Shooting for a newspaper- pricing?

pyropenguin · Dec 7, 2007

So at the beginning of highschool football season the newspaper ( www.redding.com ) hired me on contract to shoot spectators of the game of the week, and at the end of the football season that contract would be terminated. Apparently they liked what I did and then have had me shoot a haunted house event for kids, a Christmas parade, and they just contacted me to do another set of pictures.

In all of the previous jobs I just accepted the price they offered and didn't barter at all- should I keep doing this? The next job they want me to do is to shoot the 30 best decorated houses, take a panning video (1 clip per house) of the houses, pictures and video of 5 nativity scenes, then do a walk through video + pictures of a Christmas light setup that our city set up.

I wont be pp'ing the pictures, but I will have to compile the video and put it to music. It wont be anything fancy, but it will still take an hour or maybe more.

With all that in mind, what would be a fair price for this amount of work? I'm 17 and this is my first real photography related job, so I don't want to ruin it by asking too much. I just want to make sure they're not taking advantage of me.

They're getting back to me on a price quote, so I'll post up their offer as soon as I get it.

Thanks,
Kyle

dpolston · Dec 7, 2007

My first thought is time and materials. What do you think a fair hourly price is for you? Do you want to make $50.00 an hour or can you live with $20.00? What kind of time do you think it'll take (include the time for driving to the locations, setting up, driving home, uploading the pics and video, editing, processing the prints at your favorite processor)? Materials you think you'll use (gas for the car, cost for the cd and/or dvd, blanket equipment maintenance (some people I know, well... me, charge for the camera equipment maintenance fees, although hidden cost, like $10.00 a session. This keeps me in fresh batteries for the flashes, cleaning stuff, future repairs if needed, new cards that I don't necessarily charge to the client, but you need to replace every now and then etc.) proofing materials?

All of these things you need to take into consideration. Being young and more or less new to all of this, I think $20.00 an hour is pretty fair with a minimum of 5 hours (by the way, put all of this into a simple contract and make sure you let them know that you own the images and will release a limited copyright usage; which basically means that they can print them in whatever way YOU see fit or for how long and only with a "by" line, which is your name: "photos by (your name), used with permission" or some such thing).

Hope this helps.