’ll never know whether you’re charging an appropriate price or not. Let me give you an example.
A few years ago I was asked to cover 6 shows during London Fashion Week as the show photographer. They weren’t the mainstream shows, it was more fashion week fringe if anything. I was offered £200 for the two days and at the time I thought this was fantastic. I was trying to get more into fashion photography and this was a chance to get paid to cover an event I was planning to attend anyway. It wasn’t until a few weeks after the event when I was chatting with one of the designers that she let slip she’d paid £350 for my images. I was furious but there was nothing I could do. I’d agreed to the price so I just took it on the chin.
Rather than grow my toys of of the pram, I chose to look on this as a valuable lesson. It taught me about he worth of my images. It taught me that people were prepared to pay over 10 times what I’d originally valued my work at.
That was a lesson worth learning. Ever since that day I’ve not been looking at my pricing strategy in terms of how much I’d pay for my images but rather how much would a client be prepared to pay. That’s a huge difference and one of my recipes for success.
Know your costs…
Knowing your costs is crucial to the success of your business.
Here is a fundamental rule that if you charge less for your work than it costs you to produce it, your business will fail.
Nowadays with digital photography many people think there is no cost in photography. Guess what? They’re wrong. Big time. True you don’t have the media costs that you had in the days of film (unless you’re shipping hard copies), but how much is a Photoshop license compared to paying development costs? What about equipment costs? Wear and tear? Travel costs? Your time? Studio costs? Cost of living?
In many cases I hear the same argument “we’ll, I already have the equipment” or “I was going there anyway” (I even typed it myself in the section above if you remember!). I would argue if you’re at all serious in having your photography finance your lifestyle you need to understand your costs and more importantly how much it costs you to do a particular job. Otherwise you’re really just playing. That’s fine if you just want to finance your hobby but doesn’t make sense from a business perspective.
Conclusion
Pricing your work is fun. To do it effectively you need to find the price other people would be prepared to pay for it. As long as this is more than it costs you to do the job, you’re I the right track. The next step is to develop your pricing strategy to enable your photography to finance your lifestyle.
This post is by no means a definitive answer to the question “how much should I charge for my photography?” I’ll discuss that further in my next article. In the meantime, if you have any other ideas or comments, leave a message below.
