The last several years have seen record inflation and increases in the cost of living overall around the world. From the cost of milk and eggs to camera gear, just about everything except maybe big screen TVs has gone up in price.

It's as important as ever to emphasize the importance of making sure your fees and rates as a photographer increase along with inflation and the cost of living. Evaluating and raises in your rates should be done every single year.

This year we launched the Photography Rates sheet. If you're lost on what to charge for music or sports photography, we have dedicated spreadsheets for these specialities that can give insight into what real market rates are for specific jobs.

US INFLATION RATES

In the last 3 years, we've seen historic rates of inflation worldwide. Normally, inflation rates hover around 2% Over the last 3 years, we've seen inflation rates average 5.93% for a cumulative 18.88% increase.

Beyond inflation itself, the consumer price index for goods across the board have averaged higher. While we're seeing a decline in the trend of the CPI, the fact remains that prices are higher than ever, not lower.

KEEPING THE SAME RATE YEAR OVER YEAR REDUCES YOUR VALUE

In recent years, the cost of various essentials, including gas, food, and utilities, has consistently risen. Consequently, it's reasonable for you to consider adjusting your rates for the services you provide to your clients.

In essence, failing to raise your rates in line with inflation means a decrease in your purchasing power. As the prices of necessities such as gas, milk, and the materials you use for your work continue to climb, it's essential to keep pace with the rising cost of living. Anything less quite literally means less value for your work as a creative.

YOUR CLIENTS ARE RAISING THEIR RATES

Just as consumer goods are increase, so are services. You can bet that the prices charged by your clients — whether they're musicians, agencies, art buyers, managers, etc — are increasing to keep their own profit margins up.

This year, publishers and streaming services have reached a settlement to increase streaming royalty rates to 15.35%. This is after already winning an increase from 10.5% to 15.1% for the 2018-2022 period. While this increase is not due solely to inflation, it's not independent from the fact that value has to track with the times.

It's not personal — it's just business. Your best clients should understand. And those who don't — they are not budgeting accordingly in a way that truly respects the value of photographers in relation to global economics.

INCREASING YOUR VALUE YEAR OVER YEAR

Beyond cost of living adjustments, another important reason to increase your rates every year is for your own professional growth. As creatives, we are not static — we are constantly learning, adapting and bettering ourselves in small but important ways.

Wherever you are in your career, you are gaining experience in your craft. This comes in the form of faster workflows, better technique, and more. All of these small but important and incremental changes add value to your customers.

And that value to your customers can and should be expressed as increased rates.

GIVING YOURSELF A RAISE

With conventional 9-5 jobs, you should expect not only cost of living adjustments, but also pay increases that reflect your experience and abilities as tied to promotions, title changes and professional growth.

As photographers, we have only ourselves to advocate for ourselves in most instances. No one else will be fighting to give you a raise. You must be the one to demand it for yourself.

HOW MUCH SHOULD YOU RAISE YOUR RATES?

A 2-3% raise year over year is generally accepted as appropriate for cost of living increases for many corporate employers. Again, this is in a typical 9-5 office world that many photographers don't occupy.

Personally, going into 2024, I would recommend at least a 3.2% increase. Why 3.2%? If you're based in the United States, this is the rate the US Social Security Administration is raising benefits from 2023 going into 2024.

Almost every year since its inception, social security payments have been adjusted to ensure that the purchasing power of these benefits tracks with inflation. Note, this is simply keeping the same purchasing power — it does not account for your professional growth or advancement.

So at the minimum, I'd still recommend at least a 3.2% increase to your rates as you head into 2024. This is assuming you raised your rates last year.

END NOTES

Now that we've covered why you should raise your rates every year, jump into the 4 best times to raise your rates as a photographer (spoiler alert: it's right now). And as a refresher, for more reading, check out the common things to charge for as a photographer. You might be surprised at some costs and fees you can pass on to your clients if you aren't already.

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Pricing photography can feel like a daunting task, even for experienced professionals. For beginners, the feeling of not knowing where to start in pricing photography is natural and completely understandable.

After all, many photographers get into a love and passion for the creative aspect of making images. Putting a value on our work doesn't necessarily come easily, because the creative act comes first.

In this post, we'll look at some of the factors in how to consider pricing your work, resources to use for pricing, and more.

Factors to consider when pricing photography

Pricing photography should consider many factors. These include:

• Usage
• Client
• Licensing Rights
• Deliverables
• Rarity
• Effort
• Expenses
• Time
• Expertise

Now let's break down these factors. This won't be an exhaustive examination, but the goal of this article is to get you thinking about how to price photography and why.

