The Beginner Photography Podcast

Photo Q&A: How Do You Set the Right Price for Your Photo Prints?

• Raymond Hatfield

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#550 In Today’s Episode of the podcast I chat with YOU as I discuss important topics about photography that are essential for both beginners and experienced photographers. This episode's key themes revolve around the pricing of prints, motivation in photography, understanding lenses, managing photography business logistics, and addressing technical shooting challenges. 

KEY TOPICS COVERED

  1. Pricing Prints - Raymond addresses pricing framed prints by explaining that the photographer's value comes from capturing moments and connections, not merely selling paper and ink. He stresses that pricing should reflect the photographer's time and expertise, with a guideline from the Professional Photographers of America suggesting a minimum charge of $50 for profitability.
  2. Motivation in Photography - Raymond discusses how lack of motivation often stems from not having a specific idea rather than a lack of interest. He advises photographers to set constraints and avoid self-editing during shoots to reignite creativity. He shares methods for photographers to overcome creative blocks by exploring new subjects or projects.
  3. Understanding Lenses - The episode provides a detailed explanation of different focal lengths, clarifying the role of lens compression, depth of field, and the effects of lens choice on photographic outcomes. Raymond suggests using specific lenses depending on the shooting scenario, like wide lenses for landscapes and telephoto for portraits.

IMPORTANT DEFINITIONS & CONCEPTS

  • Compression: Refers to the perceived distance between the subject and the background, which varies with lens focal length.
  • Circular Polarizer Filter: A tool used to reduce reflections and glare, enhancing image quality by altering the light entering the camera.

DISCUSSION & REFLECTION QUESTIONS

  1. How can photographers better assess their work's value beyond material costs?
  2. What are some creative strategies to overcome a lack of motivation in photography?

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Thanks for listening & keep shooting!

