Pricing Photography

The Complete Guide to Assignment and Stock Prices

Michal Heron, David MacTavish

• Publisher: Allworth
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781621532569
• Topic: Mezzi di comunicazione e arti performative
• Subtopic: Arti performative e business

Written by successful freelance photographers, this classic trade reference tool provides photographers with a wealth of time-tested information on everything from estimating prices, identifying pricing factors, and negotiating fair deals. Topics discussed include practical information on the economics of photography, cutting-edge negotiation techniques, pricing guidance for photography buyers, how to structure prices to fit any type of market and usage, how to define prices in a way that guarantees long-term profitability, and the specifics of pricing electronic media. A must-have addition to every photographer's bookshelf.

CHAPTER 1

The Business of Photography

Photography is an obsession, mostly a joyful one. This doesn’t have to be explained to any photographer who has felt an adrenaline rush while shooting and deep satisfaction at viewing a finished image. Catching elusive light, graphic details, a fleeting expression, and evocative moments are what draw us to photography.

The profession of photography is unusual in the extraordinary range of abilities it demands of a practitioner. It combines artistic, emotional, and technical skills; it requires you to understand the impact of light on a sensor, to recognize the power of imaging software to enhance photographs, and to have physical, organizational, mental, and emotional strengths as well. You must be at once left- and right-brained—in short, you must do it all.

The joy of photography is in its challenge, adventure, and satisfactions. It is a “profession” in that it is a way to earn a living; it is also a profession of our faith in the artistic side of our nature. When you fall in love with photography, you are embracing an addiction—to the pleasures of creating with light, to a fascination with seeing, and to the delight of sharing the visualization of your emotions and your intellect. Plus, it’s fun.

Most of us would do photography paid or not. It’s part of who we are. Our purpose here is to help you get paid fairly for doing what you love in spite of the special challenges of today’s economy.

Make no mistake, it’s a tough world, and photography is not a sure thing, as veteran photographers know. If you are entering the profession, the silver lining is that new photographers will always be needed, just not as many as in previous years. At the end of this chapter, we consider realistic approaches to building a successful career in the world of photography.

Who is the reader? Are you picking up this book to find prices or, preferably, to learn about negotiating and pricing? Judging by the emails the authors have received over the time span of the three previous editions of this book, readers fall into three general categories: The first is the entry-level photo student struggling to understand how one might earn a living in photography. Second is the working professional who wants to check prices and finetune pricing and negotiating skills to fit the current economy. And third, there is the established veteran, already skilled at negotiating, simply keeping abreast with pricing trends.

Especially for the newcomer, we believe it’s valuable to understand the evolution of the profession. In this book, we’ll provide information that clarifies traditional concepts of negotiating, as they are the foundations of business. The fundamental principles of negotiating, setting your prices, and maintaining a viable business still hold true, though they have been dramatically altered by the paradigm that came along with the Internet.

Language of negotiation. The traditional concepts of negotiation are meaningful, though the vocabulary may be different. Today, agreements may be expressed in language for Twitter or suitable for texting to a client but must still be backed up by a framework that protects the photographer’s rights.

If you are coming of age and entering the world of photography as a new professional, you have the advantage of being at ease with all types of instant communication. However, you should not rush headlong into agreements that you don’t understand with rights that are not spelled out clearly. Read the chapters on negotiating and translate those precepts into current forms of communication. When you receive a client query, it’s fine to text or use Twitter to respond with brief bare bones comments that bring you and a client into a working agreement on an assignment. But you should create backup documents to send within hours to nail down details that spell out rights, fees, expenses, and responsibilities.

Using This Book

The temptation to skip the text chapters in this book and go directly to the price charts is understandable. But that would give you numbers without understanding. Unless you are an experienced professional, with a long career of negotiating and pricing, we believe that the information in this revised edition is as relevant as ever in giving you a foundation for understanding how to approach pricing. The doomsayers may argue that negotiating has become a futile exercise since clients are in the driver’s seat– that they simply offer out their fee and you take it or leave it. That’s only partially true. The fact is that successful negotiations go on regularly. An understanding of negotiating coupled with a clear view of the economics of photography will help you learn whether photography is a viable profession for you.

Earning a Living through Photography

There are many service photography specialties, such as banquet, insurance, or even forensic photography. However, most of the business falls into two general categories: consumer photography and photography for publication.

Consumer-based photography, such as wedding photography and portraiture, provides a product to a retail customer. In this case, the actual product purchased, the photographic print, changes hands and generally is retained by the buyer. Many ancillary photo products are offered, such as a table number photo card, an enlarged album, and DVDs of photos set to music. If a product can be designed with a photo displayed on it, it is probably available from a photographer to a consumer client. But it is a product. That’s the important distinction.

Photography for publication, on the other hand, most often provides a service, not a product. It means that the customer (or final user) is a client who reproduces a photograph in, for example, an advertisement, a calendar, a magazine, an ebook, a website, or a company brochure. In this instance, the photographer allows access to the photograph through the turnover of digital image files with specified usage limitations defined in their paperwork. Most often, the image files are transferred to the client electronically, for example, by posting on an ftp site. Rarely, the image files are burned onto a DVD or CD for shipping to a client. In that case, the only physical property accompanying the disc may be a match print to use for color guidance to a printer or a contact sheet for reference purposes. It’s extremely unusual for any tangible item to be provided for reproduction purposes.

