business: can I charge for that?
What’s involved in delivering professional photography? There are a core group of services we provide on most every job. I thought it might be interesting to show you what services we charge for on most every commercial photography job. This is the basic “skeleton” of charges. If stylists, props, rentals, etc., are needed then that all gets added and a 10-15% markup is tacked on for handling, facilitating and carrying costs. These are the basic core group of services that our photo studio provides.
I want to say that I used to struggle with creating estimates and remembering what to charge for until I began using Blinkbid studio software. Blinkbid helps me create estimates by storing all of the potential item charges and providing me with a list that makes this process much easier. If you sell your photography and need to organize the estimating / billing side of things, download the free trial of Blinkbid and give it a whirl. Plus, they’re really nice people and are extremely helpful. Personal service means a lot to a studio like ours and we appreciate what they do.
As for actual prices to charge for commercial photography, one of the best resources is FotoQuote. They guide you through a number of questions to help determine what fair prices are for your photography and specific usage.
Keep in mind that we do modify this list for various jobs and different studios have different ways of charging. This is really to provoke thought and to show that many steps are involved in putting together even a simple shoot and that all of those steps do have value. This outline is for a relatively simple shoot: say, a day spent shooting 6 interiors in an office building.
FEES
- Setup Fee - this could also be called pre-production fees. This is the cost we’ve put into answering questions, creating an estimate, and packing the equipment up to take on location. Basically, the planning and preparation costs.
- Scouting Fee - did we make a trip there to scout the location? This has value.
- Creative Fee - the cost to create the photographs. In commercial photography we avoid using a “day or hourly rate” because there are intangibles we bring to certain jobs that add value. Reducing it down to an hourly rate gives the client an incentive to cram more shots into a certain time period, not a good thing for commercial photography. For that reason we separate time from value when estimating and billing creative fees. We’re not there to fix something that’s broken, we’re creating something new, and that needs to be taken into consideration. I will say, though, that knowing your cost of doing business and the income you need to generate in a day is needed to understand pricing. This is a big topic for further exploration another day.
- Digital Capture Fee - sometimes we charge a nominal fee, $1 or $2 for each capture taken during a shoot. On most shoots this is built into the creative fee. If the client seems at all disorganized then this fee goes in to deter them from having us shoot a million needless shots because they are ill-prepared to make a decision. It takes time and money to organize all of those files.
- Usage Fees - what are they using the photographs for? If it’s for web use only then this fee is smaller than if it is for web, brochures and billboards used worldwide. If the images are used widely and are seen by more people then that makes them of inherently higher value. As we provide photography of higher value, we should be compensated for that higher value (as explained on the ASMP website).
CREW
- Digital Assistant - only one assistant will be needed on this job. They used to be called “first assistant” but the job responsibilities go way beyond that now since the assistant handles the computer and file organization, also.
DIGITAL
- Digital Web Gallery - an html web gallery from the shoot is created and posted online for the client to review images.
- Digital Image File Prep - once the client has made their photo picks from the web gallery, we process each file out from RAW for a flat fee per file. This includes basic spotting and color-correction.
- Digital Post Production - charges for retouching, outlining and compositing, sometimes charged per hour and sometimes per specific service.
- FTP File Transfer - delivery of the final files to the client via FTP. In the past we had CD / DVD burning and delivery charges, now it’s mainly via FTP. We either upload to their FTP site or ours, providing a password protected folder containing a .zip file(s) of images for download.
- Archiving - we no longer charge for archiving a client’s files, though we used to, since there are costs involved in maintaining such an archive. Though we have backups for everything we no longer guarantee that service and that’s why we eliminated the charge. Less liability that way.
MISCELLANEOUS
- Meals - lunch
- Phone / Fax / Cell - a basic, small charge to remind clients that these things need to be paid for
- Travel - depends on distance
That’s the basic list. Along with Blinkbid software and FotoQuote, these books are my go-to resources for determing business practices and pricing:
- Pricing Photography
by Michal Heron and David MacTavish
- ASMP Professional Business Practices in Photography.
- Best Business Practices for Photographers by John Harrington
- Jim T.
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This makes for a nice quote and invoice checklist!
Do you find this helps clients understand everything you’re doing, or do they balk at all the expenses of “just shooting pictures”?
I’d be interested in hearing more about how you explain fees to clients new to hiring professional photographers.
What I really appreciate is the way you worded your descriptions in a way that sounds reasonable from both a photographer’s and a client’s perspective.
Good communication mojo!
I had to put together quotes/bids/proposals for jobs in a previous career. It was always a balancing act between putting enough in to make a profit, not making it look like you were “nickle and diming” the client, and being low enough to get the job in the first place.
The software you mentioned sounds like a good tool to keep track of all the types of expenses and charges you might need to pass on to the client. There is a reason that professional services of any sort are expensive, and is that professions need to make a return on every expense they incur. Sometimes it is difficult for a client to understand the behind the scenes expenses as they don’t really know why you need to charge for them. However, that is precisely the reason they are hiring you in the first place, because you have the knowledge to get the job completed.
You guys make me see things in a new perspective, too. It’s a great exercise for me to put things like this in writing in order to examine our standard procedures.
Matthew, explaining and negotiating are a great topic to look at next week (and I’m thinking of throwing in a podcast in addition to the text, too). We work more and more “client direct” and less and less with ad agencies. For that reason we find ourselves educating clients a lot.
NormMonkey, I think that’s why we strive to describe things simply. Clear communication (and a great paper trail) are key. My goal is to have a clear understanding on money and get it completely out of the way before the day of the photo shoot. When I’m shooting the last thing I want to discuss or think about is money, that’s the day we’re there to create photographs. If the estimate and pre-production discussions are done properly, money never comes up again!
As for clients getting impatient with a lengthy list of charges, yes, it does happen sometimes. But I feel it’s good to do it this way for a number of reasons (which I’ll explore more later). I stress to the client that I have to do it this way so I can give them accurate numbers on cost. The last thing I want to do is surprise them or us on cost because we haven’t asked the right questions or prepared properly.
The real bottom line is that my major motivation when a client comes in the door is helping them solve their problems. I’m genuinely interested in what they want to accomplish and how I can best help them. Once they pick up on that they begin to understand why we have to do what we have to do. The next step, then, is to figure out how to do the job so it’s fair, profitable and beneficial for us all.
I never thought about what I did for a gig until I downloaded Blinkbid to do an estimate for a client I’ve always shot for free, but is now asking about costs (there is a God.)
A lot of the line items don’t apply (assistant? *le sigh* one of these days, I hope), but it made me think about all the little things, the pre-production, post-production, usage fees, hourly time, travel, postage(!) and materials… regardless of whether the client accepts the estimate or not, now I know what I’m worth… to myself! All itemized and everything.
Thank you, once again, Jim!
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