Pricing Your Photography

If you’ve ever asked, “What should I charge for my photography?”, this class is for you.

Pricing is a difficult part of running a business for many photographers and the truth is that the answer to the above question varies dramatically. To help you overcome this challenge, this class provides an overview of the costs you should be looking at that will help you determine your pricing.

Karl discusses day rates, outside services (retouchers and models, etc.), set building and props, agents, equipment and studio rental. He also looks at usage fees and how you can find the right balance in what to charge.

In this class:

  • The costs of running a business
  • Day rates – what are they and how do they work?
  • Usage fees – what they are and when to apply them
  • Advantages and disadvantages of working with agents
  • What to consider when pricing your photography

Please find the accompanying documents for this class here or in the Downloads section.

Questions? Please post them in the comments section below.

Photography pricing

Comments

  1. Hi, I’m not sure about the licensing fee for packshots (white BG). It is about 100-300 photos per month, but the client distributes these photos to his dealers (around EU), so it is about 10-20 sites (Czech Republic, Slovakia and a few countries within EU). Could I ask for help on how to set the license fee correctly when the price per photo without license would be say $10? Thank you very much!

    1. Hi, I would say it would be uncompetitive to add a usage fee to simple pack-shots. Their will be many pack shot providers who do not charge a usage fee for this sort of work, usage fees are more applicable to ‘campaign’ advertising style imagery where the photographer is making more creative input into the success of the campaign.

  2. Hi Karl, first time comment here. Is the day rate still applicable if you have 3 to 4 models to shoot for a campaign or will you charge your rate per model?

    1. Hi, If you can explain what you mean a little more I’ll try to answer, for example are you shooting fashion on models for a label or are you shooting portfolios for the models etc etc? I’m not quite sure what you mean by rate per model? As mentioned in these classes we shoot either Day Rate or Half Day and then Post Production fees and usage fees.

      1. Ah yes sorry. I was commisioned to shoot for a local brand here in the Philippines for their 2025 collection of MTB gears and apparels. There are 3 riders that I photograph with 5 different jerseys and gears each. I already included transpo and meal fees, equipment rental fees, assistant fee. I just don’t feel like I charge them enough day rate fee for it if I just shoot 1 rider for 5 jersey for a day.

        1. Hi, in commercial photography you need to apply a day rate that ensures you are profitable throughout the year and that is competitive based on the standard of your work and other photographers of the same standard. For example it is ok to be 5x more expensive than another photographer if your work and service is much better. But going back to the pricing, most commercial photographers in the UK, Europe and USA operate on: 1. Photography day rate/creative fee plus expenses for rental, catering etc. 2. Pre-production testing and post production work (this rate in my case is half my day rate). 3. Usage fees (usually only applicable to bigger campaign work)

  3. How is usage fee priced? I didnt see anything in the video.
    Example:
    1 year internet use or
    3months print in UK and EU, or
    6months print worldwide
    There are many permutations.

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