Pricing and timescale for big photography and retouching job

[Mimosa]

Hi everyone,

I have worked as a graphic designer for quite a few years, and have recently started to do some freelance retouching/product photography jobs.

I have just landed a large project of around 1000 products to photograph and edit for a website, and I am very new to the pricing side of things so was hoping for some advice. The images need to look great, so there will be a fair amount of retouching required, but obviously as they are going to be smallish for the web, they don’t need to be worked on to a huge resolution.

My two main issues are how to price things and how long is a reasonable time for it to take? I know this is a difficult question as it depends how much work is to go into each image, but having no experience in a job of this scale, I don’t want to say it will take x amount of time, only for them to look elsewhere and find that other people are charging more/ quoting half the time and contracting out to speed things up.

Thanks for your help!

Jeff

 

[Bitter Jeweler]

How did you "land" this project without pricing it out first? How can you price it out without knowing how much time is involved? If you have never done a project like this, how can you compete with those who have, and can more than likely do a better job in less time that you? How can you expect people to help you, with so little information?