If your local community perceives that you’re a busy photographer, it'll make you a more desirable choice when someone's looking for a photographer. Social proof is a form of perception. If you can show that you're shooting all the time, people will believe that you're in high demand. People often equate that, if you're in high demand, then you must be good.
In the beginning, it can be very difficult to show that you are shooting all the time. People on social media need to see you in their feeds constantly shooting, otherwise you won't be held as a top choice when they need photos. What if you aren’t super busy yet? How do you get the social proof to create the perception problem of being a top choice?
In order to change everyone's perception and show social proof, you have to post pictures and videos of you shooting on a regular basis. I recommend you make the most of a single shoot and turn it into at least four different posts.
First Post: Packing
You got the call you're going to meet someone for a shoot. First thing you should do is take a short video clip of you packing your camera bag. Give everyone a peek at your professional gear and let them see that you are headed to a shoot.
Second Post: On Your Way
Take another short clip of yourself walking out the door. Have hold of your camera bag and say something like “I've got my camera bag and I'm ready to rock this photoshoot” or “heading out on that family shoot” or “got my gear, got my pants, let's go”. Show off that you aren’t just sitting in your living room all the time. Let the social media world know that you are busy and on the go.
Third Post: Hard at Work
Have a friend tag along and take a clip or a photo of you in the action at the shoot. If you don't have someone to bring along with you, take a celebratory selfie of you and the client. Try putting your phone on a tripod and let it record a bit while you shoot.
Fourth Post: Stunning Results
Finally, post some of the awesome photos from the shoot.
You now have four pieces of content from a single shoot. The goal here is to post each one of these a week apart. Add captions that suggest you're on a whole new shoot each time. I'm not saying you should lie, but being a little general or vague is key. For example, with content piece number one you could say something like “getting ready for this shoot, super pumped”, content piece number two can be “heading to a dope shoot”, and content piece three might be “shooting Ashley's senior photos”. The last content piece will be you posting actual photos from the shoot, which actually occurred several weeks ago.
You can literally do one shoot and make it look like you had a shoot every single week for an entire month. Even if you only had three shoots, doing one of these posts every week will help it look like you've had steady work for three months. Anyone can land three shoots.
Your friends will see you killing it on a regular basis. So when they're ready for photos, you're gonna be top of mind. Even if your friend’s don’t need photos, they might refer you to others. If they see a Facebook post that says somebody is looking for a photographer to do photos of a child’s birthday party, your friends are going to think of you.
Creating a series of posts from one shoot will generate that perception that you are busy and in demand. If you're in demand, you must be good. Use this method, along with all the other tools that I taught you in this course, and you’ll be booking gig after gig in no time.
The rule of thirds is designed to provide more pleasing compositions. Imagine an image broken up into thirds both horizontally and vertically so you would have 9 sections. Most cameras have a “grid” setting that will display these 9 sections over your image to help you better compose your shot. With this grid in mind the “rule of thirds’ now identifies 4 important parts of an image that you should consider placing important points of interest on while you are framing your shot.
The idea is that placing points of interest on these intersections or lines will bring an overall balance to your image and will allow the viewer to become more interactive with the story of your photo. Studies have shown that when people view an image, their eyes tend to naturally travel to one of these 4 intersecting points first rather than the center of the shot. The rule of thirds works with this natural way of looking at an image rather than working against it.
Let’s talk about taking portraits first.
When you’re taking portraits, you could place the head of your subject on one of these intersections. Let’s say you take a photo of someone looking to the side like the one below.
If you place their head on the upper intersecting line opposite of the side they are looking too, then it lends to the understanding that “hey, they are looking at something interesting in that direction”.
This will help your image become more interactive for the viewer and they will be able to see the full story. Otherwise, if the image is like the previous one and just captures the subject in the middle, then the mind has to work harder to create the rest of the story. So always remember to give more space in the direction someone is looking.
Now, let’s bring our focus onto landscape photos. Here is a photo taken at sunset without using the rule of thirds.
This composition is unpleasing and uses the rule of thirds incorrectly. Let's take the same photo, only this time we use the rule of thirds in the correct way.
In this photo you can see that we placed the horizon on the bottom horizontal line. This allows the viewer to see the full spectrum of the landscape and the beautiful sky as well.
1. What are the points of interest in this shot?
and
2. Where could I place them to best help tell the story?
Now that you understand how to use the rule of thirds to take better photos, GET OUT THERE AND START SHOOTING.
Always remember, "You don't have to be great to start, but you have to start to be great!"
]]>Not knowing how to properly charge could be costing you a lot of money. It’s important that you maximize your earning potential with each and every shoot. This can be a very confusing process for a lot of photographers and videographers. It becomes even more difficult when you have tons of “gurus” telling you a million different things. In this article, I’ll be clarifying the correct pricing structure and showing you how the pro’s price their photo and video work.
When pricing your work, there are 3 elements you have to consider when determining how much to charge a client. The first thing is “Shooting Time”.
You know what shooting time is. It’s the actual amount of time that you will be spending on that specific photo or video shoot. So, what are things you should consider when you think about shooting time? Well, first and foremost, EVERY photographer and videographer needs to determine their typical hourly rate. So, how do you know what is the appropriate hourly rate? This is normally determined by skill, experience, and what part of the country you are in. But, I’m gonna give you a window of what you will typically see in the industry. Normally you will see a range between $75 to $200 dollars per hour. You may be thinking “woe, Tyler, I’m new at this. Can I already be charging $75 an hour for my work?”. The answer is, that’s actually not very much. $75 is typically the bottom of the barrel. So, I would start here. If you don’t think you are at the $75 mark yet, then what we are going to go over in the next couple minutes is really going to help you be more comfortable with charging that amount.
