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If you’re a new photographer, then you’re likely in search of a photography pricing guide to help you figure out how much you should be charging. In fact, even if you’re not a new photographer, you likely need a photography pricing guide to help you figure out where you’re at in comparison with what other photographers are charging.
Obviously, a lot of this depends upon the type of photography you’re doing. If you’re doing real estate photography, your pricing structure is going to be a lot different than if you are doing portrait or family photography.
Still, there are some basic tips that will help you learn how to price your photography, so you won’t ever have to Google, “how much should I charge for photography,” again.
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Pricing with Hourly Rates
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There are a bunch of ways that you can structure your photography pricing, but one of the more popular ways is to price yourself hourly.
The problem with hourly rates is that they vary widely. But, for the sake of this photography pricing guide, we will suggest that most photographers will price themselves somewhere between $50/hr to $200/hr, depending upon the type of photography and the experience of the photographer.
We definitely do not recommend that you price yourself on the lower side of this rate unless you are brand new to photography. That’s because, when you factor in all of the time it takes to get to your location and to edit your photos, you’ll be making nowhere near that much per hour.
You also need to factor in all of your business expenses, like your equipment and insurance costs.
Pricing with Daily Rates
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The second option for learning how to price photography is to do so on a daily basis. While this isn’t really a popular move with someone doing portrait photography, it is popular for someone who participates in wedding or event photography, in travel photography, or in wildlife photography.
Essentially, if you can expect to spend nearly your entire day doing a shoot, then you should likely be using daily rates. Another way to look at this is that you should be charging daily rates if you cannot feasibly expect to book multiple clients on a single day.
The photography pricing guide for photographers who charge daily rates is a bit more complex because an average day rate for a photography varies between $300 and $3,000.
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Think about it. If you’re hired to shoot someone’s graduation, then you will really only be doing 1-2 hours of work on that day and it doesn’t make sense to charge in the thousands for that service. However, if you’re hired to shoot a wedding, then you can expect to be there from 9am until 11pm. It makes a lot more sense to charge thousands of dollars for a 14-hour work day.
If you’re planning on charging daily rates, then it may be helpful to consult a photography pricing guide that is specific to your photography niche. It may also be helpful to find a more specific photography pricing guide that is relevant to your city, since a wedding photographer in New York City will be far more expensive than a wedding photographer in a rural town.
If you’re planning on charging daily rates, it is also so, so important for you to explicitly state the number of hours you plan to shoot in your contract. Otherwise, you may end up with an especially needy client requesting too much work for your established rate.
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Pricing Per Photo
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One final popular way to price your photography is doing it per photo. This is, of course, a part of our photography pricing guide that not a lot of photographers will truly need. However, if you’re doing professional headshots for a living, or if you’re doing specific types of marketing shots, then it may be.
Photographers typically charge somewhere between $25 to $250 per unedited photo, and $50 to $400 per edited photo.
If you’re planning on using this part of the photography pricing guide, then we highly recommend that you, once again, think about all of the time you’ll be helping your models get set up, traveling to and from your photoshoot location, and editing. Only after you’ve established how much time a single shot might cost you should you decide on a price.
Pricing with Packages
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One of the more popular pricing structures in this photography pricing guide is pricing with packages. That’s because packages offer your clients different options, but it’s also because packages offer you the option to try and guide what you want your client spending money on. That’s because good photographers will offer three different packages, with the medium-priced package being what they want their clients to purchase.
Photography packages usually cost somewhere between $150 to $500 if you’re planning on shooting a family or individual, and $350 to $550 if you’re planning on shooting a smaller event. That’s if you’ll be doing somewhere around 3 or 4 hours of shooting.
Collecting Payment
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Regardless of which structure you choose from this photography pricing guide, you’ll need to spend valuable time chasing down paychecks from your clients. Unfortunately, it is one of the cons of running your own business.
However, there are ways that you can make this process easier on yourself and one of them is Podium.
Podium is an all-in-one messaging platform that allows you to text your clients to remind them about their appointments, to upsell them on your products, and to get paid. That’s because Podium allows you to send your invoice directly to your client’s cell phone via text message. Considering the fact that over 95% of text messages get opened, you can rest assured that your clients received your invoice.
The invoicing option Podium offers also lets people easily pay their invoices right from their phones because it is integrated with things like Google Pay and Apple Pay. You don’t want this process to be any harder than it absolutely has to be.
While Podium is not free, they do offer a free trial for our readers so that you can determine whether it is something that might work for your business or not.