A photo shoot is more than a client turning up and the camera coming out for forty minutes or two hours for the duration of the shoot itself.
When pricing the photo shoot you should be fully aware that you are not just paying the wage of the photographer for their time during the actual photo shoot itself, there is more, a lot more to consider.

The basic understanding for the photo shoot is that there will be:

• A photographer
• A venue
• A camera
• Lighting

On this basis you can work out the first areas of the costing process.
To start with the essential part when you looked for a photographer you first came across them on a website or advertisement, these all cost money which is distributed between the clients as business costs, this is not on the list above nor is the telephone call you use to contact the photographer and the rates there, but also the computer and software to book in and send emails are also not listed.

The photographers time  is not merely the photo shoot but also is managing the business and also making ready the studio and sets as well as the camera Prior to the photo shoot. This includes service and maintenance.
The venue can be a studio or other location and these have rental costs as well as associated maintenance costs, such as heating, lighting and insurance and there are government taxes on top.

The photographers camera is a constant cost, far from many peoples belief Digital cameras do not shoot endless images and the quality degrades on Professional cameras after a certain amount of photos have been taken. This means that the camera have to be replaced and they cost around the same as a new car. This together with Len’s add to a regular cost of the photographer who has to buy a camera annually or  bi-annually
Additional photography kit that will add to the cost of a photo shoot is the lighting, not only do these lights costs on the initial purchase but also in main power and servicing.

After the photo shoot, photographers also have to carry out editing work on the photos that they have taken, depending on the shoot and client requirements this can add to the cost as the wage and costs of the photographer themselves.

Two hands

As a photographer has two hands there is only so much work that they can do in a period of a year, on the basis that the photographer will have a two week holiday, there are only 50 weeks within the year. After consideration for illness, meetings and family, this is narrowed down to around 40 weeks. Of course there is no guarantee that there will be work every week as there is a competitive market with shark photographers lurking, so we have to adjust this to remove a third of the workable weeks. Also with clients who have weddings, the shoot take around 3 weeks from start to finish.
This leaves around 26 weeks of photography work available for a photographer, or 26 clients.

Basic Cost

The basic photographer cost is based on the number of clients divided by the fixed business costs; these are the cost that the photographer has to pay regardless of if they have a client or not.
The living costs (wage) has also to me divided into the cost for the photographer and any staff they may have.

Photo shoot cost

The photo shoot cost works on the basis that they have to meet the basic costs by average over the year of photography with the clients, failure to do so mean that the photographer goes out of business.
The price of the photo shoot is based party on the use of the photographs which falls into two parts, enjoyment or gain.

Enjoyment is the family photos that you like to hang on the wall and the whole family can remember the enjoyable time they have and record history for their children’s children.

Gain is for more commercial use of the images, where a person or company may wish to use images to sell a product or person making money from the images.

These combined values are then incorporated in to the cost of each photo shoot based on the basic costs of the photography and ultimately the cost of each photo shoot.

To give a ball park figure for the cost of a photo shoot, the costs are averaged at around £500.00 per week for a professional photography business. This figure need to be divided into the total income over the twelve month period and from all the photography that the business does. This is often why there are premium costs added to print costs and other services that photographers offer clients and forcasting the actual costs and income  is unreliable, unless you can see into the future that is.

None professional photo shoot costs

None professional photographer allow for photo shoots  to be cheaper, with the absence of  many business costs and possible income from other sources such as a full time job, the costs of living and earning a wage is diminished.  For many photographers who operate in this manner the costs are very low and allow for lower shoot costs. Typically the cost for such an operation is simply the time, which is hourly waged at around £15 per hour, plus the costs of the camera and future upgrades and lastly any advertising costs that they may have.
This allows the non professional photographer to offer photo shoots on a hour by hour and cost per shoot basis, thus the average weekly income and cost division is irrelevant. I would guess that the cost would be around £30 per hour on average.

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Photo shoot costs originally appeared on National Photographer on August 31, 2010.

