How to Price Portrait Photography
Capturing special moments through portrait photography can be a rewarding way to make a living. If you have talent with a camera and are skilled at photo editing, you may think you have everything you need to run a portrait photography business. In reality, two elements will affect your photography business and its success: your talent and your prices. Carefully thinking through your session and print fees is one of the most important steps to building your business.
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Instructions
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Review the websites of other portrait photographers in your area. Look at their session lengths and prices. Also pay attention to what they charge for prints. While you cannot base your prices solely on the competition, you need to know what others are charging so you can stay within a competitive range.
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Determine session lengths you will offer. Offering two different session lengths is a great way to bring in different types of clients. For example, a thirty-minute mini-session and a two-hour regular session will draw in people with different types of portrait needs and budgets.
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Choose an approximate number of edited portraits you will offer your clients per session. In a two-hour session, you will probably take hundreds of shots but you do not need to edit every single photo. If you promise your clients 15 to 20 shots in a mini-session or 50 to 60 shots from a full session, than this will drastically limit the amount of time you need to spend editing.
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Decide how much time you will dedicate to editing after each session. You can give yourself a set amount of time that you will sit down and dedicate to editing or you can give yourself an estimated amount of time per photo. Add the time spent on the session and the time spent editing together. This is the total amount of time you are committing to each client.
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Use the total amount of time you are dedicating to each session to come up with a session fee. Decide what you want to earn on an hourly basis and multiply that dollar amount by the amount of time you will dedicate to each session.
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Double check that your session fees are comparable to what your competition is charging. Remember, though, that unless your competitors are offering the exact same amount of session time and the exact same number of edited photos you are not making an apples-to-apples comparison. Competitor prices should be used as a reference to make sure you are not over- or under-charging.
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Choose the photo printing company you will work with. Check their prices and shipping costs and add a mark-up to each print so that you make at least a small profit. Keep in mind that your clients are already paying a significant amount for your photography services, so charging extremely high prices on your prints will not gain you a lot of repeat business.
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Tips & Warnings
Because you have no control over how many prints they will order, do not count on print orders as your main source of income from portrait photogrpaphy. This is why calculating the cost of your session fee is so important. It's the only money you are guaranteed to receive from a client.
Remember that if you set aside five hours to edit photos for a session and then spent eight hours, you are lowering your hourly rate and essentially making less money. Try to stick to the amount of time you have allotted to each client.
If you are not sure how much time you normally spend editing one portrait, sit down and time yourself.
References
- Photo Credit Jupiterimages/Brand X Pictures/Getty Images
