After several years as a full time photographer, I have gathered a couple of things I want to clarify or rectify. That’s why I decided to write a short series of articles about my cost and frustrations as a photographer. I’ll publish the whole series during the next couple of days. Today I’ll start off by answering the question, what does a photographer cost and why I have to set this cost.
Situation
We’ll assume I got the following request. I have to photograph during 3 hours, capturing the atmosphere and speakers at an event in the centre of Brussels. The photos will only be used on a website as a photo essay of the evening. No special requests
How much does a photographer cost
Below you see a quote I would send out for this assignment. I used an imaginary coin, the numbers only represent the values compared to each other.
- Photography during 3h. (with a marge of 1h) – 147 bunkies (ex. VAT)
- Material: reportage kit – 73 bunkies (ex. VAT)
- Transport inside benelux – 49 bunkies (ex. VAT)
- Selection and processing of the images within 5 business days – 73 bunkies (ex. VAT)
- Storage and archiving during 5 years- 49 bunkies (ex. VAT)
- Delivery of the selected images in web and high resolution through a shared folder on dropbox.com or via wetransfer
- Complete and unlimited use of the photos
This makes a total 391 bunkies (ex. VAT) for this quote
Why this price
Let us analyse every cost.
3 hours of photography
A cost of 147 bunkies, means an hourly wage of 49 bunkies, at least that’s for the hours I’ll be photographing. If you receive an hourly wage from an employer that does seem a lot. Let’s see how much time I actually spent on this event, even without processing the photos.
- Process the request for a quote, make appointements, check the route, etc… – this can easily be 1h30min.
- Arrive 30 to 45 min. in advance, to make the last appointements and prepare all the material
- The start of the event is 15 min. late
- As advertised it takes 3hours, but it goes 15 minutes over time, as events do.
- Checking with the responsible that it’s ok to leave and put away all my gear takes about 15 min.
In total that’s 5 till 5h30min. Let’s reconsider my hourly wage now. It goes down from 49 bunkies to +/- 30 bunkies before taxes and social costs. To keep it easy I’ll assume those are 40%, so my netto hourly wage is 18 bunkies.
Material
What do I need to shoot an event and why do I count this as a cost, I have bought this anyway.
- 1 camera + 1 backup camera
- 3-4 lenses
- flash, minimal 1 preferably 2 and backup
- Memory cards
- batteries + backup batteries
- lenscloths
All together this is about 8000 bunkies, this means to pay of my gear I have to do +/- 110 assignments. Off course it doesn’t stop there, because whenever anything fails, I have to use my backup and try to replace it before the assignment. If I can’t replace it, I have to rent or borrow equipment, that’s cost of time, transport and maybe a renting price. But as a customer you’re sure I’ll be on the assignment with appropriate gear.
Transport
49 bunkies to go from Aalst to Brussels and back, ain’t that a bit much? Let’s analyse
- Standard transportcost of 0,35 bunkies/km, Aalst-Brussels-Aalst = 50 km x0,35 bunkies, total of 17,5 bunkies
- Parking in Brussels for 5h to 6h – 2,5 bunkies/h makes about 12,5 bunkies
- Time traveling + finding a parking spot without traffic jams – 1u
The cost for parking and transport is 30 bunkies. That makes 20 bunkies for my time or 12 bunkies after tax. But my transport is fixed inside the benelux, so that means if I’m driving to Brussels or Amsterdam it’s the same price, you can make your own calculations.
Selection and processing
Als rule of thumb every hour spent shooting during an event is half an hour processing, let’s see.
- Transferring photos to the computer – 45 min.
- First round going through and eliminating all the bad ones – 10 min.
- Second round going through, making small adjustments for colour and exposure, developing the photos if you will – 45 min.
- Third round going through checking all images and deleting duplicates – 10 min.
- Preparing export and exporting to dropbox – 40 min.
- Checking export and sending it all to the client – 10 min.
That’s a total of 2h10min., let’s round off to 2hours. That means my hourly wage is now 36,5 bunkies. But we forget to calculate the cost for the computer, card reader, programs, internet connection, dropbox account, all necessary for processing the images. That cost is about 3000 bunkies, using the same value of 110 assignments, that makes about 27 bunkies. I’m left with 23 bunkies hourly wage or about 14 bunkies after taxes
Storage and archiving
This means that every customer can ask for their images again within a time period of 5 years without any extra cost.
- 1 archiving disk
- 1 backup of the archiving disk
- 1 backup of the computer, not every image is archived directly
- 1 offsite backup of all the above
- Good archiving system, so that everything can be found again
- Time to find the images and deliver them again
It’s hard to pick an exact value for these things, but for 5 years it does not look as an exaggerated cost
Conclusie for what does a photographer cost?
It may seem that you pay a lot for a photographer, but after analysing the prices and their cost, you can see that it’s really not that much.
The next article is about the frustrations as a payed photographer
