Photo Pricing - Act Like a Pro

Filed Under: Photography

There is series of articles over on Strobist that discusses the “phenomenon” of creative directors and image seekers trolling through Flickr (or other similar sites) in search of pictures to use. If you are not a photographer and not familiar with what is going on, in a nutshell, the stock photo business isn’t what it used to be (nor is the for hire business). Digital cameras and photo sharing sites (and micro-stock sites) have opened up a while new “talent” pool for creative directors. Anyone with a digital camera and a Flickr account can get a call.

Knowing this, as most if not all photographers with a photo-sharing account do, why would you not know how to price your work should someone call? Why are you in a mad scramble to figure it out when you do get a call? Look, if you are putting your images at a photo-sharing site and allowing the world to see them, do yourself a favor and a) either learn how to use Google search (try “photo pricing guide”), b) go to your preferred forum and search for the topic (believe me you are probably not the first punter to ask that question), c) bookmark these links.

  1. http://photographersindex.com/price-adv-calc.htm
  2. http://www.fotoquote.com/fq-demo.html
  3. http://www.blinkbid.com
  4. http://www.zimberoff.com/photobyte.ht
  5. http://hsltd.us/products/PriceGuide.html

If you want to take things a step further, read John Harrington’s book, Best Business Practices for Photographers it is quite possibly the best $20.00 you can spend if you are setting up a Photography business. Add to that ASMP Professional Business Practices In Photography and many of the questions you will have about what to charge, what to do, how to do it are answered for you (you do need to add a little common sense).

The fact of the matter is, too many amateurs get contacted about their work and are wholly unprepared from a business standpoint. Do yourself a favor, don’t wait to get a call and then run to a forum to get information (where most of the advice will come from people who have never sold anything anyway). Buy these two books, look at the work you do, look at what other photographers do, look at what other photographers are charging, and price yourself accordingly. If you are a pro or considering becoming a pro, it goes without saying that this is one of the first things you should do (more on this coming soon - that is after all what this blog is about).

If that is too much work for you, just set a price that you are happy with. How hard can that be? I mean if you are not going to be prepared and act professionally up front, why worry about what you ultimately charge? You are obviously making it clear that you are not a professional (or even wanting to act like one), so why should you get paid like one?

If you are not a photographer, this advise holds true in just about any service/freelance industry and I am sure you can draw the correlation.

As a note, check out John Harrington’s site as well as his blog. Good stuff on both of them.

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