First portrait shoot/

[newrmdmike]

i worked charging 150 for a 2 hour shoot, and endup making around 500 on decent senior portrait jobs . . . i would never sell the actual file or neg, so i could see charging more for that.

i attended a jerry ghionis seminar where he discussed sales being slow, he raised his prices 50% and got more business. people will pay ALOT for photos, regardless of how good the photos may or may not be.

from a (cutthroat?) business perspective what ever price to work ratio makes the most profit is the model you should follow.

i would however expect a nice presentation, high level of professionalism, high quality prints, high quality studio and or presentation area. People don't always know what to look for, but if your clients are paying 700 dollars you had better be able to present yourself in a manner befitting a photographer charging that for portraits.

as well as present your work in a way that makes them feel like its completely original, have a spot on personality that doesn't take off days, and be generally cool.
Jerry Ghionis

go for it if you know you can nail it, otherwise can you afford the negative review?

 

[JE Kay]

While I see nothing wrong with the price, it's what you're pricing that is weird. The CD is meaningless, you're not shooting a CD full of images, you're shooting a portrait. How many shots you take is your problem and not something you ask the client to pay for, and quite frankly if you need to shoot a whole cd full of images for a portrait, well there's something wrong. That's a lot of wear and tear and time. I charge 600 for single formal sitting portraits and it's done in about an hour.

The other problem is that for 700 bills for a portrait sitting, shooting with a 40D is ridiculous. If you want to charge professional formal portrait rates, then shoot with an RZ or Blad. A cropped DSLR is not a portrait camera, that's just not going to get taken seriously.

Now if you were charging say 200 for the whole thing, and they were friends of yours and it was an informal type of thing? For sure a 40D would be fine.

Again, nothing wrong with your price, it's just what you're offering for it.

 

[Jim Gratiot]

I gotta think that you are smoking the same Kronic as the OP. Who is going to pay $700 for a simple family portrait. A lot of people feel that you are overcharging them when you quote that price for a wedding that you spend all day/night at and then spend another 2 weeks+ editing the images. You are talking maybe 1.5 hours of actual shooting time here and I can't imagine that the quality is going to be so phenominal that anyone is going to consider $700 thinking they got a deal.

Where do you people live? I'm moving there and opening up a portrait studio tomorrow.

First off, I'm not saying that in this case $700 is necessarily appropriate. I'm talking theory here.

If certain people feel that you're overcharging them... then those aren't the clients you should be going after. If you truly want to make money, then go after the clients who won't flinch at $700 for a family portrait. And those clients do exist.

I also find a fundamental flaw in the thinking that the actual number of hours you spend shooting has anything to do with the final price.

When I pay a photographer to shoot a family portrait, I'm not paying for a certain number of hours. I'm paying for a photograph that I can cherish for the rest of my life. If I'm ultimately happy with the final product, I don't care how many hours it took.

It's all about value. I'll use a hypothetical example from the personal coaching arena:

Coach A charges $500 for a 5-minute meeting, while Coach B charges $75 for a 3-hour session.

Using your logic, you'd take Coach B simply because he is charging a more "reasonable" rate per hour.

But suppose that:

If I used Coach A's advice, I would make an additional $25,000 per year.

But if I used Coach B's advice, I would make an additional $100 per year.

In this admitedly ridiculous example, Coach A is simply providing a better value to me. And the fact that he only took 5 minutes to get his point across means absolutely nothing to me.

My 2 cents,
Jim