How much should I be charging to do a music festival?

[ptvredwings]

I have been doing photography consistently for over a year now and only within the past few months have decided to start charging for my work. My main area that I work with is live music events. Typically doing shows that area only around 4 hours and usually will charge $50 which I'm not sure I may be underselling myself but then again don't want to spook any clients because my traffic isn't that frequent. Now I was asked to cover a festival by someone who is performing that is not that large but the festival has a few larger headliners that have been heard on the radio and will have my travel covered. How should I gauge to propose to being paid for this?

 

[The_Traveler]

So if you spend 4 hours editing and 4 hours on site (plus gas and time), you're working for less than minimum wage and throwing in your investment for free.

 

[KmH]

You don't show in your profile where you are.
How much you might charge will vary by location.
If you're in a major city you can charge quite a bit more than if you're not in a major city.

What The Traveler is saying is that each hour of shooting generally means needing some amount of post production time if you intent to deliver finished photographs to your customer.

I found each hour of shooting usually resulted in about 3 hours of pre production and post production time.
So a 4 hour shoot winds up being a 12 hour job, plus travel time if travel time is significant.
And, that's just your time.

Next then is how much you charge for your photographs.
How your photographs will be used by the customer has a a lot to do with that.

How much you charge has to be determined by how much it costs you to be in business and how much your cost of goods sold is.
If you want to actually make money. Many confuse being paid as 'making money' until they realize that it costs the photographer some amount of money to make photographs.
But the bottom line is you charge as much as you think the traffic will bear.
The way to determine how much the traffic will bear and how much it costs you to be in business is to make a well researched, written business plan.

 

[tirediron]

You need to figure out what it actually costs you to do the job and how much you want in terms of profit. I wouldn't do this for a cent less than $500, not including usage.

 

[pixmedic]

I propose you be paid with money.
but I digress...
$50.....an hour?
I can only hope you dont mean $50 for the whole thing. not to sound snobbish, but i wouldn't leave the house with my equipment for $50, let alone shoot for 4 hours and then come home and spend another few hours editing.
in part, the answer would depend on what sort of coverage the venue wants, and what their expectations are. how many pictures? how will they be delivered? edited, or just straight jpeg files right after your done?

If I treated that like a short wedding (ive attended a few that short) I would assume maybe 100 finished photos and I would start at ~$600-$800, assuming there were no location changes, and assuming in this particular case they would want print and promotional usage of the photos both online and offline.

 

[dennybeall]

I'm retired and working an occasional easy gig just for fun and even then I never work for less than $25/hr. If it's not fun then 45 to 55/hr.
These days because of all the cellphones and ipads it's hard to even get anything so it's hard to decide what to charge.