So back to shooting time. How long is it going to take you to shoot and how long is it going to take you to travel to the shoot? Some people question “should I charge based on mileage” or “Should I charge like a cab and just start the meter as soon as I begin driving”? Well, sometimes traffic is backed up and it may take you longer to get somewhere. If you’re charging based on mileage, then the sitting in traffic costs you more than it costs the client. The only thing they aren’t making more of these days is time and we know time is money. So, charge based on your hourly rate. If it takes you 30 minutes to drive there, then you would charge $37.50 if your normal hourly rate is $75.
How long does it take you to edit a shoot? You need to know these numbers. If you don’t have a lot of experience then I know its hard to know your times when you’re still in the learning phase. When you’re newer, it’s almost like editing for the first time each time you open up your adobe software. Over time you will figure out a style and a way you like to edit photos. Each time you edit will get faster because you will know what settings you typically like to use. If you need more guidance on editing, you can find it HERE. If you want to cut down on your editing time, because we know time is money, then you need to create presets. When I say presets, I’m not talking about batch editing and just clicking “apply to all” and boom you’re done. No, I’m talking about presets based on settings we use every time we open our editing workstation. For example. If you like the contrast of your photos to normally be at 10% or 40%, or you like to crush the highlights, or whatever it is that you like in your style, you need to already have those options pre set up as a jump off point for each editing session. If you don’t have presets of your own, you can download mine HERE. It takes time and effort to build presets and edit photos, so it’s important that you are charging for how long this takes you.
When I first started, it would take me 4 or 5 hours to edit a simple family photoshoot. But now, I’ve developed a process and it takes me 45 minutes to an hour to edit a family session because I already know what I’m going to do. Right now, we have photographers and videographers out there who aren’t charging based on time, they are charging based on “project”. They are saying things like “my senior photo shoots normally run about $150, my family shoots are about $300, and my weddings are somewhere between $1,200 and $1,500. But, that’s bad practice and we shouldn’t do that anymore. We should charge based on the time we spend. The shooting time, the editing time, and the 3rd thing, which is possibly the most important metric of all, is Equipment Cost.
So, what do I mean by equipment cost? At one point in time you had to pay a full price for all of your equipment whether you bought it new or used. As you know, gear is very expensive. You need to recover this cost and have it redeemed back to you. Equipment cost for a photographer or videographer is considered an “Expense”. So, how do you pay for that expense? You’re going to do it by charging the client a depreciated value based on the full value of your original purchase. Let me show you how this works. If you were shooting on a 5D Mark IV that you paid $2,400 for, overtime of using that camera on every shoot it will start to ware out and not work as well anymore. Think of the shutter in your camera like the transmission in your car. After about 250,000 miles, your transmission begins to act up and will need to be replaced. In the same way, the shutter of your camera has a life expectancy. This is different for each model of camera, but the typical life expectancy for a shutter is 250,000 actuations or clicks. So what we want to do is depreciate the value of our camera based on shutter actuations. We need to know how much it costs for every time you press the shutter button. Then we need to figure out on every shoot, how many shutter clicks are we typically using. Thats kind of a tuff number to figure out if you haven’t had hundreds of shoots, but, don’t worry because I’ve done the math for you. I started tracking shutter clicks over the course of hundreds of shoots. Each time I finished a shoot, I went to my computer, I opened the card, I highlighted all of the photos, clicked info, and boom, I figured out how many clicks were used on average and for what types of shoots. This is how I developed the model for pricing based on the depreciated value of your cameras shutter clicks. At the end of this article you will be able to use my photo/video pricing calculator that will do all of this math for you. So, let’s look at this from a birds eye view.
You have a 5D Mark IV that cost you $2,400, you depreciate the value based on 250,000 shutter actuations, and then you get a number that will be your rental fee for that piece of gear. Let’s say for a family shoot that takes you 2 hours, it ends up being a rental fee of $35. You want to eventually be able to replace your camera after it poops out on you at 250,000 clicks. But, where does the money come from to pay for it? Does it come directly out of your pocket? No, it comes from the money you set back from all the rental fees you charged your clients over many shoots. You could say this seems ridiculous, but this is how the pros do it. Imagine what it’s like making a Hollywood movie. Do you think when someone calls up universal studios and says “uh yeah, I have a script that I want to make a movie for, how much will it cost?”, and universal replies “normally for a movie that size, we charge around 1 Million dollars”….. Ummmm… No… They will say this is the equipment we will use on that shoot, this is how much it costs operators to run that equipment, this is how much it is for casting, costume design, etc etc. They will give you an itemized list of all of the things it will take to create that film. You need to do the same thing for your photo shoots and your video shoots. You should be giving your clients and itemized invoice outlining all of the charges for the equipment you used on their particular shoot. Have you ever heard someone say “why did it cost me $400 for you to stand there and just click a button for an hour?”. If you have, it’s because they couldn’t see where every dollar was going so they could justify the cost in their mind. It may seem like there is a lot of math involved, but DONT WORRY! I said I had you covered.
I’ve created a photo/video pricing calculator that will do all of the math for you. You enter in your hourly rate and the cost you paid retail for all of your gear. The calculator will do its magic in the background and deliver you a total price for you to charge the client. You can even print itemized invoices from the calculator to give to your clients. The calculator will also break down how much money you should set back in an expense account to replace your gear when it wares out on you. Click the link below and download the calculator now.
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