In the world of professional photography today, 

The cost of your prints has nothing to do with what you charge your customer for your images, nothing at all.

It is your taxes, interest rates, utilities, equipment purchases, along with marketing and advertising expenses, not to mention gasoline prices, food prices, clothing prices.  The cost of transportation.  Creating the ability of growing your business to have a marketable offering when you decide to retire.

Just living, costs everyone twice as much as it did 20 years ago, but photographers think they can build a profitable  business by charging prices that are the same as they were 20 years ago. That just does not work.  This is the reason 95 percent of all new photographers fail. They under price their product because they don't know, and won't take the time to learn  the total cost of operating their business.

This requires an attitude adjustment to correct the causes of failure.

Sell your services. Sell the craft. Sell the experience, not the size of the image.  Photographers have been setting themselves up for disaster for the last two generations by selling SIZE over their service, creativity., and TIME.

Here is a simple equation:

If a photographer's fixed costs are let's say, $75.00 and hour, (which is low), and he spends three hours total, in all aspects of the job and service, working for just one customer, what has he spent already before he even downloads the images into the computer??????

Knowing hourly overhead, the  photographer starts out with $225.00, in fix overhead cost on that job. ( Time X fixes expense= basic cost.)
That is before he adds maybe,,,,,the cost of prints from the lab... but more importantly, one more thing.

That one more thing, being PROFIT.  

What are you worth per hour as a human? If you worked at Mickey Dee's,@ $10.00 dollars an hour? Or in a factory for $20 an hour? 

Let's take the higher wage per hour, cause  I know your smarter than an the average counter clerk.

So now remember you worked 3 hours for this customer from phone call to delivery.   You add that $60.00 on to the $225 cost.and now the last thing, the lab costs, to determine the price.

My question to any and all professional photographers is:

What part of  $285.00 is the $2.25 in determining you selling price?  It plays little if no part, in my opinion. Plus it is a tax write off so there is another non reason.  

Of course the lab cost has to be figured into the selling price, but for glory sakes my friends, it is not the foundation of the selling price calculation as we photographers have done for 75 years.

Know your costs! Know how many dollars it takes per day to be in business.  Know the percentage of sales it is going to take to buy the new camera in 18 months, because you will.  Know your market place.  Know your Market Share. 

The days of sticking up a sign and calling your self a photographer are gone forever.  You can no longer be in business just because your friends think you take good pitchers. 

It takes work.  It takes planning.  It takes investigation.  It takes being involved with your community. It takes working 80 hours a week sometimes.

It take more of everything, except just pushing a button and creating an image.  That is the easiest part.

• All of mankind can make images.

• What do you offer that is better?

• What do you have that is different?

• Why should anybody have you create their photographs?

These are just some of the truths that, there are now in photography.

Count on me to bring you, personally tested thoughts, ideas about this great profession.  It is still alive and well, we just have to learn the new ways of marketing, and producing an image that the entire population around you CAN"T.

Keep the questions coming, and Have a great day,
Bruce Roberts, M. Photog.