THE WRONG QUESTION
Why a market rate cannot answer it
Every published average for photography mixes together people running incompatible businesses. A photographer with a leased studio, employed staff and a hundred weddings a year sits in the same average as one shooting twelve weddings from a spare room. So does a beginner pricing to fill a diary and a specialist pricing to empty one. An average across those is arithmetic performed on things that do not belong in the same column.
Copying a competitor's price sheet has the same defect with an extra risk attached, because the sheet is the only part of their business you can see. You cannot see their overheads, their volume, their second income, or whether the price is working for them. A photographer quietly losing money publishes exactly the same page as one who is not.
The question that does have an answer is narrower: what does a year of this business cost to run, how many sessions can the calendar actually hold, and what must each one produce for the two to meet? That is a calculation with your own inputs, and it produces a number that belongs to you.
A price sheet is the only part of a competitor's business you can see, and the least informative.
THE COST OF THE YEAR
What the twelve months have to cover
The first input is the cost of doing business: everything the year consumes whether or not a single session is booked. It is usually larger than people expect, because most of it is paid in small amounts at different times and never added up in one place.
Two items are missed almost every time. The first is the replacement cost of equipment, which is a real annual cost even in the years nothing is bought, because bodies and lenses wear out on a schedule and then arrive as one large bill. The second is the photographer's own pay — not the profit, the wage. A business that covers its costs and leaves nothing for the person running it has priced itself as a hobby with an accountant.
- Equipment set aside for replacement, plus repairs and rental for the jobs your kit does not cover.
- Insurance — public liability, and cover for the gear itself.
- Software subscriptions, gallery hosting, and the storage and backup of finished work.
- Travel, parking and the mileage that never makes it onto an invoice.
- Marketing: the website, the domain, the second-shooter days you pay for to build a portfolio.
- Accountancy, banking, and whatever tax the business attracts where you are.
- Your own pay, and the weeks in the year when nobody books anything.
THE REAL HOURS
A two-hour session is not two hours
The second input is time, measured honestly. A portrait session advertised as two hours contains the two hours and then a great deal that nobody counts: the enquiry and the three emails that follow it, the planning call, the drive there and back, the location scout if the client picked somewhere new, the culling, the editing, the gallery build, the delivery email, the reprint question a fortnight later and the invoice chase after that.
Editing is the part that most often escapes the count. Culling a session down and working through the selects is measurable — photographers who have timed it once are usually surprised, and photographers who have never timed it are usually wrong by a factor rather than a margin. Timing three sessions end to end, with a clock rather than an impression, converts the whole pricing question from an argument into a division.
The third input follows from the second. Once a session has a true hour count, the calendar has a ceiling: the number of sessions a year can hold without the editing backlog eating the weeks between them. That ceiling is lower than the number of dates that are free, and it is the number the annual cost has to be divided by.
THE FLOOR
The minimum that falls out of the arithmetic
The cost of the year, divided by the sessions the calendar can genuinely hold, gives a minimum per session. It is not a price. It is the line under which the year does not add up, and its main use is negative: it tells you which enquiries are not worth taking and which discount ends the year in deficit. Packages are then built above the floor, with the differences between them stated in what the client receives rather than in how long you were there.
The number moves, which is the argument for writing it down somewhere it can be recalculated. Costs rise, the kit needs replacing, the editing gets faster, the calendar fills earlier. A floor worked out three years ago and never revisited is the most common reason a busy photographer feels poor.
Once the number is settled, the next thing that leaks time is the paperwork around the session — the questionnaire that collects what the client actually wants, the contract that fixes what is being sold, and the release that covers where the pictures can appear.