The business side of photography
If a professional photographer was featured on national TV, you might think the publicity would boost that photographer’s business. Well, not in this case.
In 2009, the BBC ran a news story about a commercial photographer and his business practices, or should we say, his lack of business practices.
This publicity caused the “fauxtographer” to take down his web site and disappear. Good riddance. Such scammers make all professional photographers look bad.
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Way back in my teenage years, I worked part-time at a take-out pizza store. Customers would sometimes say, “Give me a large pizza with everything on it.”
When I’d reply, “Okay, that’ll be $26.00” (or whatever the price was), the customer would gasp and quickly change to, “Just make it pepperoni and mushrooms.”
Wants and needs can be quite different when a price tag is attached.
A corporate photography customer recently asked for some photos of their Toronto office. The pictures were to be used on their web site and printed in a brochure. The company sent a list describing the ten pictures they wanted.
I sent a quote for about $2,800.
The customer e-mailed back and was quite shocked at the price. Why is it so expensive?
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Corporate photographers and commercial photographers often produce pictures of buildings, factories and retail locations.
Customers will sometimes request the digital removal of objects such as poles, road signs, overhead wires, fire hydrants, bus stops, etc., from exterior photos.
What’s funny about such requests is the customer assumes that once an object is erased, whatever was behind that object will automatically become visible. But as every photographer knows, when something is digitally removed from a photo, it just leaves a blank spot in the picture.
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Before a company tries to save a few dollars on its corporate photography by buying cheap stock pictures or by hiring the lowest-priced commercial photographer, that business should remember this:
There is hardly anything in the world that someone cannot make a little worse and sell a little more cheaply. The people who consider price alone are that person’s lawful prey.
It is unwise to pay too much but it is worse to pay too little. When you pay too much, you lose a little money, that is all. When you pay too little, you sometimes lose everything because the thing you bought was incapable of doing the thing it was bought to do.
The common law of business balance prohibits paying a little and getting a lot. It cannot be done. If you deal with the lowest bidder, it is well to add something for the risk you run. And if you do that, you will have enough to pay for something better.
– often attributed to 19th-century social critic John Ruskin, an advocate for economic reform and social change.
The fee for commercial photography is based on two things: production value (creative fee) and usage (licensing fee). Remember that production expenses are in addition to this.
One point of the previous post was to show how production value affects the creative fee. High-end camera gear, lots of lighting equipment and lots of time spent creating a picture will result in a very good photo and also a more expensive photo.
The second factor determining the overall fee is photo usage. This usage is a combination of four things: how many pictures will be used, how the photos will be used (media), where the images will be used (location) and when the pictures will be used (time).
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Hotel Client: What?! You want $1,500 just for some pictures of our chef?!
Photographer: What do you think the job is worth?
Client: Maybe $250.
Photographer: Okay, for $250, I’ll come by your hotel sometime in the next couple of weeks whenever I have some spare time. When I’m there, hand me your cell phone and I’ll take a few pictures with it. You pay me $250 and the job is done. How does that sound?
The American Society of Media Photographers (ASMP) has a few dozen videos to help professional photographers improve their business practices. Topics include negotiating, marketing, pricing, paperwork, licensing and copyright.
These videos were produced for American photographers and so there are a few legal and business issues that either don’t apply or are different here in Canada. However many of the concepts and principles are equally applicable to Canadian photographers.
