Deciding on a fee for your photography is often a daunting prospect. The ins and outs of pricing, licensing, calculating usage rights and so on can be very confusing when you’re first starting out. If your local market is anything like mine, there’ll likely be an awful lot of photographers working for beer money, and an equal number of clients taking advantage of that and imposing unrealistic demands. Case in point, I recently had a request for 4 hours shooting late at night from which they wanted about 50 images on a 48 hour turnaround for web use. The fee? US$50 + cab fare. What’s stranger than the request is that there are photographers who’d jump at the chance.

To that end, below is a short video that explains one way to approach pricing. It gives you a good background in exactly what costs are involved in working as a professional photographer, and serves as a useful starting point for calculating your own fees.

If you are getting serious about making the jump to life as a working photographer, then using a pricing calculator is an essential part of the process. Photoshelter has one inbuilt in their system, making use of Fotoquote. This is included with your Photoshelter membership and I’d advise you to take a look. You can get a month free by clicking on the banner below and signing up there. Check out their expanded Pro membership for $549.99 a year that now comes with 1TB of storage. Monthly plans are also available.