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Somebody who's writing a book cannot both write the first draft and edit it at the same time. The creation and the editing process are two entirely different things. What you cannot do is edit while you're shooting you. You simply cannot make that decision because sometimes it's simply the act of shooting different things that will allow you to see the world differently and then shoot new things that you actually do like. So you can't edit while you're shooting, because there's a really good chance that you're gonna miss out on all of those bad photos that get you to a really good photo. Hey, Raymond here from the Beginner Photography Podcast, and today we have another photo q and a episode ready for you. Photo q and a episode is where you submit your questions about photography, about anything that you're struggling with, and I'm gonna give you some answers to help you out. If you have any questions that you want answered in an upcoming photo q and a episode, then be sure to join the Beginner Photography podcast community. What you can do by heading over to beginner photo pod.com/group. It is a free and amazing community full of photographers just like yourself, who are looking to learn and grow their skills as photographers. All right, so the first question today comes from Timothy in the group. Timothy asks, how do you go about pricing of framed eight and a half by 11 prints? My Canon Pro 100 quit feeding 13 by 19 paper, but it will feed eight and a half by 11 paper just fine. Okay, so, that means that you can print up to eight and a half by 11. So how do you price it? This is hard sometimes because it's like if you were to print an eight and a half by 11 or an eight by 10 at CVS, it might cost you two or$3, and you think to yourself, okay, so that's how much an eight by 10 costs. So if I were to sell it to, one of my clients, let's just say that I mark up the price double or even triple the price, that's still less than 10 bucks. But one of the things that I think is so important to remember when it comes to pricing prints, not even just frame prints, but just prints themselves, even if they're just on photo paper, is that what you're selling is not paper and ink. That's what CVS, that's what Costco, that's what Walmart, that's what, all these other, print labs are selling paper and ink, but that's not what you're selling. What you're selling is, is love. What you're selling is connection. What you're selling is a moment in time. What you're selling to somebody is a part of their own life. They reached out to you for a reason to take these photos, right? If they were just simply looking for something to fill a spot on the wall, they could do that extremely easily and extremely cheaply, by going to any store and buying some cheap poster and then framing it and putting it on the wall. But that's not what they wanted. They wanted somebody to create something for them that is gonna show off that love, it's gonna show off that connection. It's gonna show off that bond that they have with either their family, their spouse, or even their pet. So how do you price an eight by 10? Well, a few years ago, the PPA, the Professional Photographers of America did a study and they found that if you want to run a profitable photography business. You cannot sell your eight by tens for less than$50. That's the minimum that you can charge. And you're thinking, how is that possible? How is charging a minimum of$50 for a$3 print, essentially? how is that the only way that I could be profitable? That's a great question. That's fully understandable. And the reason is, because you're in business, that$3, that it costs, whoever the print lab is probably only costs them a few pennies because they buy in bulk. They buy a lot. They're marking up the cost to then send to you. The biggest cost for you is your time as a photographer and a, solopreneur, somebody who's doing everything themselves. Your biggest asset is time. The more time you spend on something. Say, going to a website, uploading a photo, or even before then, even just exporting it in the right size to make sure that it's not, gonna be extra pixelated or whatever when it's printed. And then, uploading it, choosing the right size, entering in all the. the shipping information and whatever, getting it yourself, making sure that it looks good, and then, if you're gonna frame it yourself or whatever, all of those things take time. It's not just the press of a shutter button, the button on your camera and then you're done. It takes way more time than that. I did a softball shoot, for, a softball team here, local. Right. and I did the math, and again, I'm not in business for this, but I did the math and I was like, if I charge say$25 per kid, that'll be enough to, to cover my time and that'll be worth it. And the total came out to about$400 and my wife was just like$400 for an hour's worth of work. That is insane. Like, I wish that I could make that, as somebody with a master's degree. And I had said, like, I understand what you're saying, but it's more than an hour's worth of work. It's the hours worth of communication leading up to it. It's the planning. It's, what are your team colors? It's all the Photoshop work, because for team photos, it's not just, you take the photo and you deliver it. You gotta change out the background. you gotta make a banner image for the entire team. You gotta get their logos and stuff. It's coordinating all that. It's making sure that the banner's the right size so that it can be sent off to a printer so that they can print it. And then it looks good. It's delivering all these things. It's uploading the photos to, my cloud spot gallery and sending it off, making sure that my cloud spot store was set up correctly for them so that if they wanted to purchase any prints, it's all of these things. Now, was it, 50 hours worth of work? No, it wasn't, but at the same time, I don't, as a photographer, you're typically not working 50 hours a week