For Photographers

Low Expectations

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Canadian goalkeeper Milan Borjan celebrates Canada’s win over Jamaica in their men’s soccer match in the final rounds of the Concacaf FIFA World Cup qualifiers in Toronto, Canada, 27 March 2022.

This is a view-from-my-office photo from a cold, rainy-snowy soccer game.

From the past two weeks:

 

• A Toronto professional photographer does family portraits for $500 according to his web site. The price includes a 45-minute session and 50 “fully retouched” pictures.

Fifty images in 45 minutes? Fully retouched? Ten dollars per photo?

At that price, who should have low expectations, the customer or the photographer?

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Price for the End Result

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A 19-metre-tall rubber duck floats in Toronto Harbour in Toronto, Canada, 01 July, 2017. The duck was in the city as part of the celebrations to mark Canada’s 150th birthday.

This is just another view-from-my-office photo.

Corporate customers don’t buy photography, they buy outcomes or end results. How much is that end result worth to the customer? Or to rephrase that, how much does your photography contribute toward achieving the customer’s goal?
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Increasing Your Photography Prices

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A fun photo by Canadian-born photographer Joseph Ernest Pasonault in his studio in Cando, North Dakota, 1902. (US Library of Congress)

Joseph Pasonault’s family moved from Newfoundland to the US, circa 1882, when he was six years old. In 1896, a twenty-year-old Pasonault opened his first photo studio in Cando. He later moved his studio to a larger town in North Dakota.

Canada’s pandemic case numbers today (April 2022) are the highest than at any time in the first year-and-a-half of the pandemic when everyone was panicking and hoarding toilet paper. But no one is panicking today and, figuratively speaking, the news media is no longer reporting in all caps. What’s changed?

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Sky High Photography

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Cameras have a changed a lot over the past hundred years. They got smaller and lighter, became more electronic, film gave way to digital sensors, and we now have flying cameras commonly called “drones.”

Aerial photography started at least as early as 1858 by Gaspard-Felix Tournachon (aka Nadar) who photographed from a hot air balloon in France. But most photographers didn’t have a hot air balloon handy so they had to find other ways to get a high camera angle:

Circa 1909. (US Library of Congress)

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