Hourly Median Wage — Photographers — $15.46

64¢ less per hour than tree trimmers.

[U. S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, May, 2015.]

Chapter 34 — Act Your Wage

After you sell your first photographic print you are probably hooked, convinced that there is a market for your work and that you have a future as an artist. You may even think you’ll be able to move out of your parent’s house (you’re probably wrong). Selling your first photograph marks an important milestone: After your first print sale you should never lower your print prices.

There is nothing wrong with an emerging photographer pricing her photographs at an entry-level price. There is no magic moment when you must raise your prices; it will happen. If you sell prints (your artwork) for a dollar, everyone who buys them expects them to be worth a dollar or for the price to go up. You can’t turn around and sell them for fifty cents next month at the next gallery. Pricing is one of the most talked about topics yet it’s tricky to give advice because conspiring on price is illegal.* Join the ASMP, APA, PPA or WPPI to learn about pricing and business, they have great resources and publications and there are also not-so-sexy photo-business workshops that can help you figure out what you should charge as you enter your market.

“I have photographed many people. I did a lot of portraiture on demand, which I don’t consider my best work at all. You do portraits to make a living.”

— Ansel Adams™

Chapter 35 — The Customer is Always Delusional.

When you’re starting out you’ll take any picture for free. Then the day comes and you turn professional and start charging for your services. You are now competing with all those amateur photographers who give it away for free (AKA: You Yesterday.)

Pricing services is a bit different than prints or books or other products. If you charge three dollars to take someone’s picture today and then charge them a two dollars next week, they may not devalue the first photo, they’ll probably just think they are getting a good deal. But they also might think you’re too cheap and find a more expensive photographer who will charge them ten dollars because that’s what their friends are paying. And more expensive photographers must be better right? Wrong. Pricing is wacky that way.

I began my photo career at 17 doing weddings at a tiny wedding chapel for $75 per wedding. I could do two or three in a weekend. Big bucks! Then I began charging ten times as much for big weddings in churches. I got fewer weddings but ten times the money. I made more in one wedding than in a month at the tiny chapel. If I would have priced my big church weddings at $75.00 I wouldn’t have gotten a single job because brides would have thought, “He’s too cheap. He must be a scam even if he is brutally handsome.”