Bart Reardon - Photographer

The cost of Photography

If you ever wondered why photographers cost as much as they do and why beginner photographers that charge $50 per session will never make it then read on.

There are some assumptions that one must make when determining what to charge a client. These act as guidelines for the photographer and are designed to present a baseline. A minimum of income and what needs to be done to achieve that. Things to take into consideration are:

 - how much you want to earn
 - how much it costs to run a business
 - how busy you want to be

How much you want to earn is easy. Pick a figure you are happy with and start with that. Look at the average income for your area or look at what you are currently earning (if you have a full time job). In Canberra, the average income is $75,000 but for this example I'll aim a bit above that as I want to be comfortable but not struggling. I'll aim to earn $85,000.00 but then I have two kids and a mortgage to take care of as well.

How much is costs can vary. You need to take into consideration the cost of running a website, ordering process, computers and software, internet, advertising etc. Most of these should be tax deductable but they are real costs nonetheless. This doesn't include the cost of the shoot (that comes under client fees).

How busy you want to be is a personal preference. You might be able to handle 2 wedding per weekend for 8 months or you might want to do less than that but this number and the amount you want to earn per year determine (roughly speaking) how much you need to charge the client. In simplistic terms you could charge one client $85,000 or 85,000 clients $1 and you get the same amount.

So here's some very conservative assumptions we are going to make:
 - I want to gross $85,000 per year
 - I want to charge around $2000 per wedding
 - I want to charge around $500 per portrait session
 - Each wedding costs $500 to produce (transport, prints, other package items  etc)
 - Each portrait session costs $200 to produce
 - I want to split those workloads 60:40 (weddings are more profitable but portraits are less stress)
 - I have very lean ongoing costs of around $3000 per year (averaged over 3 years), half of which is for some minimal advertising
 - I want to spend just a day editing each portrait session (typically delivering 10-15 photos)
 - I want to spend a week editing wedding photos (typically delivering 10-15 special shots and up to 100 additional images)
 - I want to assume I can make all my income from shooting. Selling prints and products after the fact aren't included in the cost estimate

Here's how some basic figures run, taking into consideration the ongoing costs, tax that needs to be paid to yourself and the running cost of each event:
To pull in my $85,000 I will need to produce 34 weddings and nearly 114 portrait sessions

That's a lot of shooting! 34 weddings per year might be doable but 114 portrait sessions might be out of my reach, so either the wedding price, or the portrait price will need to increase. A quick calculation shows that by increasing the wedding photos price to $2500 and adjusting the ratios to 80% weddings, 20% portraits I can still shoot 34 weddings but the number of portraits I need to do drops to a bit over 55. If I decide I need to advertise more to bring the numbers up then that extra cost is passed on to the client and so on and so forth.

There are a few ways in which these numbers can be adjusted, including re-thinking how much I want to earn and having greater separation between business costs and income, but whichever way you look at it, charging $100 or even $200 to clients for a simple portrait package is unsustainable if the photographer want's to make a living. A hobby done on the side for the love of it can easily turn into a career you resent. To make the same $85000 your $50 a pop photographer needs to get 1700 clients, or nearly 5 clients per day for 365 days straight.

Food for thought.