For Customers

A Federal Case

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There’s a Canadian federal election coming in early May. One would think that if a party wants to run the country then surely it should be able to run a web site.

Liberals

The Liberals have the slowest loading site of the bunch. Almost painful, but let’s be charitable and assume the site was just busy today. This site uses free WordPress blog software but it fails XHTML validation. The design is consistent and it uses the party’s traditional red–white colour scheme.

The two-year-old portrait of Liberal leader Michael Ignatieff is outdated. What does it suggest when the party couldn’t be bothered to get a new business portrait for something as important as a federal election? But again, to be charitable, let’s say the Liberals used an old picture just to save a few bucks.

The site has photo captions and credits on many of its pictures. The party has hired at least one experienced news photographer, but the site suffers from either non-existent or just plain bad photo editing.
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Make Sense

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A few things don’t seem to make sense:

— Order a $1.49 hamburger at a fast-food joint and you have to pay before they give you the food.

Order an $85 steak dinner at a restaurant and you don’t pay until the food has been eaten.

 

— Some amateur photographers spend thousands of dollars buying top-of-the-line cameras to photograph things a $400 camera could do as well.

Some professional photographers who own top-of-the-line cameras use a cheap toy camera to do their photography.

 

— A company spent about $47,000 to buy five full-page black-and-white ads in a Toronto tabloid newspaper. Then it budgeted less than $500 for the photography for those ads.

Why not spend $25,000 for five half-page ads and then budget, say, $2,500 for the photography? Not only would this save the company thousands of dollars but the better quality photography will earn the company more attention.

 

How to find the right photographer

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It should be easy to find the right photographer for your business photography, right? After all, every city has many, many professional photographers.

Recently, I was reading a web site for photographers who are new to running a photo business. These amateur(?) photographers were apparently hired by various clients to shoot corporate work, advertisements, business marketing or editorial assignments. Yet these photographers didn’t know how to price their work or, in some cases, even how to do the assignment. Why would any business hire an amateur photographer?

How should a business find the right professional photographer?

The best way is by referral from another business or a colleague. If this isn’t possible then a search engine is your best friend (or enemy).
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One Price Fits No one

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One problem when a photographer charges a one-size-fits-all photo fee, (i.e., an hourly fee or a day rate), is that the photographer ends up providing a variety of services to their clients all for the same price. 

For example: an editorial customer may require the photographer to use one camera to cover a one-hour press conference. A corporate customer may need the photographer to bring four cases of equipment to produce several studio-quality executive portraits within an allotted one-hour period.

Those two assignments require different equipment, different skills and different talents. So why should both clients pay the same price (i.e., the same hourly fee or day rate)?

Charging by the hour can even penalize the customer.

For example: a certain photo might take one hour to shoot or it might take four hours. Either way, the benefits to the customer are the same. Charging by the hour would mean that the customer pays more for the “slower” photographer yet gains no additional benefits.

Pricing based on photography and usage may be confusing to some customers but it allows the photographer to customize the price to suit each customer’s exact needs.

 

A Small Discount

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At my favourite buffet restaurant, people under 12 years old pay only half-price. Kids get the same quality of food and the same service but pay only half the price.

People under 12 years old pay half-price for movie theatre admission. They sit in the same seats and watch the same movie but pay half the price.

At a hair salon, people under 12 years of age pay half-price for a haircut. They sit in the same stylist chair and get the same service but for half the price.

On Toronto public transit, people under 12 years of age pay one-quarter the price. They ride the same bus and travel to the same destination but pay a quarter of the price.

What’s going on here? Are the rest of us being over-charged?
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