Hey all, I want to begin this with admitting my fault in not starting with an offer. The reason I didn’t send one in is because my customer had already worked with a few different photographers and the project is part of a networking exchange. My bad. So I went there and took pictures for a bit more than two hours. My own expectations of quality make me edit every set of pictures by hand, so no presets. That makes another two hours in editing. Now I’m based in Europe and I calculated my prices based on my cost, my taxes, my expected wage, available hours deducted by holiday and sick time and an overall paid workload of 40% of those hours. That makes me start my prices at 130 per hour of photography and 70 per post processing hour. Of course there is deductions for longer bookings, and networking opportunities etc. Overall I gave my customer the price of a bit more than 300 euros for the job. Sadly my customer wasn’t to happy and very confused as her recent partners oy charged her 100 or got invited for dinner. The customer also wanted to edit the pictures themselves. Again I’m at fault for not following proper procedure here. My questions are the following. Was the price unreasonable? Do you not edit your pictures the way I do and do you only use presets? What would you recommend to do in that situation. Thanks!
the one thing I don’t understand when pros calculate their price, that they consider their cost in that way. The approach would lead a slower pro or a pro which made worse decision in buying gear, being more expensive. Why should a customer pay for that? I would look at what I think the product it worth, not how much it took the photog to make it. If I knew it cost the pro almost nothing* but provides me with a product which is valuable for me, I would happily pay.
that * of course would be customer’s perception, “what? He came here for only so long?”, not thinking about the time, effort and cost to become so good.