Ques about pricing

[Ramblinman]

Someone has approached me via email over the weekend asking him to take pictures of snakes for his website. He has about 50 snakes that he wants me to take pictures of and Im wondering if I should charge by the hour or by a session.

Im leaning towards by session and am trying to figure out what price I should quote him. I dont want to lowball him or charge him too much to the point I will price myself out of a job.

Pretty much all of my equipment is paid for, so I dont have alot of overhead.

[NorthernFocus]

I've been looking into this recently myself. What I've found is that it varies all over the board based on geography, subject matter, industry, etc. What I did was search on line for web sites of photographers providing similar services. Some of them have pricing posted on their sites. For example, I was looking at what people charge for private sessions for pet photography. I found ranges from $50 for up to three dogs at the photographers location to $350 in-home within 20 mi. of the photographers shop. In both cases the fee was just for showing up and then the images were sold in addition based on size, resolution, intended usage, etc.

A couple of hours of research on the web will confuse you even further

Good luck.

[Shadowman]

Find out how many shots he wants and use that number as a reference for how much editing you will be doing. You should set both a session (or setup fee) and an hourly. Suppose he wants twenty shots and you know you can do this in an hour and then he decides he wants additional shots taken, differerent location, different lighting, then you will have covered yourself for any additional addons the client might require. Your session fee should incorporate how much time you will spend editing.