Don Orkoskey breaks down pricing photography into three steps: calculate your annual expenses, estimate realistic billable hours (not a full 40-hour week), and analyze what clients in your market will actually pay. Underpricing leads to burnout and hurts both you and your clients.
Hi, it's Don Orkoskey from WDO Photography, and I'm here to talk to you about how to figure out what to charge for your photography, how to price your products and services in order to make the money you need to make as a photographer. When figuring out how much to charge for your photography services, the first thing you need to do is understand how much money you need to make in a year. The second thing you're gonna need to know is how many hours you can actually bill for. And finally, the third thing you're gonna need to know is what is your market likely to provide in terms of both of those things. Let's start with the first one. How do you know how much money you need to make as a photographer? Well, the first thing that we can do is look at our bills. How much does our rent cost? How much do all of our utilities cost? What's our car payment? Do you have a studio that you're renting? Do you need to consider that rent as well? You have to think about the insurance you need— liability and equipment insurance, for example— plus your health insurance. Do you need to hire an accountant? Do you need to hire anyone else? What other costs are there that you have to figure in that you maybe were not thinking of prior to, to this exercise. I also want to take a minute to talk about how when a lot of photographers start their business, what they end up doing is pricing themselves low and getting a ton of clients. And that is a recipe for fast burnout. Burnout is not good for you, and burnout is not good for your business. It's also not good for your clients. If you can't keep up with their demands, then what good is hiring you? Running your own business, whether you're a photographer, videographer, or something else, you are not going to get 40 billable hours a week. That's for W-2 employees. You're no longer an employee, you're now a business owner, which means that your billable hours are going to be significantly less. This is why it's so vital to figure out how many billable hours you're going to be able to bill for and How do you do that? Well, the first thing you have to do is understand roughly how many hours your particular type of photography takes per client. So if you're an event photographer doing corporate events, that time can be from 2 hours to 6 hours to 14 hours. So understanding those different tiers and understanding how to price those, because if you've got a 6-hour job in the middle of the day, you're not going to be able to take a 14-hour job that day. So you have to price accordingly. If you've got a 2-hour job equally in the middle of the day, you may not even be able to take that 6-hour job. So understanding what that minimum is in terms of how many hours you need to bill for as a minimum and what that fee has to look like in order for you to make enough money to cover point A, everything that you need to in order to make your business profitable. Another point about billable hours is it's really going to matter where you are in terms of how much business is out there. If you're in New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, then you may never have any issues finding jobs. But it's also going to depend on the type of work that you do. Are you a wedding photographer? Are you doing corporate events? Are you doing senior pictures? Are you doing— family photos, so on and so forth. So understanding your market and how many clients are in that market, and also how many photographers are in that market— what's your competition going to look like? One other consideration when talking about your market is what is the price that your clients are going to be willing to pay? If you are in a small town and there's a small number of potential clients there, then they might not be willing to pay what somebody in either a tourist location or a very large town is willing to pay. To be honest with you, when it comes to charging what you're worth, charging what you need to make, a lot of people when they're starting out, especially in a creative field like photography, think, I'm not good enough yet. But I'm going to tell you, you Yes, you are. If you are selling your work, if people are buying your work, if people are telling you that they would pay you to take their photos, your work is good enough. I'm not saying that you don't want to get better, but it's good enough for you to charge what you need to make to earn a living. So to recap, figuring out what to charge for your photography services doesn't have to be that hard. The first thing you have to do is figure out what you need to make in order to not just survive, but to thrive. The second thing you need to do is figure out how many hours you're reasonably going to be able to bill every year. And finally, the third thing you have to figure out is what is the market that you're in and how much is that market going to be able to pay. Once you've done that, you've got it. It's in the bag. If you have any questions, please leave them in the comments. Like and subscribe. And I'll see you next time. Thanks so much.