shooting, right? So you have to take that into account as well. Like how many shoots can you do and then how much do you need to earn to survive? And that was the number that I came up with. So does it seem like a lot to sell one, eight by 10 print for$50? Sure. It may seem like it, but what if you're only selling, four in a week? That's only$200 that's coming into you, is that worth all of the work that it's gonna take to get that done? Anyway, these are just things to consider when it comes to pricing your work, and also as a photographer, you kind of gotta make these things up on your own. You're in charge of your business. Nobody else is telling you how to run it. You get to be in charge. There was a wedding photographer years ago. I completely forget who it was, which is a shame, but they said that their goal in life was to be able to just go to a wedding and photograph whatever they wanted, whether it just be shoes, people's outfits, you know, whatever, anything that they wanted with no expectations of receiving anything else. And that's because, again, you are running your own business. You can do whatever you want as a business owner. You can make those decisions and you have to make decisions that are going to keep you in business long enough to keep doing it. So there you go. I hope that that helps answer your question, Timothy. Again, when it comes to framing, adding the frame, that is an additional cost, that is an additional time as well as you have to put it all together and you're probably gonna deliver it too. So take those things into account, when coming up with pricing. Again, Tim, I hope that that helps. Okay. Next question here comes from John. John asks, how do you motivate yourself when you just don't feel in the mood for photography? Man, John, I love this question because one, it's honest, right? There is so many times we buy this camera, we're so excited for it. We imagine that it's gonna change our life, it's gonna take us to all these amazing places, which it can. But sometimes then life gets in the way and the camera goes on the shelf for longer than you expected it to, and then, you kinda lose that motivation. So how do you get back in the motivation of shooting and getting excited creatively? And like I said, I've been there and I have found that for me, lack of motivation is not a true lack of motivation. What it is, is a lack of some sort of specific idea. So what I mean by that is that when you have a camera in your hand, if I were to hand you a camera and I would say, go ahead, go shoot something amazing, your brain would just kind of overheat, it would be like, what? Something amazing. Oh, okay, let me look around. Where am I? What is amazing? What would be worthy of being considered amazing? And there's so many different ideas. There's so many different possibilities of things that you could shoot, ways that you could shoot it. That again, your brain would just short circuit. And even though you have seemingly infinite number of things to shoot. It feels like you have nothing to shoot because you're waiting for something to come along. That is amazing. But if I were to hand you a camera and I were to say, go photograph blue birds, you suddenly know exactly what you need to go do. You know that you need to go find some trees, you need to go find somewhere in nature. You need to be looking up towards blue birds. You need to be listening and you have a clear idea of what to shoot. Now does that mean that blue birds are, something amazing to shoot? Not necessarily, but I've found that again, when I'm in some sort of creative rut or I need some sort of motivation, what I do is I give myself very constrained limitations because once I'm there and I start shooting these, within these constraints, say birds, suddenly I realize, oh, there's a squirrel right there. Actually, I'm gonna photograph that squirrel too. Oh, as I'm looking up, Look at the way that the light is coming in through these, these branches here, and then I'll try to photograph that. Maybe it's a little too tight. You don't get an idea of scale, so then you kind of back up. You get something wider. You try a different focal length, you try a different angle. And then before you know it, it's like one idea sparks another, and then that sparks another, and then you just kind of keep going. which is kind of like, free association within photography. And if you stick to that idea, if you keep going with that, you're going to find images. that you love. You're gonna find, compositions, you're gonna find subjects, you're gonna find things that, you really enjoy shooting. And that motivation is slowly going to come back. But here's a tip, because one of the things, again, like if I were to say, go shoot something amazing, everything that you look at, you would immediately decide, is this amazing? Yes or no? And nine times outta 10. The answer is gonna be no. Right? Because it takes work to create something amazing. But when you go out with a specific task of trying to get that motivation back, and by essentially just doing free association shooting, shooting one thing which leads to another, which leads to another, which leads to another, what you cannot do is self-edit the photos while you're shooting. Meaning you can't look at a bird and say, that's not a good looking bird, or I don't like that light, or this isn't an interesting tree. Somebody who's writing a book cannot both write the first draft and edit it at the same time. The creation and the editing process are two entirely different things. So what you need to do is go out and shoot everything that catches your eye, anything that sparks an idea, anything that grabs your attention, anything and everything, shoot it. And then it's not until you get home that you are then allowed to put those photos on your computer or your iPad, whatever, and then judge those images. You can judge them to your heart's content for sure. Once they're on a larger screen and you're not actively shooting, that's fine. You can decide