Keith Cooper‘s Photography Blog

How to work out what to charge for your photography services – are your rates high enough?

Photography - your only job?

I’ll keep this one short and simple.  I often get asked about what to charge as a professional photographer by other photographers.

Indeed, I can spot fake ‘work enquiries’ from other photographers a mile off. Our prices are published on the Northlight site, but are aimed at helping potential clients and ourselves, not our competitors

Other photographers are the ones who ask for all the details about licensing and rates up front. This is something we discuss with clients merely as part of the process of ensuring we can meet their needs and help solve their problems.

I know from experience that potential clients who instantly concentrate on price are unlikely to become long term clients (see why this is not good at ‘Expanding your photo business‘)

The basics – much simplified, but it works

• Work out how much money you need to live on [M]
  Remember taxes, and in some parts of the world, the need to worry about health insurance and the like.
• This money comes from the profit that your business will make, after costs are subtracted from your turnover [T]
  Be thorough with costs – travel, cameras, lenses, software, more taxes …anything that the business has to pay to function.
• How many jobs do you think you can average per week?
• How many weeks a year will you be working ?
  Note that if this figure is anywhere near 52, then get real and allow for some holidays! Mine is 40
• Multiply the jobs per week, by the number of working weeks to get a total number for a year [J]
• T divided by J gives the average rate/price/fee you need to charge per job [C] to earn [M]

Now comes the awkward bit…

A lot of would-be photographers, and those recently started, don’t like these numbers.

Well that’s fine, go back and refine the inputs.  Just remember that if you want to eat, then the figure [M] can’t go too low.

• Maybe you can live on savings for a while, or another job?
• Maybe you should look for work in a more profitable area?
• Maybe you can cut costs?
• Maybe you can price low to try raise the number of jobs? (bad move for lots of reasons…) Not for very long for most people, and hardly conducive to a long term profitable business.  Remember that one job that makes £200 profit is worth twenty jobs that make £10.

That’s it – if these numbers don’t stack up, then you’ve at best got a paid hobby or a relatively short career in professional photography ahead of you.

These numbers don’t care if you like them or what you competitors are charging – they give you a simple estimate of what you need to do to earn a living.

But it can still work

It took about 15 months to get Northlight Images into profit (i.e to get [M] at a level I was happy with)

Photography is a fast changing business, but that doesn’t change those numbers…

I’ve written lots of other short articles about the business side of being a photographer, covering many of the things I’ve learnt and discovered over the years.

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I’ve been looking at the latest version of DxO’s RAW camera file converter and image processing software.

Review Link: DxO Optics Pro V7.2

File browsing has been improved

The latest version of DxO Optics Pro offers a number of advances in both workflow and image processing capabilities.

I’ve used earlier versions for converting some of my RAW camera files, both for colour and black and white.

The ‘project’ based approach found in earlier versions of the software is no longer the default option, making it easier to integrate into existing workflows.

Noise reduction is very effective, both for current cameras and, importantly for me, for older cameras that supported.

This photo is from a Concert in London and was taken at 1250 ISO – the highest setting on my Canon 1Ds that I was using at the time.

Software like this, is one more reason to keep your original RAW files.

Polish jazz singer Anna Maria Jopek in London in 2006

Another powerful feature is the recovery of highlights, which when combined with the ‘One shot HDR’ handling of darker areas of images, allows me to keep all the bright cloud detail in this shot, where much of the rest of the image is relatively underexposed.

Spring snow in Colorado. Hwy.285 South of Poncha Springs

Not software I’ll want to use all the time, but it’s helped pull some great images out of files taken in less than optimal lighting.

This review is also discussed in a Google+ thread

Choosing a basic printer for black and white

OK, not everyone wants to make prints this big

At Northlight Images, we’ve a range of printers, but it’s a 44″ width Canon iPF8300 I currently choose for our black and white prints (smaller 24″ iPF6300 shown)

It’s huge and not cheap …but we’re a business.

What about if you’ve been printing a few photos at home and have decided that you want to experiment with black and white photography?

I get asked about this quite often, and have put together some thoughts that also include links to some of our B&W related reviews and articles that may be of further interest.

First up, the bad news.

It’s much easier to produce an acceptable colour print than black and white with most cheaper printers.

If your current printer has just three colour inks or three colours and a black, then you are quite likely to find that black and white prints show a distinct greenish or magenta tinge under some lighting – there is no neutral grey between pure black and the white of the paper.

