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Posted on December 6, 2009

Portrait Photography | FAQ: Pricing, South Bend Indiana

I have been asked quite a bit lately about pricing and why I charge what I charge. Let me start by saying that you really have to work backwards. You have to set your own personal goals before you can really get the price that you need to charge. I want to first and foremost warn you about under pricing yourself. When you are done going through this rigorous process, I want you to tell yourself if what you are making an hour is going to pay off in the end or if you should go work for Sears. I don’t mean that in a mean way either. Please read on for me to explain.

Let’s say you brought in $30k a year from your job that you recently lost and your husband just went to a $30k salary from a $50k salary. You have been told that you take decent pictures and should consider making it your new profession. You decide that you are going to start taking friends and family’s portraits, but what do you charge?

Your goal is to make up the money that you lost with your job loss and your husband’s cut back. Here’s a formula that should help, but please keep in mind that you will still need to keep in mind what demographics you are in. Your goal is $50,000. Now, add 35% tax to that ($17,500). Don’t forget about your business expenses. This could be the equipment you want to have in the next year, office expenses, marketing, packaging, etc. I would recommend budgeting a minumum of $30-$50k just for business expenses (not including the cost of goods that your clients purchase). Now you have the number of $117,500 (I went with $50k of business expenses) per year. You will need to bring in $9,791.67/month and $2,259.62/week.

I know this seems VERY overwhelming, but comes the big question. Will the demographic you live in allow you to do a low volume of sessions or will you need to do quite a few throughout the week? What about the quality of your work, what do you want that to be? Photographing less will give you more time to spend on the sessions or with your family. I want you to really consider your options. If you are new to the industry and are unfamiliar with photoshop or lightroom, you might want to start out with less per week, for workflow sake.

Let’s say that you want to set aside 2 days a week where you can focus on doing sessions throughout the day. By doing 3 sessions each day, you will be doing a total of 6 sessions in one week. You will need to make a minimum of $376.60 per session. If your client is purchasing product, you will need the add the cost of goods to this total. Let’s say you want to do only 2 sessions per week, just to get use to it. You will need to bring in $1,129.81 per session, not including the cost of goods.

The other thing to keep in mind when you are determining your pricing is the time you spend on that session. From the point of contact with the client, booking the session, answer their questions, travel time (if you are not going to set up in your home), the 2 hour session, editing, showing the client the images, helping them choose the images to order, putting the final touches on the images, ordering the products, packaging, and delivery. Generally speaking, you will spend 10 hours on each session. If all you are hoping to get is $50 from your client and that includes your time and a disk of images, you are only making $5/hour. If that’s what you want to make, maybe owning your business isn’t the way to go for you.

One thing about our industry that you should always keep in mind is the fact that there is ALWAYS a new photographer every week coming out of the woodworks. Their business sense is what is going to deteremine whether or not they are here to stay. I wouldn’t stress over the competition, but remember that they are out there. If there is one thing that the other photography company doesn’t have is you. Plain and simple. Don’t short change yourself. Stay strong and love what you are doing.

I am going to leave you with this, if Walmart can charge $50 for an 8×10 a la carte item, then you should be selling it for at least that, if not more.

With that said, I am happy to announce that our portrait and wedding collection pricing is now available to view on our site.

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