Take pictures for free for 3-4 years, put together a portfolio, then start charging

I was wondering how much to charge for photography

People don’t pay for “photography.” People pay for product photography, people pay for portraits, people pay for digital restoration of an old photo, people pay for retouching of beauty shots, people play for photography of a baseball game. Each market might be different.

I currently shoot on a canon t5 with manual settings

Forgetting your age entirely. This is a tell-tale statement that usually reads to me that why you are making an effort to learn, you have very limited experience as you’re putting emphasis on the wrong priorities.

I’d negotiate with each client on the needs. Maybe you made some money that can help you buy a new filter or put some money towards a new lens. But at the same time you may find some jobs that give you more experience to learn or opportunities to expand your portfolio may be worth taking a job that pays less.

Charging by the hour may be problematic at your point as you’re still learning. The first time you do a job you haven’t done before you might spend 5-10 hours retouching cause you’re spending time figuring stuff out. By the 10th time you’ve done it, you might be down to 1-2 hours. So if you do charge by the hour, try not to charge for time spend figuring things out. For this reason, charging for number of final deliverable files might be simpler. I don’t know if you want to spend a ton of time calculating hours worked initially (later you may move to that). And again, you can negotiate with each client and set a rate for each as needed.

Forget all the people saying you can’t charge anything — lots of teens do work for money. You can’t charge as much as a professional but that’s fine, you could at least charge as much as you’d earn working at a fast food restaurant or babysitting!

I freelanced since I was 14 years old, and it gave me invaluable experience in working with clients, negotiating, delivering on what I promised, and handling money.

And I got shafted by clients, like everyone does, which was good in a way because I learned a lot from it when stakes were very low and mostly it just hurt my feelings.

Yes you should use as much time as you can learning and trying lots of things — for cheap or free — because that’ll give you insight into what you do and don’t love, that’ll help you as you grow up and have to make adult decisions about college and career.

But there’s no reason you can’t earn some money while you’re doing it!

A lot of people are being realistic here, but don’t take that to mean you shouldn’t try. At this point the most valuable thing you can do is learn is that failure can be a good thing. Understanding what doesn’t work is just as valuable as understanding what does, and making mistakes with the intention of learning from them is the best way to get that understanding.

Make a fake Gmail that sounds real. Then reach out to other photographers in the area with a similar skill level and kind of shooting you do. That’s if they don’t have their prices on their webpage. But realistically you probably aren’t ready to be charging for any type of work yet.