Photography Pricing, the Easy Way
I’ve always been doing photography for art’s sake, and never for monetary gains. But there is always a moment in photographer’s life, with career long enough, when somebody knocks on your door and asks for a print or a permission to use your photos…
This article deals with pricing images that you’ve already captured. I will not be talking about photography service pricing, which is a different story: function of your time and effort. Nevertheless, the trick which I reveal to you can be successfully tweaked to give you reasonable price range also for services.
…
To tell the truth, I’ve not sold many photos; just a few and most of them in a recent month. I was happy for the opportunity, but puzzled in the face of unknown. It’s hard to assess an art piece, that’s probably the reason why Gioconda boasts the “priceless” tag.
While I won’t be able to create anything remotely brilliant as the painting mentioned above, I can rest assured that my photos can at least have some down to earth pricing.
Now the question is: what price exactly? Overprice your photo, and you will never hear from buyer again; sell it cheap, and you are losing money.
How to find the right price?
In business terms, you would have to look into demand and supply forces and deduce the market clearing price. But we don’t want to over complicate things here; you certainly don’t need a business degree to sell a photo or two… What we need to do is what businesses have been doing for ages: to look how competition is pricing its products.
I’m sure you knew this, but here comes the tricky part; this type of information isn’t freely available…
Solution is simple!
Next best thing to a photographer’s price list is a stock agency website! (And when I say stock agency, I don’t mean micro stock agency, which is basically a rip-off, a type of slavery for photographers).
I’ve been successfully using: alamy.com
Procedure is easy. Use alamy.com to search for similar photographs, and look up prices based on the usage specified by the person who has inquired about images. Check multiple photos, so you can have a good average.
To make it work as intended, you will need to get following information from your customer: Image use, Details of use, Image size, Print run, Placement etc.
Let’s see it in action:
Brilliant isn’t it? To achieve same pricing simplicity you would have to buy a 700$ software – really!
This solution was suggested to me by Mike – Don’t forget to check his website, amazing landscape photography! I’m including him here for some link karma.
There are 4 comments on this post.
Trackback URL | Comments RSS Feedthis is great, I’ve been looking into a computer program with similar functionality that costs around what you said! awesome! this will save me money, thanks!
I find pricing artwork to be one of the more difficult thinks I have to do at akayakfortwo. Your tip of checking out stock agency sites for a guideline price is great!
Hey,
I’m glad this was helpful.
Very helpful article. Thanks for sharing.