- Another important step to consider taking
when you're interested in becoming a pro
is to begin to think about how you monetize
your time, your craft and your skill
because what tends to happen to people,
so when they have passion about something,
they tend to undervalue what they do,
and that really is a surefire way to ensure
that you probably won't succeed.
And, so, one of the ways to counteract that
is to start off with a goal.
What really is your goal for your photography
in regards to your overall income?
Is this sort of a side-hustle or is this something
you want to do to be able to support your family,
maybe even more.
Now, based on that goal, can help you to come
up with sort of a price strategy
because a lot of photographers will ask me,
"well, Chris, how much should I charge?"
Well, a lot of those factors depend upon
the type of photography that you do,
your own goals with that photography, where
you're situated, where you're located,
and other things as well.
In other words, let's say that you do fashion photography
in New York, that's going to be a different rate
than it is maybe fashion photography in Ohio,
or somewhere else.
And, so, you have to have a sense of what are my goals,
what am I trying to accomplish, and then, also, where
am I located within this larger sphere of commerce,
and what type of work am I creating for what
type of clients as well?
Now, one of the things that you want to think about
in regards to this is when you set your goal
for your work, you want to begin to define
some sort of a price strategy, right?
And, that price strategy will attract
certain clients your way.
Let's just keep things simple for a moment,
and let's say that what you want to do is
family portraiture, that's something that
you absolutely love.
Well, if you set the bar really high with your
price, you're going to attract towards your
business high-end families which are also
more high-maintenance.
If you set the bar lower, you may attract
families which are a little bit more casual
and down to earth.
Now, is one better than the other?
Not necessarily, but it depends upon your goal
and also your needs.
Now, the other thing to think about with your
strategy and what you're tracking there is
to think about how much time something will
actually take.
Let's say you're hired to do an editorial shoot
and it's going to take you an hour.
Well, you have that one hour, but you also have
the hour of communication that you did with
the client before, then you have five to eight
hours of post-production and then a little bit
of back and forth, and you have to think about
what that adds up in its entirety in order
to evaluate how much all of that time is worth.
It's not just the one hour where you're taking
those photographs, it's all of that, plus it's
all of the creativity that you're bringing
as well, which is above and beyond the overall time.
In regards to the strategy, there are different
ways to structure pricing.
What I mean by that is this: sometimes what you
can do is say, hey, you know what, I have a day
rate, and that's how I'm going to structure
my approach, or I'm going to work on a
project-by-project basis, or I'm going to work
based on the usage of these images.
All of those strategies are viable and good,
but what you need to do is think about that
a little bit and decide which will work for you.
Last but not least, I want to talk about
creating some sort of a system to handle the income.
What I mean by that is if you're going to do
professional work, you need to use something
perhaps like a Quicken or Freshbooks or one
of these online services, which allows you
to work with invoices so you can quickly
send invoices to clients and that they can
follow up with those as well.
Of course, you could make invoices from scratch, too,
and there are lots of different ways to do this,
but the point is, if a client says, hey, can
you send me an invoice, and you haven't already
looked into that, you don't really know what
an invoice is or you don't have a system for
handling those, that can get to be a little bit
of a mess.
People will then evaluate you as someone who
isn't quite a pro, and then the work will
start to dwindle and disappear.
So, you want to build a little bit of an
infrastructure which allows you to handle ways
to deal with income as you move ahead.