A client pays merely for the permission to reproduce (i.e., to license) the photograph as part of their publication (magazine, book, newspaper, brochure) or in a product (greeting card, DVD cover, packaging box). The digital files are property of the photographer on loan for that purpose. In later chapters, you will learn strategies for protecting the digital files in the possession of a client. The photographer is licensing the rights to publish the photo for a period of time, a particular use, for a number of uses in a specific geographic territory—but is not selling it. In casual speech, you will often hear the word “sell” with reference to publication photography. However, it is more accurate to say that you license rights or grant permission to reproduce the image.

Fine art photography and the selling of gallery prints to collectors and museums—a specialty unto itself—cross over into all aspects of photography. Art can originate in any part of the business. The power of the work, the reputation of the photographer, as well as the skill of the gallery in selling that art determine prices for fine art photography. However, the pricing and negotiating techniques in this book will concentrate on photography for publication.

Career Choices in Photography

How do you earn your living as a photographer? Lifestyle preferences and circumstances, like what jobs are available, will largely determine whether photographers work on staff as employees or on their own as independent businesspersons/entrepreneurs.

Staff photographers are used by companies as varied as newspapers and book publishers or medical media producers, as well as by institutions ranging from museums to governmental agencies—actually, wherever an institution has a large enough volume of work to keep a photographer busy. Catalog studios are also likely to use staff photographers.

Staff jobs generally pay a relatively low salary but offer the security of a regular income, benefits, access to expensive equipment without the overhead of maintaining it, and an opportunity to gain practical experience in a variety of photographic areas. Staff jobs can also provide continuity, often offering the photographer the opportunity to work with the same people or on the same types of projects, and sometimes even to become a specialist in one field. However, photographers are most often used as part-timers rather than full-time staff. It’s a handy way for emerging photographers to gain experience, but since there are no benefits or permanence, it’s not the foundation for a long career.

Being an independent freelance photographer means you are in business for yourself, whether you work as a sole proprietor (just you) or run a photography studio with a staff. This lifestyle offers variety, creative challenges, the possibility of a higher income than a staff position—and anxiety. Along with the excitement and satisfaction of running your own operation comes the pressure of maintaining an overhead with an uncertain income flow.

Blending. Aside from the two major types of career choices mentioned above, it’s increasingly common to create a blended career, earning in several areas of photography to provide a living. For example, a shooter may also work as a production manager for other photographers. A staff photographer for a catalog studio may shoot for stock in his or her free time. A makeup artist may shoot portraits as an adjunct to his or her business.

Another common blend is a hybrid career: part photographer and part digital technician. Simply working full time as a digital tech is an increasingly realistic career path. This person can light and shoot professional level photos as well as process and retouch the digital files with a high degree of expertise. As you’ll see throughout this text, every photographer must have a certain technical digital expertise. However, there are those who excel in this area and use it to balance their career in shooting. There are also veteran photographers who did not “grow up” with digital devices who rely on the expertise of younger, tech-savvy assistants.

Film and video. An increasing trend for a blended career is the move to film and video. Many clients consider photographers who shoot video in addition to stills more valuable than photographers who only shoot stills.

The book Creative Careers in Photography (see the bibliography) outlines more types of careers that might be blended with shooting to allow a viable income in the world of photography.

The information in Pricing Photography is critical to the financial success of an independent photography business, but it is equally (and possibly more) useful to the staff photographer who sells stock or does the occasional freelance job. The staff person, being out of the mainstream of day-to-day pricing, may be more at sea when called upon to negotiate the occasional assignment or stock photo sale.

Photography Income

For pricing purposes, the two main sources of photography income for the independent photographer working for publication are assignment photography and stock photography.

Assignment photography is new photography commissioned and paid for by a client. We photographers are selling our ability to create a photograph and also granting the rights for the client to reproduce that photograph for a very specific usage and time period. In stock photography, we are selling (licensing) rights to reproduce an already existing photograph. Those stock photographs are any to which the photographer owns the rights. They may have resulted from many sources: from an assignment (the outtakes—the images to which the photographer retains the rights from an assignment), from photography produced specifically with stock in mind, or from any other impetus, such as travel shooting, family portraits, or lighting experiments. Any good photography to which you own the rights is potential stock photography.

Stock photography can be marketed for us by one or more professional stock photo agencies, or through one of the many Internet outlets for photography, to a range of clients worldwide. These agents do not own the copyrights but merely act on your behalf. Photo agencies maintain staff to handle everything from the routine key wording and cataloging of the images to maintaining a responsive website for easy access by clients to a huge number of images. To cover these costs, agents keep a commission from any fees they collect for usage licensing (commonly 50–65 percent). Increasingly, stock agencies are also charging the photographer a fee for each image entered into their system. The rationale is that the ever-ballooning cost of maintaining state of the art websites requires greater participation from the photographer. Before agreeing to this fee structure, be sure that you assess your images as well as the strength of the agency to market them. Don’t pay a fee for the “glory” of having an image on file. The safety net here is that most reputable agencies will not take your work if they don’t believe it has income potential.

Another income stream comes from companies that operate photo source websites on which you pay to be showcased. This is different from mainstream photo agencies, which provide many services for the fee they receive from licensing your images. These photo source websites charge you according to the number of images posted on their site (either per month or annually). They promise to put your work in front of thousands of clients worldwide, and you handle the negotiating and collecting of licensing fees. There are a number of reputable source websites used by serious, well-established professionals to promote their images. In some ways, these source websites are the digital version of the old stock catalog. It is a new marketing world, so i...