then that you hate all of them, whatever. But what you cannot do is edit while you're shooting you. You simply cannot make that decision because sometimes it's simply the act of shooting different things that will allow you to see the world differently and then shoot new things that you actually do like. Sometimes it takes a lot of bad photos to get to a good photo, so you have to allow yourself to take those bad photos to get to the good photo so you can't edit while you're shooting, because there's a really good chance that you're gonna miss out on all of those bad photos that get you to a really good photo. So don't look at the screen. Just go out, shoot, enjoy yourself, spend time in nature, whatever it is, and really be present. Slow down. This is photography. It is not brain surgery. It is photography. Have fun with it. All right, John. Hope that helped. All right. Next question here comes from Delaney Delaney acid. Are there any good charts or graphs that help explain lenses? The millimeters confuse me so much. Ooh. I specifically remember a number of years ago, I specifically remember, when I was getting into photography and, the first digital camera that I had was a Canon xt. It was like eight megapixels and it came with the kit lens, the 18 to 55. And I remember reading online everybody saying, you gotta buy the 50 millimeter, 1.8, the nifty 50. This would've been 2006 or so, maybe 2007. And my first reaction was, oh, I don't need that lens. My current lens goes from 18 to 55, 50 millimeters is in there. I don't need to spend the extra money on a 50 millimeter lens. And what I learned, obviously, as time went on and I did end up buying the, the 50 millimeter 1.8, the nifty 50, what I ended up finding was that when it comes to lenses, the focal length or the millimeters is not the end all be all. There's so much more that goes into your lens choice that goes into, creating a great photo that goes into, the image than just the millimeter. So let's talk about that for a bit. There are several types of focal lengths. We'll kind of stick to the, the main ones. There's ultra wides, there's wide, there's standard, standard telephoto, and then telephoto, six types of lenses. But you can pretty much get all of them with just just a few lenses. So an ultra wide would be something between 15 millimeters and 24 millimeters. A wide lens would be something between 24 millimeters and 35 millimeters. A standard lens is something between 35 and 50 millimeters. A standard telephoto lens is something between 50 and 85 millimeters, and then a telephoto lens is a hundred millimeters or more. A standard lens is called a standard lens, which is again, about 50 millimeters. It's called that because the way that the image is, rendered closely represents what and how the human eye sees as far as compression goes. And what I mean by compression is that the longer the millimeter. The more compression there is. So anything over 50 millimeters, your subject is going to look closer to the background than what they actually are. Anything wider than 50 millimeters, your subject is gonna look further away from the background than what it actually is. I try to picture for a moment. There's a very famous scene in the movie Jaws, and this has become known as the push pull shot. It's called the push pull shot. it's when I don't even remember his name. It's been so long since I've seen the movie. The dad in the movie, the main character of the movie is on the beach and he realizes that there's a shark in the water. The camera moves in very close to him, but as the camera is physically moving closer to him. The lens, they're zooming out. So his face stays about the same size in the frame, but it looks like the background is getting further and further and further away. It creates this really interesting distortion effect if you watch severance, on Apple tv, it's the same sort of effect that they do when people get severed, when they go through the elevator, it starts really wide and then the camera pulls back as it's zooming in. So it looks like the background is coming up real close, to the subject. Okay, so that doesn't have anything to do with millimeters. Like why are we talking about this? It is important because, specifically in portrait photography, that's what, the majority, I would say of the people in the group here are shooting. if you want a headshot or a portrait where the background is out of focus, what you're gonna do is you're gonna use a longer lens, a more of a standard telephoto lens. Something in the 85 or even telephoto range, a hundred millimeters. That way you can more easily blur out the background because you see less of the background. It looks like it's real close to your subject because of the compression, but really it's, it's still far away. So you can make sure that the background is out of focus. If you try to take the same portrait at, say, 24 millimeters rather than 85 millimeters, your subject's face is gonna look distorted. It's gonna look longer, and the background will just be more in focus. And that can be really distracting for portraits where there, you know, where your subject's face is, is the main subject of the photo. So I hope that kind of helps to explain why you would use some lenses, with different millimeters more so than just being able to zoom in on something or get wide enough to, to capture it all. cause I think that that's, that's the more understandable part. If you want a wide shot with a lot of stuff in it, yeah. Grab a 24 millimeter lens. If you want more of a documentary reporter look, get a 35 millimeter lens. If you just want a standard view that looks very similar to what the human eye sees, get a 50 millimeter lens. If you want a great portrait lens, get an 85 millimeter lens and if you want a telephoto lens,'cause you're shooting stuff further away, get a 100 millimeter lens. That's the easy part. It's talking about the compression. And the depth of field, right? How much is in focus? Those are the two things that