Hey all, I want to begin this with admitting my fault in not starting with an offer. The reason I didn’t send one in is because my customer had already worked with a few different photographers and the project is part of a networking exchange. My bad. So I went there and took pictures for a bit more than two hours. My own expectations of quality make me edit every set of pictures by hand, so no presets. That makes another two hours in editing. Now I’m based in Europe and I calculated my prices based on my cost, my taxes, my expected wage, available hours deducted by holiday and sick time and an overall paid workload of 40% of those hours. That makes me start my prices at 130 per hour of photography and 70 per post processing hour. Of course there is deductions for longer bookings, and networking opportunities etc. Overall I gave my customer the price of a bit more than 300 euros for the job. Sadly my customer wasn’t to happy and very confused as her recent partners oy charged her 100 or got invited for dinner. The customer also wanted to edit the pictures themselves. Again I’m at fault for not following proper procedure here. My questions are the following. Was the price unreasonable? Do you not edit your pictures the way I do and do you only use presets? What would you recommend to do in that situation. Thanks!
Agree with a bunch of comments but did not see the question about handing over unedited pics. Is this a common thing? I would not hand over any raw images though…
If people are willing to pay your prices, they’re not unreasonable.
Some people will only pay bargain basement prices; others will pay top dollar (or £ or EUR) for a high quality product or service.
The only thing you did wrong here is not being transparent with them about your pricing at the outset.
Just because people pay it doesn’t mean it’s not unreasonable. People are desperate and will pay whatever they have to if they need it. However, this doesn’t apply as much to photography. Still 8k for a 30 min session is wildly unreasonable even if a billionaire forks it over.
Always remember - if YOU don’t prioritize YOUR salary, no one else will.
so you did a job without first informing them of the cost…? well that wasn’t right, on both ends. but it does put you in a really hard bargening position
I will follow this thread, as someone who is EU based but not quite at the level to start charging for photoshoots - I’d love to check your portfolio, work so I can get an idea of what level of quality we’re talking about here.
I am just not confident enough to ask someone to pay…