She was in the belief that the business would pay for her photo shoot, which is not the case. Having read through a massive FAQ on information overload I found some little bits of information which some photographers maybe aware of or blind to.

As we know shooting modelling portfolios we great the use for commercial gain for the client. What we DON’T offer is for the commercial gain of the ‘agent’ business or websites.

Looking thorough the website, I found a number of clauses and some research into the business revealed a money making company at the expense of the client, which of course they would not really be aware.

What we found was that the model would submit images to the website, if they were approved they would be featured on their website and paid £322.

Once this happened the business would have full ownership and rights of the images.

Not only is this underhand for photographers and the models, but it gets more and more worse.

• The site is paid access ( money going to the company)
• They make books and videos from the submission of the models ( money going to the company)
• They sell the images to other websites ( money going to the company)
• They use the images for promotion and advertising ( money going to the company)
• The models receive no other payments over the initial purchase

From the research into the company I found that they were not so great about what they said they did and also were in violation of the CAP codes.. AKA they lied about business and what was offered and undertaken.

There is confusing information about photographers payments and of course there is promotion for ‘staff photographers’  I had to enquire as there was two bit of information (that were not close together at all) to find out about the photographers payment. I found out when I had to email them, that they buy the images outright for £45.00.
On the basis of figures that were available the company make in the region of around £50,000 from each of the clients who are asked to send in around 75 images and the maximum return for the model is £367.00.

This is one of the first scams of this type that I have seen, the usual modelling scams are that they hold a meeting and hold photo shoots that cost around £300.00 which is done on the day and paid on the day by  these pay and run fake agencies. I believe the new  you pay and supply and give us everything for a small return is fairly new. However I have not been involved with this industry for some time and it seems to have been around for about 4 years.

While we do advise models to be careful and that there are more scam’s that honest businesses. As we know that many of these girls will willing send photographs into agents to be approved, clearly it is no the intent for photographers to have the clients agent make considerable amounts of money, esp if its TFCD… The model isn’t going to tell you where they send the images!

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Photographers be wary originally appeared on National Photographer on August 27, 2010.

Photographs that are short listed by National Photographer and will be displayed on the website, the shortlisted photos will then be selected by the BBC weather production team for the BBC Gallery and TV. All photos in the BBC Weather photo gallery will be fully credited.

Don’t forget to include your name as the file name and some background information as to what the image is about, and why you took the picture as this will increase your chances of selection, You should also include your telephone number so we can get back to you.

Photos submitted for use on TV need to be of wide-screen ratio, be a minimum size of 1050 x 576 pixels.

Terms and conditions

In contributing to National Photographer & BBC Weather you agree to grant us a royalty-free, non-exclusive licence to publish and otherwise use the material in any way that we want, and in any media worldwide. This may include the transmission of the material by our overseas partners; these are all reputable foreign news broadcasters who are prohibited from altering the material in any way or making it available to other UK broadcasters or to the print media.

It’s important to note, however, that you still own the copyright to everything you contribute to National Photographer & the BBC Weather and that if your image is accepted for TV and Gallery use on the BBC or shortlisted on the National Photographer website, we will endeavour to publish your name alongside it on the BBC Weather website and National Photographer website. The BBC cannot guarantee that all pictures will be used and we reserve the right to edit your comments.

National Photographer will show a short list of the best images on the website in the form of a post where you can submit your website /portfolio link to your own website.
National Photographer is only operating as a third party and is not liable for the content or use of the images that are outside of the control of National Photographer.
Only one entry per person or family.
No cash equivalents or alternative prizes are awarded. This competition is “just for fun”
Entry is available via email to info@nationalphotographer.co.uk and should have the subject ”Compitant weather.”
We reserve the right to withdraw enteries.

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Fun Photo competition -Weather originally appeared on National Photographer on August 27, 2010.