change. So the longer the lens, more compression, more depth of field, the wider the lens, less compression. So more weird distortion. And the background is more in focus. So again, Delaney. I hope that that helps. Oh, and I guess, I guess I, I mentioned earlier that you can kind of get all of those focal lengths with like three lenses. Pretty much every caman manufacturer has what's called the golden trifecta. They have some sort of wide, ultra wide lens. They have some sort of do everything lens, and then they have a telephoto lens as well. So with Canon, they have a 15 to 35, 2 0.8 lens that covers everything from ultra wide to wide. Then they have a 24 to 70 that covers all of the standard range. It goes from wide to standard telephoto, and then there's a 70 to 200 that captures all of the telephoto range right there. So within those three lenses, you can get just about all of the focal lengths that you would need. So again, hope that helps. Alright, next question here comes from Maria. This is more of a business focus question. She says, Hey Raymond. I had a bride send me back her wedding photography contract a week ago, but I still haven't received her deposit, which is required upon contract. The wedding isn't until October, but how long do I wait until I nudge her for the deposit? Great question. If you're new to this, you want to bring an air of professionalism right? To, to your work, especially in the world of wedding photography, where oftentimes with, smaller weddings, you're the only professional who's been to multiple weddings. You're also looked at as like the planner. So, planning a wedding is stressful enough as it is. You want to bring this cool, calm, collected confidence and professionalism to all of your communications. But if you're new to this, how do you do that without the experience? Right. Totally get it. So the way that the whole booking process works for me is that I get an inquiry. I then have to have some sort of conversation with them, whether it be a phone call or an in-person meet. I just wanna learn a little bit more about them, who they are, what makes'em tick. What this does is it serves two things. It's one, a way for them to decide if I'm gonna be the right fit for them, but it's also a way for me to decide if they're gonna be the right fit for me. So, congratulations, you've already decided like we're gonna be a good fit. I'm gonna send you a contract to sign. Here's the contract with all the details so that they can decide right then and there if this is gonna be right for them. They say, yes, this sounds great. They sign the contract, but they haven't put down a deposit yet. Now the deposit holds their wedding date. They can still have a signed contract and you not shoot their wedding because if they don't pay you anything, you're not obligated to show up. So the way that my workflow works is that once a contract is signed, they immediately get an invoice. That invoice has the deposit on there. They need to pay that invoice before their date is booked. So what I do is when I receive the contract, I have an email that goes out immediately afterwards and it's all automated. That says something to the effect of, Hey, I got your contract signed. Thank you so much. Now you're only one step away from holding your wedding date. And that is to pay your deposit. Once your deposit is paid, then your wedding date is officially locked in, so be sure to pay the deposit at your earliest convenience. You have to stress that their wedding date is not locked in until the deposit is paid. So to answer your question. How long do you wait until you nudge her for the deposit? The answer is immediately, send her some sort of email that says, Hey Brian, I got your contract back. It looks great. As a reminder, your wedding date isn't officially locked in until you pay the contract or pay the deposit, rather, here's a link to pay the deposit. And then your wedding date will be locked in and you'll be ready to go. Please pay it at your earliest convenience. Thank you so much, Maria. And that's it. Now, if they still go a few weeks, I would say then, wait a week. If they don't pay it within a week, get on the phone call. Just to see if there's any issues. Sometimes life gets busy. I've called brides before and they're like, oh my gosh, totally meant to do this. Spaced it, so sorry. Thank you so much. And then they'll just pay it. It's usually no issue. I've never had a couple book me sign the contract and then ghost me after that fact. So again, it's usually some sort of timing or they forgot, or just something like that. Just try to be there to provide help and it'll get done. All right, so again, Maria, let me know if that makes sense. Lemme know if that helps. All right. Next question here is from Kyle. Kyle says, I'm new to photography and I'm really struggling to pick a camera. Any suggestions between a full frame or A PSC for beginner? What about brand? Any help is appreciated. I. Well, first of all, Kyle, it sounds like you don't have a camera yet, and yet you're doing so much research that now this question between full frame and A PSC is, is coming up and that brings a lot of decision fatigue into the equation, right? Making sure that you make the right decision. But here's the thing that I've learned about photography, and after talking with literally hundreds of photographers, beginner photographers about this exact experience that, that you're going through right now, the first camera that you buy does not matter. It doesn't matter. Because there's no way to know exactly what kind of things that you want to shoot in the future. So therefore, you can't know what camera will be the best tool to achieve the thing that you want most. So the best route forward is to buy the cheapest camera that you can right now. Shoot as much as humanly possible with it. Shoot all kinds of stuff. Shoot nature, kids, families, weddings, portraits, stock photos, food, photos, pet photos, go birding, do all of the things with it, because what you want