Pricing and Packages

Appropriate pricing requires the juggling of a few factors. Fees should include pricing for your services and your costs.

You might first consider:

Hours spent at wedding taking pictures.

Post production time- editing and choosing pictures for clients.

Price of printing photos at your photo lab, product freight, packaging, location rentals, credit card processing fees, paypal fees.

Album costs and time to produce.

Effort of burning images onto CD and/or placing them on website. – time/cost involved with computer work, backing up files, uploading to galleries, etc.

These are factors in Cost Of Sales (COS).

Secondly, you may factor your general expenses,  these are more fixed items such as :

Overhead (Studios), Insurance, Equipment, advertising, administration (telephone/internet,bookkeeping,financial consulting) Education,  and credit card interest.

Thirdly, the harder-to-price features such as how much to charge for your talent, experience , and personality need to fall into the equation too.

These are all costs of running a business which need to be considered if you’re interested in running a profitable business.

You need to assess at the outset what are your expenses? And what level of service are you willing to provide?

You can be a shoot & burn photographer, taking pictures and giving clients a CD/DVD, or be more concerned with delivering a more holistic wedding experience.

And if so, then how much will you invest into providing that experience. Are you concerned with developing your brand ? Or, are you a part timer, not too concerned about making significant profit from your photography venture ?

Decide who you’d like your clients to be  (Young Professionals? Local folks? Worldwide?) lower, middle-upper class?

Scanning the local competition may be a strategy to those just beginning, setting your prices just under the average, to be competitive. But beware, if you start here you may realize that your business can’t grow or expand as you like because essentially all you’ve done is decide your prices based upon another photographers prices. Who’s to say that that photographer will endure, and that they’re showing profits at their price level? You really haven’t done enough meaningful research if you only price your weddings based on the competition. You need to base your prices first upon your cost of goods.

Professional Photographers of America(PPA) has outlined a set of financial benchmarks which are designed to assist the Retail Studio and the Home Studio photographer bring in profits.

For a Home Studio, their research through surveys has identified that a 35% Cost of Sales/ 30% General Expenses/ 35% Bottom line profit is the breakdown of the successful home studios that they have surveyed. Ultimately, your Pricing should be structured such that your cost of sales ( photo printing/time producing goods) ought to be covered by 35% of your selling price. Your general expenses- covered by 30%, and 35% is your bottom line profit to do with as you wish- pay bills, purchase new equipment, whatever.

This is only a guide based upon successful studios that were surveyed by PPA. Take it or leave it, however, the point is that by having been exposed to this statistic you will be forced to take a closer look at what it is you’re doing, and hopefully, know where you stand with your pricing. Retail studios have to sell and earn more, so their benchmark looks a little different. 40% of a Studios income must go toward its general expenses, higher, due to larger overhead. 25% should be allocated to cost of sales, while 35% is a healthy bottom line profit.

*factoid TheKnot.com survey in 2009 found that in a survey of 21,000 new brides, the mean amount spent by US couples on the wedding photographer was $2,444.  The same survey found that there were regional differences, Arkansas TOTAL wedding budgets averaged just $15,073- New York$56,999. I would say to aim for the middle of the road with your packages. Low pricing does nothing to entice the kinds of brides and weddings we all would love to shoot. Overpricing, well, is just as much of a mistake because if you’re not prepared to deliver what you charge, you will shoot your first and last wedding in this town.

Clients aren’t usually photo connoisseurs, and really don’t judge photographers’ work as harsh as we judge ourselves and one another. They just want to hire someone whom they can trust to deliver beautiful images that help them remember their wedding day. Your reputation will be the mark that justifies your pricing more than the content of your photographs. This is why your personality will have to shine, clients also want a photographer who is easy to work with and won’t get in the way of the wedding day proceedings. The don’t know that they want this, but it’s your duty to make sure they learn that you ARE just that! Being fun and energetic will go some of the way in helping you develop that reputation.

Related articles

• Assessing Your Photography Market (blogs.photopreneur.com)