A flash website may offer a simplistic and creative site to be shown, but this is where it ends. One of the fundamental issues with flash websites is that search bots cannot read them and therefore do not know the content. I think i will explain a little something about search engines:
They look at the code of your page and look at the words on that page, this is called page keyword weight. This is measured against what people are looking for. A flash website is a graphic and therefore there is no text. In these cases OCR is used, but it cannot read fonts correctly.

Another problem is loading times, Photo’s loading can be an annoyance, As one user reported ” I came to look for a photographer not a loading bar”

Another problem is that some browsers do not support flash websites or the screen sizes, therefore they see nothing. When using flash in a website it should be used for what it was originally designed for, For banners, small graphics and buttons. But I do not recommend using them for buttons as search engines cannot navigate them either.

Photographers Should use HTML with XML and CSS, in layman’s terms that the old stuff and the new stuff mixed together to provide a slightly interactive website which to most will appear the same as a Flash website.
PHP websites and ASP websites also work well as they often generate text content code and are readable, not to mention easier to update. Flash can be embedded into a website but should not form the main part of the site itself. Java Is not enabled on some browsers and will not effect the website as it provides text code for search engines, which is the same as normal content depending on how you write the code.

On our R&D with photography websites that we carried out throughout 2009, we found flash websites had most poor performance ( if any at all). Our java and HTML mix websites performed the best and HTML  with CSS stuck around the middle.

Many websites that have been designed with Flash can be designed in HTML code, and we have carried out the same functions as Flash sites use, some things are not as smooth, but they function all the same and with a creative coder the websites can be smaller and load faster without the loading screens that happen with flash websites that are growing larger each year.

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Should Photographers avoid flash websites? originally appeared on National Photographer on August 25, 2010.

This data allows us to show how the photography world is working and where the clients are rising or dropping in particular areas. Without further wasting time with the small talk, let us look at the world of photography in charts and see what has changed.

Wedding photography trends

As you may have suspected wedding are down, but we have seen a small rise recently, there still is around a 35% drop from before the recession.
The data doesn’t show the stats as well as you may want it to as it should be noted that social sites and friends of friends are obtaining work from social websites.
we have seen first hand photographers (mediocre) offering wedding photography for “around £100″, the uncle bobs are taking over and there is little that can be done.
For those of you that have read the previous report, it is much the same in the wedding photography world.

Boudoir photography trends:

Boudoir photography is pretty interesting, I had a phone call from Yahoo’s marketing team who said there is no information, but yet again its a marketing team and they talk rubbish, they just pretend!  The chart is NOT surprising, Boudoir picked up with mass press coverage and is a luxury for women, as you can see the recession and the market trend match pretty well. As you can see now there is more confidence in money matters it has started to pick up once again. Equally pin-up is doing roughly the same as photographers have marketed Boudoir, Glamour, and Pin-up in much the same way to get rid of the stigmata attached with nude glamour work.

Portrait Photography trends:

As we are in the digital age, disposable portraits of the Iphone and other phones have taken top slot. As we know portrait photography is seasonal and there has been a slight drop with the combination of effects.

Event Photography trends:

Event photography has seen a fairly good rise, this is due to the rise of marketing and promotions as businesses and events you the photography for promotional use. I also know that there are tax breaks which also help in this area. As we know most if not all event photographers are free and sell images on the day, therefore passing the cost buck. When people are offered free shoots and relatively low cost prints from a professional photographer over what they may pay for retouched studio photography. This type of photography is undermining other areas of photography, which I think we may have to make a post about.

Photography training trends:

Photography training is a sign of new photographers and those going into photography, as we saw from 2008-2009 there has been a growth on average and it is on the rise. We cannot say for sure that this is not hobby photographer improving skills, but after training the next step is…. thats right.. I need not say anything.

In directories (part wedding) I have seen a change in the named photographers and business offering photography over those from a few years ago, there are around 70% new businesses listed in my areas (southwest) and I have seen other photographers disappear that had been there for a number of years.