It's ultimately most important to understand what goes into pricing. Even viewing specific ranges or prices for jobs, as shown in the Music Photography Rates Sheet, may not give the full picture. The rate should ultimately depend on the details. So let's dig in.

Usage

Usage is one of the most important factors. Usage in photography is how a client will use images when those images are licensed. The use of an image for an album cover is dramatically different than use for social media or editorial coverage.

More broadly, use can fall into a few main categories:

• Editorial use
• Marketing/Promotional use
• Commercial use

Marketing and promotional use is technical commercial, but here the main distinction is that for commercial use, the image itself is being sold either directly or as part of a product.

Editorial use is generally the least expensive in terms of licensing cost, while commercial is the most expensive.

Client

The client is hugely important in licensing photography. Who is using a photo can be just as important as what they're using it for. In music photography for example, a local band using an image for an album cover is much different than an established national band or a pop star.

Another way to consider the client is their reach or the impact the images will have. The client can be tied to use and usage in a sense. While the specific use may be the same, the actual “work” the images does is different in scope. So when considering clients, this weight of the images is critical in considering their value.

Licensing

The licensing rights that you assign to a client are integral to usage, but for this purpose, let's break it down in terms of exclusivity and ownership as it pertains to the images.

The main types of licensing agreements include:

• Non-exclusive
• Exclusive
• Full buyout
• Work For Hire

When photography is made, all rights reside with the photographer/creator as a matter of law as defined by the Berne Convention. You as the photographer hold the rights to the images until you assign them away under a licensing agreement.

Licenses can also be defined as unlimited use or limited specific uses (which should be outlined and agreed on by all parties).

It's most common to have limited use and this is often in the best interest for photographers, to maintain the highest control of their images and to limit use.

Deliverables

What the photographer delivers should be a large factor in pricing. Is the price for one image, or one hundred? Is it for JPGs or RAW files? Are you delivering photographer selects from your edit, or are you showing the client everything as proofs?

Generally speaking, the more you deliver, the more you should charge.

Generally, you should to control your photography unless the client pays for the right to dictate the final product. For this reason, most photographers prefer to only deliver final processed images — not RAW files. The reason is that giving a client RAW files means they may have the final say on the edit and processing, which in turn means the final product may not represent the photographer's style accurately.

Rarity

Rarity of images can also be a factor in pricing. If there was a historic moment or scene that was only photographed by a single photographer, those images have more value in one sense than if there were 10 or 100 other photographers who made similar images. This is most often the case with editorial images for moments there aren't planned or cannot be recreated.

Effort

The effort and production involved in a shoot should be a factor in pricing photography. Effort can be related to time and equipment required, but it can also be related to art direction, the level of production required, planning and so forth.

Time

A photoshoot that takes an hour can be priced differently than a multi-day shoot. If you travel for a photo job, the travel days should be considered in how you bill as an opportunity cost.

If you're a music photographer bidding on a tour, your rate has to account for travel days as well, not just show days. With extended jobs like touring, the rate also has to account for not being able to take other jobs in that time as well.

Expenses

All hard costs should be a factor in pricing photography. This includes specialized equipment, studio time/rental, and hard costs such as transportation.

Experience

While experience doesn't always have a bearing on the value of photography, one should factor in experience if you're able to do a job efficiently. If it takes an experienced photographer an hour to create the work a client needs that would take another photographer four hours, that experience should be reflected in the value of the work. At the very least, the work is not valued on the time it took, but in the work it does for the client, which is the same regardless of the time and effort.

Further Reading

If you're newer to pricing photography, here are a few more articles for your further reading:

The post How to Price Photography for Beginners appeared first on ishootshows.com.

Most photographers I know struggle to put a price on their work. This is especially true for newer photographers who haven't found a peer group that can tap into experience on rates for photography.

Talking about money can feel taboo generally, but especially for photographers and when it feels directly tied to our success. But I'd argue that talking about money and business literacy is essential in the music photography world if we want to create and sustain value for our work in the music industry.

Sharing rates as photographers

Recently, I launched a Photography Rate Spreadsheet focused on music photography. The intent was for fellow music photographers to self report rates across editorial, brand, in-house, festival and tour clients so that we can get more clear and transparent idea of rates in our industry.

It's expanded to sports photography and film and television thanks to Heather Barry and Leigha Jenkins, respectively. And hopefully this is just the start. Why? Read on.

What is pay transparency?

Pay transparency is the act of sharing pay, rates, fees and other forms of compensation in an open manner. Some fields such as tech jobs make transparency a standard component of employment, via salary bands. Other fields may have compensation tiers, minimum wage, and so forth.

Photography has no such protections or standards in place.

Why is pay transparency necessary?

For freelance creatives and photographers in particular, transparency about rates has been historically almost non-existent. The general reasons for this are ego, fear of competition, and jealousy or feelings of doubt.