Black and white test image for printing

Printers have improved a lot over the last few years, but greyscale (or ‘black and white’) performance has not been a priority for the design of smaller printers.

Just trying your existing printer…

If you already have a printer and want to see how it performs for black and white, download and print out our free A4 printer test image.

See our Test Images page, for more info.

Let’s say that you’ve tried the test image on your printer and noticed a slight colour tinge.

Slight colour tints can come in from a combination of paper colour, optical brighteners (OBAs whiten paper and make it much brighter if there is any UV light present – think glowing white shirts in clubs), illuminant (viewing lighting) dependant colour shifts of inks, and profiling accuracy.

The first two of these are part of your paper choices. The third, I’ve discussed in an article about fixing colour tints, whilst the fourth one varies with your print setup (from no profiles, through to making your own).

Probably the most common question I get asked about prints, after ‘My prints are too dark and not matching the screen‘, is why people’s monochrome prints come out green or magenta.

It’s not that nice sometimes to have to tell someone that the printer they are using, just isn’t much good for B&W, and that no matter how much tweaking and test prints they make, or new papers they try, it just isn’t going to give good results for B&W.  By all means give it a go, but don’t expect too much.

If your printer works as a copier, then black and white photos were probably not high in its list of design goals.

What about a new printer?

A4/ letter sized prints in B&W

Unfortunately, I’ve yet to see an A4 sized printer that includes additional inks to expand the greyscale performance.

It is possible that the printer driver will give a moderately good black and white print on some papers, but prepare to be less than overwhelmed.

Note that printing black and white photos is not the same as ‘text’ or ‘black only’ print modes, which are designed for printing text.

By all means try out the test image on small printers – if you come across one which works well, please do let me know.

Bigger printers – Black and white at last

Once you move up from an A4 sized printer to A3 or larger (often 13″ width or A3+) the options improve greatly.

These printers are often sold as ‘Photo printers’ and whilst they will print out a letter or sheet of text perfectly well, it’s ‘photo’ that will appear in the marketing materials.

Look for multiple black inks in the specifications, for best black and white performance.

If I look, for example, at Epson’s current A3+ printer range, I see an R2000, R2880 and R3000.

The R2000 is an excellent solution if you want glossy colour prints, that look like they were from a photo shop. Or colour prints on matt paper. However, it only has one black ink (two are listed, one for matte papers and one for glossy).

The R2880 and R3000 (links are to my reviews) both have multiple black inks and offer a special B&W print mode in the driver software.

For Canon, similarly I might  look at the PIXMA 9000 MkII, 9500 mkII and the new Pro-1. As with the Epson printers, only the last two have multiple black inks, aimed at B&W printing. I note that the Pro-1 has a total of 5 black inks (4 for any particular paper type) and is being particularly marketed for its B&W performance.

Note – I’ve not had a chance to test the Pro-1 yet, and hope to have a full review before too long.

That’s fine, but too expensive…

Do you need both colour and B&W on the printer?

What if you can’t run to a bigger printer and want to try with a smaller one?

Well you could try with some different printer driver software.

For the Epson R800, R1800,R1900, R2000 pigment ink printers, you can try QuadToneRIP software (QTR – $50 shareware) which can give some excellent results.

I’d point out that it also works with the older 2000, 2100, 2200 and 2400 printers that you may find for sale (BUT -check used printers, as you would used cars)

If you get more into black and white, you might want to look at specialist ink sets, which are supported in many older Epson printers through QTR.

One major difficulty for me though, is that they are not easily available here in the UK. You are also tying up a printer for just monochrome printing.

More help

I’ll try my best to answer people’s questions sent to me here at Northlight, or I’d also suggest asking on the specialist Digital Black and White Photography group I’ve set up on LinkedIn. It’s got some 2500 members, and is aimed at people at all levels of interest and ability.

You might also want to check out the full index of all the different Black and White photography articles and reviews, here on this site.

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Absolutely anything whatsoever you order from Amazon helps us run our site – thanks to everyone who has purchased items, however small.

Amazon UK link / Amazon USA link / Amazon France / Amazon Germany / Amazon Canada link

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So, you’ve sold a few photographic prints – do you have the makings of a print business, or is it just a hobby? Some thoughts on what you need to consider if you want to make print sales a significant part of your photo business.