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!
I am a full time Photogrpher from Italy, your prices are not too high and are actually affordable.
I charge 240€ per hour of Shooting (editing included), i usually decrease it, when they book me for longer, or don’t charge every hour since i like to take my time to make the pictures as good as possible. I often also make offers which with a fixed price, for example ( i shoot picture of product A, B, C and will deliver at least 3 picture per product for X€) like this i can decide by myself how long i take for finjsbing the pictures and clients know the exact amont that i will charge already.
If you want to make a living you need to charge these prices and most of the full time photographer charge somewhere around this amount. Same as you say, about 40% of the money will be expenses and you would not always have Work. You also need to upgrade equiptment regularly to stay up to date, which cost a lot of money too and they pay for your experience which a hobby Photographer that charge less might not have.
In your situation, i would try to explain that to them. See how they react, if they try to make a big deal out of it, i would let it go and take it as a lesson for future clients. Be carefull to keep a good reputation and always give them your rates first or make an offer.