I would argue that pay transparency is essential for fields like photography. Why? Because we don't live in a vacuum. We don't work in isolation nor do our clients and prospective clients.

Pay transparency helps us all for several reasons.

Pay transparency helps create standard rates

First, pay transparency removes one of the essential hurdles that newer photographers face: not knowing market rate of what to charge for their services.

Veteran photographers often lament that newer photographers undercut them and cite this as a reason for declining value in their craft. Being transparent about rates addresses this by giving newer photographers the knowledge of what fair rates are, allowing them to make informed decisions about their worth.

This sharing of rates helps establish a standard when pay transparency is widespread community knowledge.

Standardized rates help all photographers

I've always been as open as I can about rates and giving advice about what I would charge for photography jobs. The reason is half altruistic and half selfish.

The altruistic aspect is self evident. Helping people is good.

The self serving part? I give out pay info and help with rates because the next time the client needs photography, I want my full rate. By sharing information about I would charge, I'm betting on making a more sustainable future for myself and all photographers by encouraging others to charge what I feel I'm worth. This act helps prevent inadvertent undercutting. I want you to get paid so I can get paid.

This is precisely why photographers should be open, even when it comes to competition. We should all be advocating for the highest rates possible that respect our talents and value.

Here's a recent note from a photographer on the Music Photography Discord.

This is a direct example of the kind of empowerment and confidence that rate transparency instills when it's normalized in a community.

The fear and fallacy of undercutting

A major fear of photographers being closed about what they charge is a fear of undercutting. When this reason is cited as a reason not to share rates, a few considerations come to mind.

If your rate is all that keeps you valued by clients, you're already dispensable

Rate transparency doesn't change a client's emphasis. If all they're concerned about is saving money, there's always someone cheaper — including those who are willing to work for free. You don't need pay transparency or a spreadsheet to see that.

Pay transparency isn't the enemy with cheap clients

Being transparent about certainly won't save you from the people working for free or cheap and it never has. You're already in a compromised position with low value clients and this has nothing to do with being transparent about pay with the larger photo community.

In fact, being closed about pay only helps clients who would take advantage of photographers who feel like coming in low for jobs is necessary to secure a job.

The best clients equate a low price with low quality

There will always be budget clients, and this is perfectly fine. But I'd argue that for the best clients, a low price is viewed with concern and suspicion. There's a Goldilocks effect for pricing and viewing services. Very often, you don't want to be at the extremes, especially if you're very low or very high compared to other rates.

When you undercut, not only are you leaving money on the table, you're making yourself a target for doubt, being viewed as inexperienced and low quality.

Being just cheaper won't matter to the clients you want

Cheap photographers don't have a unique value proposition. The photographers do are the ones who often find they can leverage their talents more than just a competitive price. More importantly, simply being the cheaper option isn't going to get one very far with the clients most photographers actually want.

Individual vision, skill, talent, ease of collaboration — these are the qualities the best clients value in those they choose as partners.

Client-photographer relationships are build on trust and unique value propositions. Reliability, consistency, rapport and so more. When budget cuts truly constrain, clients that one has built a relationship will almost always be up front about it. Undercutting isn't something that magically turns good clients into cheap clients.

Summary

If you were on the fence about pay transparency, I hope that this article has given some considerations as to its value. The Photography Rate Spreadsheet is open to all and I hope will serve as reference. We're looking to expand beyond music photography and sports photography, so if you have a specialty — particularly for event/live photography — let's make it happen.

Photography can feel like a lonely endeavor until you find your community, and even then, it can be a struggle to find openness of knowledge and generous peers. Not everyone has that solid group chat or friends with experience. The goal of this spreadsheet is to give everyone a resource, regardless of experience, clique or social following.

Whether it's locally, among your peers, in your specific genres or at any scale, the future of photography will only be strengthened by rate transparency.

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If you're a music photographer, pricing your work can be a struggle at any stage of your career. Traditionally, guarding one's pricing and rates has felt like an asset or perhaps a necessity. This approach isn't specific to music photography, but it is one that is very common in this field.

I'd argue that being as transparent about rates and pricing is something only benefits the music photography community. If we can leave egos aside, understanding what our peers charge and earn can give us both goals and the aspirations to set our sights even higher.

To this end, I wanted to create a comprehensive music photography rates sheet that can serve as a community resource to encourage transparency about rates. Enter the Music Photography Rates & Pricing spreadsheet.

If you're looking for what to charge for music photography or have experience to share, read on.

If you want the sheet, skip to the end, but I'd encourage you to read about why this resource was created first.

Why is pay transparency necessary?

Like most aspects of business and employment, pay transparency benefits those doing the work. Conversely, being closed about what we charge only saves egos and protects low budgets.

