Headshots

[Anthonykuziaphotography]

Hi,
I am just starting out and looking for some advice for headshots. I was asked to do headshots for a professional organization. This would be my first job on a large scale. They are looking to have headshots done at their conference. It is going to be 50-70 people. What do you recommend charging? Do I charge per headshot or do a price per hour? What is the average going rate for a headshot for a someone beginning in the business? Amy help or feedback is greatly appreciated. Thanks

Anthony

 

[Designer]

Greetings, and welcome!

The fee you charge should not have a bearing on whether you are new to the business. Being a newly-minted professional photographer might have something to do with your results, but to automatically offer a discounted price indicates to your client that you are a rank beginner who doesn't really have the skills to do this job.

Can you do it? Can you give your customers a professional product? If not, then you are giving them snapshots that nearly anyone with a camera can produce, so why should they pay you? Either you deliver professional results, and charge accordingly, or you don't.

It seems to me that you might want to consider a bi-level pricing structure. So much for each shot, plus an hourly charge. That way, if they miscount or suddenly find a dozen more people to shoot, you can at least get paid for them.

Good luck!

 

[tirediron]

A 60 head session is a fairly ambitious undertaking. I price this out at $175 to walk in the door and $25/head which gets the client two low-res files. High-res files are $65/each.

A few thoughts: Do you have the equipment to take this on? A couple of speedlights really isn't going to cut it for lighting. `Have you talked to the HR department at the client company to determine if there is a specific requirement for lighting, pose, clothing, orientation, etc, etc? Have you discussed clothing with the client? A plan to get the people in and out? A location? Make sure that HR lets people know in advance (ideally at least a week). There is NOTHING that will get you on people's hate-list quicker than showing up to take their photo when they didn't know (there will always be a frew, but you want to minimize it. What is your plan for reshoots? Delivery schedule? What are the deliverables? Make sure you have a portable mirror, bag of disposable combs (Dollar Store), hair pins, etc.

 

[Derrel]

A friend of mine asked me to light/grip a large 104-person, 3-hour headshot gig for a computer sales and setup company HQ'd here a few years back. He felt like his convection-cooled monolight system might not be up to the task of powering through so many shots very quickly over a three-hour or so shoot. So I supplied a Speedotron Black Line 2,400 W-s pack and multiple fan-cooled flash heads, set pretty low in Watt-seconds, so he could shoot extremely quickly for those kinds of people who are tough to shoot. Being able to shoot super-fast mini-sequences can oftentimes help people who tend to "freeze up".

Anyway...as Tirediron mentioned, it's a good idea to have on-hand some necessary supplies, like disposable combs, a hand or table mirror (or two!) and let me add--a good, new lint brush, or failing that, a large roll of masking tape that can be used to make an impromptu lint pick-up tool by wrapping some tape around the subject's hand, with the sticky side facing outwardly, so they themselves can blot at and pick up lint, pet hairs, etc, especially from dark shirts and blouses. Clothing needs to be clean and hair- and lint-free! You want to do almost NO retouching!

One tip: when shooting indoors in offices with flash, set the camera's white balance to a pre-set or custom WB. Do NOT allow the camera white balance to be on AUTO, since it will almost invariably sense the prevailing fluorescent lighting. And in mentioning fluorescent lighting and White Balance: set the camera up in Manual exposure mode, and keep the shutter speed constant, and fast enough so that there is no mixing of the flash with the ambient lighting! Keep the shutter speed around 1/125 second, which keeps the fluorescent light from showing up, and keeps the actual exposure as "all flash lighting".

If your flash units are weak, or are slow to recycle, set the camera's ISO level to a higher-than-normal ISO value, such as 250,320,or 400. With good, adequate lighting, and a decent exposure from the lights, there should be fairly minimal noise. Elevating the ISO with studio flash-lit pictures is typically not a big worry.

Make SURE the backgrounds are good! Don't shoot garbage shots. Shoot in RAW + JPEG small mode so you have an EASY-to-review set of JPEGS that can make culling the set a matter of doing a slide show of the camera-created,small JPEG files, and kill-filing the duds and blinks, and then pulling the corresponding RAW files out of the main editing collection. Secondarily...the straight out of camera JPEG files can or could be delivered as a "bonus" item to the company...and they might even run directly with those, depending on how well-shot they were.

When shooting this kind of stuff, assembly-line, flash-lighted portraits, it helps to have the SOOC JPEG setting set,beforehand, so that the SOOC JPEG images look "great". That means some in-camera sharpening, like 6 or 7 on a scale of 0-10, the tone curve set to the right degree of contrast, and the color saturation a bit above normal, yet not Nikon-like "Vivid", which is clown-car coloration. By pre-setting the Picture Control settings in RAW+JPEG shooting mode, you can have a basically, almost-perfect SOOC flash-lighted shot that looks GOOD!, but of course, the RAW files will not have these parameters set in stone, and the RAWS can be edited any number of ways.

Good luck. I hope some of these tips will be helpful to you.

 

[KmH]

For that many people you'll probably want to have at least 1 assistant & I would require the professional organization provide a 'wrangler' to help organize the people so they can all be shot in the shortest time possible, and without missing anyone.

An assistant would write intake info from each person like name/job title on a card.
A shot of each person holding their card can then be used to positively identify each person's image post shoot.

Do you have business liability insurance in case someone gets hurt during the shoot?
Will the shoot be done at a public or a private venue?