Any tips or tricks are definitely helpful, but my biggest concern is for the pricing because they want a quote soon. They wont need me till November. Here's what the woman gave me to work with. They're looking for 10 - 15 shots, at least two good "front elevation" shots and they need a disk with a thumbnail page delivered. Should I be thinking about this hourly or per-image, or what?
The way I have been handling it is to avoid anything where they have the opportunity to say "Oh we don't need THAT shot, so we'll pay you 1/10th less..." or "Oh we don't need that particular aspect of your service, so how much less would that cost?"
The reason being is these places are going to tend to be concerned about cost, and if the conversation goes away from what is needed and to a nickel and diming session, you've really got no choice but to lose overall.
Quote reasonably, be clear in what services you are providing for that quote and what would be extra and stick to your guns. Certainly try to be flexible, but don't let them get a foothold in on you in breaking your services apart massively, etc.
Another way to think about it is this... mostly they are paying you for your skill and time invested in capturing the image. If you really had to break out things like correction of images and making a CD, you would probably knock off $50, because in truth the bulk of the real value in what you just did came from less tangible things. In truth, I often consider the time I spent in correction as a loss. I do it to provide value that distinguishes me above other photographers, but if I charged for it, I would probably wind up charging 30-40% more for my services. (In time as I get more clients, I expect to do just that!)
BTW, my prices all assume electronic delivery because it's stupid easy to do. If they want a CD you should charge for materials and time to do that. I usually charge an extra $30 for CD delivery, $10 extra per each physical disk beyond the first, additional priority charges as required.
BTW, also keep in mind your licensing. If you are shooting these, you should by default plan to retain rights to the images and sell them license to use the images. If they happen to want exclusive rights the price should really go WAY up. Like 3-5x the price, easy.
What I do currently is have a very simple licensing agreement that I include in the quote and in the invoice. "Payment of these fees will be considered acceptance..." yadda yadda.
It is
not iron-clad at the moment because I'm newish to this and don't want to scare away my client, but I have been strengthening it slowly over time. If you're too unreasonable on your terms, you'll scare them away. If you're too lax on your terms, they will take advantage of you. It's not a maybe... it's a will. Unfortunate, but true. I went in making the assumption that I would get taken advantage of more in the early phases and then tighten up slowly as I went along and they decided it was worth dealing with my stricter terms. This appears to be playing out exactly as I expected.
BTW, I also require a photo credit when my images are used. I know some people who require that they are notified when the image is used, only sell a 1 year agreement to their images, and even require a physical copy of any materials developed with their images. There's quite a range in what you can demand, but I'll tell you flat out that the "new guys" are not the ones demanding copies of the materials.
This whole legal and ownership thing is
tough. Really tough. For example, I know
for a fact that my client perpetually slacks off on the photo credit and doesn't put it in. I'm not going to beat them up over it... yet. The question is to decide when. I swear this is the worst part of this business.
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