Hey all, I want to begin this with admitting my fault in not starting with an offer. The reason I didn’t send one in is because my customer had already worked with a few different photographers and the project is part of a networking exchange. My bad. So I went there and took pictures for a bit more than two hours. My own expectations of quality make me edit every set of pictures by hand, so no presets. That makes another two hours in editing. Now I’m based in Europe and I calculated my prices based on my cost, my taxes, my expected wage, available hours deducted by holiday and sick time and an overall paid workload of 40% of those hours. That makes me start my prices at 130 per hour of photography and 70 per post processing hour. Of course there is deductions for longer bookings, and networking opportunities etc. Overall I gave my customer the price of a bit more than 300 euros for the job. Sadly my customer wasn’t to happy and very confused as her recent partners oy charged her 100 or got invited for dinner. The customer also wanted to edit the pictures themselves. Again I’m at fault for not following proper procedure here. My questions are the following. Was the price unreasonable? Do you not edit your pictures the way I do and do you only use presets? What would you recommend to do in that situation. Thanks!
If this happens a lot you could put your prices on your portfolio site under “book me” or how you want to call it. Dont forget to put a small asterix with the variable prices like transportation costs per mile or km. For every hour spend photographing I spend an hour in post processing so I put those together for the ease of the client.
A tip I have gotten before is to be more transparent by showing every cost in your bill. F.e. maintenance costs, subscription costs, etc. They might be more understanding.
Never put your pricing down if you ever plan on making serious bucks. Client who will make $100k off of your work will be charged 10x more than a client who’d make $1000.