How Photographers Are Price Cutting You

I write a lot of articles about photographers not price cutting you, so I am going to try and approach this from the opposite direction. Here is how photographers are price cutting you.

I am clearly bias on this topic and to cut straight to the headline, I do not believe in price cutting at all, but I thought it wise to look at the argument from an opposing direction. The belief is that photographers offering the same service as you for less money are price cutting you. Yet, I think it is fair to say that there is a parallel argument that these said photographers are doing a worst job with worst equipment etc. So there are a few facets to the argument.

What Are Clients Paying For?

Every genre of photography has a mix of clients. From those who do not value photography much (which is fine) and don’t pay large fees, through to those who think it is the most important thing in their life or business and pay fees to correlate with this. Within there are huge gray areas. If you are targeting people who do not value photography and offering them a high end service, you are going to get price cut. Not because the other photographer is looking to wrong you, but because they are offering the service at the price of the value. Obviously if you take this to its natural conclusion, you have photographers ending up paying to shoot for clients. Which I am sure has happened to some. The trick is not to get caught up by this trap. If people are not willing to pay for your service at your fee, you either have the wrong service or the wrong client. Wondering why your fine art prints of tinned food wont sell for $10 at a major art show or why they won’t sell for $500 at a local fair are the same issue, I do not personally believe that price cutting goes into it, I do think that people pitch the wrong product to the wrong people though. In this case, the product, service, and client are misaligned, but both do have their place.

What Are You Worth?

Knowing your worth is key in every industry, but also understanding that is changes. Years ago, if you printed maps to be sold at gas stations, you were on to a winner, anyone driving anywhere would need a map. Today, it is a pretty low value economy. Sat nav is now being out dated by the free phone apps which are purchased via your data which is in turn sold on, and I am sure at some point driverless cars will trump the lot. Ranting about the value of your maps and how apps are undercutting you is not going to get you anywhere, as is the case with ranting about instagram photographers getting paid more with their phone than you do with your $10,000 camera and lens combo. Clients rarely care about your camera, they care about your images and in all honesty, a lot of the Instagramers have better images than most people who call themselves photographers.

Times change and the value placed on the service moves with it. The family portrait photographer selling prints of negatives is long gone and that business model no longer works. Yet, I know of influencers who do phone photography getting paid $10K to take a photograph of a product in situ. As far as I am concerned, this is professional photography. I then take a complicated image in my studio and get the same fee, but we offer very different products and ROIs, so we also have very different clients or at least different shoot briefs with different projected marketing outcomes when we do have the same client.

How Can People Charge Less?

As photographers, we don’t always see the business side of things like people in other professions do.After all, we are selling on our creative abilities. If you are working with just a kit camera and lens or an iPhone, then you can charge less than a photographer with a Hasselblad and make the same profit margin. If the quality of images is as good or good enough, the lower price point will win. Why pay more when you can achieve your goals for less?

What Should You Do If You Are Being Price Cut?

If you think that another photographer is offering the same service as you and that all things are equal, but that they are charging far less, they are going to get the clients. It is as simple as that. If, by some unknown reason they are obscenely cheap and the work is of an incredibly high standard, this probably wont create a booking through price cutting due to perceived value and risk, but for most of us it will happen. Nevertheless, with lower fees, it is highly unlikely that they are actually offering parallel services.

Chances are that they have remove costs that they feel the client is not interested in. Maybe you feel a high end prime lens is required, where as the client can’t tell the difference between that and a kit lens. This is not the photographers fault, the cheaper photographer has merely understood that particular  market better and has filled the gap. I have had clients looking at Phase One images and asking for even more from the camera, but I have also shot for clients with my phone when local restaurants need images on a budget. See if you can spot them on my food photography portfolio www.scottchoucino.com  There are however, as briefly touched upon, a few reasons to pay more, if you tick these boxes then your clients will stay, if you simply do not command the extra cost, they will go else where.

If you are offering a far higher perceived quality of product that there is a need or desire for, your clients won’t go cheap, or at least the clients you attract wont expect cheap, you will more than likely find that your cheap clients go else where, but that is an article in itself. People only go cheap when the perceived value just isn’t there. I am not paying $1000 for shoes when $300 do the job for me. Someone else is only paying $50 because that's how much they value shoes. That isn’t to say that the $50 shoes are undercutting the $1000 shoes. The more expensive shoes are probably far better (removing any premium for certain brand names), but not everyone cares about shoes nor do they require shoes of the same quality.

Cheap, Good or Fast: Pick Two

As the adage goes, you can pick two of the following; cheap, good, fast. If you need a high quality image delivering quickly, clients know that they are not going to get it cheap. This is just a fact of life. Those looking for all three are either nightmare clients to avoid or are kidding themselves or you and only really care about two of the above. If you can offer on site delivery on an ad campaign whilst having your retoucher in the room, you wont be cheap and the clients who need you will pay the fee for this. This has been my personal experience. If you are offering a family portrait, speed probably isn’t vital, but quality and price may be, so people may be happy with a cheaper portrait of high quality that takes 3 weeks to receive.

You need to understand your market and work toward it. Being angry that the world doesn’t work the way it did or the way you want it to is pointless and wont change anything. If someone is price cutting you, you need to up your game and prices or perhaps look to cutting back on your overheads to meet their price point whilst maintaining your profit margins. My choice was to up my game and increase my day rate by more than ten times so that I could afford to offer the service that I wanted to produce, I then slowly upped my product until people would actually pay my new price. I didn’t want to be part of the fight to the bottom, so instead of being annoyed at prices I couldn’t compete with whilst offering the service I wanted to, I worked on my craft and priced myself well out of that market. But this was not quick, it took 6-8 years of constantly working all day and every evening and probably 3 out of 4 weekends. Which is not for everyone, but in the same way, not everyone will make it to be the CEO of a company, I certainly couldn’t get there as I don’t have the love for the career path and there is no way I would work 16 hour days for 8 years to get there. It sounds obscene to me that anyone would want to do that for what I think is a very dull job, but we all have our own ambitions and interests to work with. 

So What Do I Think?

I do agree, cheap photographers are cheaper than expensive photographers. I also agree that they are not as good (in general), but I don’t agree that they are ruining the market or price cutting anyone. It is just business, we all need to adapt to the changes. It seems that the same argument has been running since the 90s with some being angry and others adapting. I am sure it will continue and I am sure the goal posts will change.

If in 2025 I am working on an iPhone to be a photographer, I will be more than happy. I love taking photographs of food and the means to achieve this do not interest me. If it means I charge less, but have lower overheads and achieve the same profit then I am more than happy.

I also have a pretty diverse income streams, which is a mix of hobbies that pay and a few Brexit disaster plans incase the British Government send us into some horrendous recession. But I am confident that making a living from photography alone will be a viable business and is becoming even more viable thanks to social media.