is to figure out, well, what do you like to shoot? Once you figure out what it is that you like to shoot, you will have gained enough experience with that camera that you'll know exactly what aspects of a new camera are most important to you, and then from that point, you'll be able to upgrade to a camera that is perfect for you. The camera body is so, so, so, so much less important than the lenses that you choose. A lens is made outta glass. You can go through three or four camera bodies before. You need to upgrade your lens. So don't worry about the camera body. In fact, don't worry about it so much. Just go to Facebook Marketplace, type in, digital cameras. Find something like a Canon Rebel or a Nikon d, I don't know, 30 something hun. Something with four digits. Or a Fuji XT 30 or Fuji XT 20, any of those cameras are gonna serve you fantastic for the first three to four years of your photography journey. Fantastic. And again, within that time, you'll be shooting a lot. You'll be gaining experience, you'll be learning what it is that you want to focus on so that when the time does come that you outgrow that camera, you'll know exactly what direction you need to go for what camera to buy. But guess what? Sometimes you buy a camera, you shoot, and then you realize, you know what, maybe photography isn't exactly, the hobby or the thing that I really wanted to get into. Would you rather only spend, say,$300 getting into this hobby and now you sell that thing, or$2,600? Save as much as possible. In the beginning. Buy a used crop sensor camera with a kid lens. Maybe buy a 50 millimeter 1.8 as well. They're only about a hundred bucks, and that will be a great camera to learn manual, get the basics and understand what you want to focus on in the future. So there you go, Kyle. Okay, last question that I got here is from Jason. Jason says, how does one prevent lens glare when shooting landscapes? I recently added a lens hood to my camera, but I'm still getting some glare, sad face emoji. I want to avoid having to eliminate it in Lightroom. Thanks. Well, Jason, getting a lens hood is a great first step, especially when you're shooting towards the sun. You can get the direct sun raise into the lens. They bounce around it causes glare, doesn't look that great. Adding the lens hood will help, but it doesn't remove it completely. When you're shooting landscapes, oftentimes light comes from below. Remember, the way that your camera captures light is just reflections of sunlight. So if you see green grass or a blue lake, the reason why you see it is because the light is bouncing up from it to your eyeballs. So light is coming from literally all 180 degrees semis, spherical of your lens out in front of it. So reducing the amount of bounce that the light takes within your lens is how you cut down on lens glare. You got the lens hood. It's not working. What else can you do? There are a few things that you can, do that you can consider. One thing is to shoot away from the sun. Right. So don't shoot directly towards the direction of the sun. That's gonna help a huge amount, but sometimes I get it, you can't. Or again, you get those reflections from, from water or from, a rock or something that is going to cause glare. So removing those reflections or that glare, the way that you do that is with a polarizer filter. Polarizer filters are worth their weight in gold when shooting landscapes and polarizer filters are one of the few things that like we haven't been able to replicate within, Lightroom. We can use all these digital filters, radio filters, graduated filters, linear filters that can replicate things like neutral density, different colored filters, different effects, but polarizer filters, again, are one of those things that we haven't been able to replicate digitally. Not very well at least, and therefore they're still incredibly important when you're actually shooting. The way that a polarizer filter works is that it changes the direction that light enters the camera. Maybe you've had a pair of polarizer sunglasses. polarizer sunglasses are huge for, for fishermen, for people who do stuff in the snow, spend time on the lake. And the reason is, is'cause it cuts down on the reflections, cuts down on the glare, and you'll notice that when you put on polarizer filters, suddenly if you're out on the water, it's not just blinding white light, you can kind of see into the water. So you can do the same thing for your camera by putting on a polarizer filter. If you wanna make it super easy and relatively inexpensive, just you know, search Amazon for polarizer filter. The next step up would be a circular polarizer filter. A circular polarizer filter allows you to spin the polarizer filter to adjust the way that the light comes into the camera, so you can essentially turn it, all in one direction so that it's, quote unquote off, and that the light is entering the lens normally, or you can turn it completely the opposite direction to cut out as much light reflection or transmission as possible. That can really cut down on contrast glare, obviously. And then that'll give you more flexibility when it comes to editing. So give it a shot. Polarizer filters or circular polarizer filter as well if if you wanna spend a few extra bucks and have more flexibility. So there you go. That is how you prevent lens glare when shooting landscapes. Point the camera away from the sun. And get a polarizer filter. Jason. I hope that that helps, and that is all the time that we have for today's photo q and a episode. Like I said, I hope this episode helped you learn something about photography and if you have a burning photography question that you want answered here in the photo q and a episode of a podcast. Be sure to join the free and amazing beginner photography podcast community only@beginnerphotopod.com slash group. Again, beginner photo pod.com/group. That is it for today. Until next time, remember, the more that you shoot today, the better of a photographer you will be tomorrow. Talk soon.