Not sharing rates gives leverage to those who would take advantage of our passions and talents. It feeds on the doubts and insecurity of creatives and reinforces the narrative that we have to lower our fees or miss out on opportunities.

I feel sharing rates about what we charge as music photographers gives us strength collectively. It gives points of reference — both high and low — for the value of our work.

Rate transparency empowers photographers

Transparency about rates empowers photographers. Here's an example that was shared on the Music Photography Discord recently, where a beta of the rates sheet was shared in advance of its public launch.

Knowledge is power. Photographers being able to negotiate higher rates from the confidence of community knowledge is the exact reason we need rate transparency.

Creating a solution for the music photography community

With this in mind, I've created a Google form and linked Google sheet that I hope can serve as community reference point for rates in music photography.

The intent of this form and data are to give us a transparent look into music photography rates. The goal is to show real world rate reporting as a reference for estimates and fees so that we can help negotiate and leverage our value more effectively as music photographers. 

The more we can share and understand what clients are paying and what are peers are charging, the more power we have to advocate for our worth. All submissions are anonymous. All data, high and low, is valuable and encouraged.

Contribute to the Music Photography Rates Sheet

If you're reading this and have ever been paid for music photography, I'd strongly encourage you to enter work history and rates. The strength of this data relies on as diverse entries as possible giving as much detail as possible.

If you're looking to contribute rates, it's helpful to view the sheet first to understand the formatting. Take a look, then add your experience.

From local bands to world tours, if you've done work as a music photographer, we need your data. All entries are anonymous, but you can name the artist or clients if you wish.

And here's a plain link to the submission form:

https://forms.gle/zHxJ9g4DVPZCQS7T7

What do Music Photographers Charge?

If you're creating an estimate or you've been asked for a rate and want to a reference for what other photographers are charging, look no further.

You can see past entries from this form in the reference sheet for music photo rates here:
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1n-9lzJ9aKmkT_N_cNsV4-xvz2otvCIZfTCzVn4Zs04c/edit?usp=sharing

I hope this resource is helpful. If you're looking for more help with business and pricing, or if you're looking for a place for community, join us on the Music Photography Discord.

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If you have never been paid as a photographer or aren't used to charging money, a natural response is to decline payment. Here's why it's the wrong one.

You're good enough right now

There's a notion, especially among newer photographers, that one has to be good enough or experienced enough to be paid for their work. This is a fallacy.

Here's the truth: You deserve to be paid when your photography does the job the client needs. Period. Never talk yourself out of being valued.

There is no magic threshold of experience or talent at which you're at one moment simply an amateur and in another a professional deserving of being paid. The difference is in acknowledging your own worth as a photographer.

More essentially, you're good enough to be paid right now.

Experience isn't value

The moment someone wants your work, that's when you're good enough to be paid. “Good enough” has nothing to do with experience, talent or creativity in this context. It has everything to do with the work your images can do for the client.

If the images weren't good enough, they wouldn't have a use. Here, the market dictates the value. Not a certain number of years of experience, not the camera you're using, not your doubts and not even imposter syndrome.

Professionals get paid

What separates professionals from amateurs? Professionals get paid. That's it. Not experience, not talent.

We all know incredible gifted photographers who are simply hobbyists that produce incredible results. And by contrast, pros who make photography a business without being artists. There's nothing wrong in the least with either of these approaches to photography.

When you're in a position to stand up for your value as a photographer, don't sell yourself short. When your images are being put to work, that work is valuable. Never forget that.

Acknowledging that you're worthy of being paid for your work is a conscious choice that you can choose.

Your investments and equipment aren't free

Anyone who has put any amount of time into their craft of photography, even if you consider yourself a beginner or still learning, knows that there's a lot that goes into making images. This is especially true beyond just “taking” the photos.

Photography requires specialized equipment, computers, software and time. At the very least, your investments and equipment aren't free — why should your time and work be?

We live in a time when every cell phone comes with a camera. Everyone is capable of making images themselves. If someone doesn't want to pay for photography, they can always make it themselves. We all know the reason they won't do this. And that's exactly the reason your work has value, regardless of experience.

When to start charging for photography

So, when is the best time to start charging for photography? The simple answer is when someone will pay you. Charge for your services as a photographer when you know that your images will meet the needs of the client.

It's fine to be nervous, but leave emotions out of it to the fullest extent you're capable. Be honest about your capabilities and what you can deliver. It can be hard, but if someone is approaching you to pay you for your work, believe in their belief in you. Try and see what they have seen in you — and trust them.

Meeting the needs of your clients and their expectations are what a professional does. When you can do that, at any level, you deserve to charge for your work.

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