How to Price Your Photography Services

You've bought the camera, you've mastered the techniques, you're ready for business. What are your prices? This helpful video will give you some good guidelines for pricing your photography services.

Coming to you from Tony and Chelsea Northrup, this video talks about pricing photography services. It's a complicated question with no single answer, as there's a veritable multitude of factors each unique situation warrants consideration of. Nevertheless, one of the most salient points for me and one that took me a long time to learn was truly adding up how much time you spend on photography work and taking that into consideration when you project how many clients you'd like to have and the total amount of money you'd like to earn. It's easy to fall into the trap of simply counting the time spent shooting the client and editing the pictures, but you need to consider all the time you spend in your business, as that's time that you can no longer spend making money elsewhere. While you shouldn't automatically pass all these costs onto the client, you do need to make sure the way you price yourself is both fair to what you deserve and sustainable. 

Lead image by Maria Tyutina, used under Creative Commons. 

Alex Cooke's picture

Alex Cooke is a Cleveland-based portrait, events, and landscape photographer. He holds an M.S. in Applied Mathematics and a doctorate in Music Composition. He is also an avid equestrian.

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12 Comments

For site visitors who don't have 30 minutes of their day to spend watching these two back-and-fourth over giving ranges based on variables for pricing... It sure would be nice for the Fstoppers poster to give a rundown. 30 minutes is nice and it allows the video creators to add in an additional 2 or 3 ads but for the rest of the world... its clock sucking.

Yeah how about a TLDR/TLDW

The reason we don't do that is because I believe that's plagiarism. If you give away the content of the video to the point that it's no longer necessary to watch it, you're robbing the video's creator of the views they earned through the hard work in creating that video and passing off the work as your own. That's why we do our best to help you decide if the video is something you would personally like and should therefore watch but don't transcribe its contents. There is also our vast wealth of original articles: https://fstoppers.com/originals

I just may download their podcast for the ride home tonight.

Alex Cooke And what about writing a summary of the times where the essential bits are ? Fstoppers writers don't need to write much more, creators get views and busy people get to the point. Everybody's happy.

ron fya Certainly not a bad idea for longer videos.

Brad Harris nowadays, because creators tend to produce such long videos, and yes they are time-sucking for the most part because of so much small talk, I watch almost all of youtube at 1.5x speed, and even sometimes at 2x speed.

Best shortcuts for youtube:
J, K, L : rewind, play/pause, fast-forward
<, > : play slower, play faster

Thanks for the shortcuts. I usually just skip through the videos until i find what i want. Especially when youtubers add all their hipster electric music BS.

So true. Thanks Ron.

Thanks for saying how long the video is. I know not to bother even starting it now. On to the next article...

This was pretty helpful and actually made me interested in pricing structures. Before I was always like " blaaaaaaaaaaaahhhh pricing sjdhvsjkdhf" but this made it a lot easier to start figuring out what I want to do. Thanks pimps!

Haha. Try to shoot for these prices in Czech republic :D