Summery

There is a growth that photographer should be noticing, it is a small growth in the photography market of around 12% over data gathered last year and the previous year, this could be a sing of development in the funding for photographers as people seem to have settled with the economics. New challenges have arisen for the professional photographer with real costs and this could be effecting growth due to the nature of new photographer who want to shoot for free or just covering cost.

There has been a reaction by some photography companies to work underhand against there clients, rather than going for good service and return work by word of mouth, they use  hit tactics. By this I mean that they are getting them through the door quick and cheap and then holding on to them for extraordinary prices on prints, we are talking £400+ for fast shoot studio types, and yes that is unmounted. This tactic has spread like wild fire and therefore people are turning away from studios for fear of  being robbed, which was the term used by the client. FYI the total they were charged for 12 prints was £1,250.00, this needs to stop. I suspect this company needs to consult a business marketing manager Link who can put them on the right track, however the damage is done.

Another problem that has come to light is that professional photographers have made a rise in their prices, I know that many will do this due to the low client numbers and costs need to be met, however, it is the cost that is now stopping people from buying.
It may now be a case for going back to basics and re evaluating the business costs and going for a minimal charge, after all if you can turn over more clients you will notice that low profit and high turn over may work for you. this in-turn spreads word of mouth and brings back clients where the demand rises.

If you are finding it a little hard and are uncertain about your photography business, national Photographer and GTWCMT offer a range of services that could prove invaluable in marketing your business, after a full year of R&D in photography, many years of business and consultancy, you could find that your business needs a push to catch the clients and market that is there. Full reports are available as well as bespoke reports and advice. Contact us for information and services that are available. Members please use your customer management service for updates and information as well as report requests.

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Photography trends originally appeared on National Photographer on August 23, 2010.

Head over to the wedding elegance website for this latest post.

http://wedding.nationalphotographer.co.uk/2010/08/20/the-bride-and-groom/

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Bride and groom poses originally appeared on National Photographer on August 20, 2010.

Our next post on wedding photography will be the personal shoot of the Bride and Groom.

To view the most recent post on wedding breakfast photography, click the link.

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Wedding Breakfast Photography originally appeared on National Photographer on August 20, 2010.

This years entry is world wide again and 6 images have been entered into 4 categories.

 We hope to shortly be running competitions from the National Photographer website as things progress.  Of course we will be entering more competitions over the next few months to improve our image and standing in the photography world.

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POTY originally appeared on National Photographer on August 17, 2010.

There are 101 wedding photographs which just have wedding details and should fire up the grey matter for your next wedding.

Click this link to see the wedding photography detailing post.

For personal wedding photography training, visit the National Photographer Photography training school.

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Detailing for wedding photographers originally appeared on National Photographer on August 16, 2010.

If you have set up a blog, search it either on the site or on google  for an API with the name of your blog or tweet/post applications. You will find it simple to add your tweets and posts to a single feed that covers all your posts across multiple software apps on line.

Youtube has a API for twitter and Friendfeed has a feed for Youtube that will post your content to the tweets on twitter. Friendfeed will post across multi twitters that you have and even link with blogs and Facebook’s. So what you could do, is post a video showing work on your you tube account and then it would be posted to your blog of feed or tweet and even all of them. 

Post on friendfeed  and both posts will be put together and you can use the feed API that is produced to post on your website. Effectively you can produce a website that could have pages which were photos, posts, and videos feeding into each page automatically from the post you make and therefore keeping your website up to date and current with out all that manual work.

A good example of this working is the City-photography.co.uk websites, the news pages on the site has a sidebar that contains the feeds.

http://www.city-photography.co.uk/news.htm

A simple page layout could feed blogs onto your website pages so that news is auto updated on to your website and you can break down the feeds to show posts on certain parts of the page without much technical knowledge and make your website page more creative and active as well as up to date for your users.

Most of the places where you post do have feeds applications and the code is provided, so you can simply cut and paste the code into your website page.

You can see this news feed is simply placed into this post page as an example.

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Less work more social originally appeared on National Photographer on August 15, 2010.