If you just begin your photographer career than you should know how to calculate your wedding photography packages, it seems to be simple but few newbie photographer get stock for few months just to set their pricing and packages.
Dear all photographer friends my name is Bima and thank you for visiting my photography blog, when you follow my stories than few weeks ago I share a great article about how to make a wedding portfolio on your beginning career than today I wanna share to you about parameters than you should know wedding photography packages. Before I talk about it in more detail than I’m gonna give you with some few mindset that need to be consider.
Why You Must Getting Paid
Photography is ain’t cheap business even for newbie and small studio, go browse at online store such as Amazon, B&H, or visiting the nearest camera store in your town than you gonna spend like a hundred of dollars just to buy an entry level camera. Surely those budget is exclude your memory cards, lenses, and camera bag so you will spend like thousand of dollar for the whole budget. In fact, few friends of mine are stuck and shutting down their business just within a year and sell all their gears on Ebay or to some friends cause they don’t know how to use those gears to shoot a great pictures and earn money by selling photos.
So it is so clear when you spend thousand of dollars on photography gears than you should pay it back and earn money from any kind of services that you can offer to your client. In my personal opinion you have to be able to earn money and get your venture capital money back within 5 years at maximum cause when you can’t do that than must be something wrong in your business.
The worse habit that make so many photographers getting bankrupt after 2 years running their business is they NEVER calculate their wedding photography packages carefully. It is so true that you must make your photography portfolio by shooting some friend’s wedding for free or even get only small amount for fuel or simply to buy set of Big Mac on your Mc Donald’s.
On the beginning of your photographer career it’s common for you to not earn much money cause sometimes you must offering your services for free and this is the saddest thing but it’s fine if you just begin your career but you have to make a great deadline for it. 6 months to 1 year is fine but if you got nothing for almost 2 years than you don’t really care about your business for sure, definitely after a year you have to be concern about calculating your wedding photography packages properly.
Let Me Share to You These 5 Parameters to Calculate Your Wedding Photography Packages
It’s the most exciting part cause I will share to you my own business secret about calculation, put a concern on it cause real business should be come with great calculation. Trust me hundred of photographer friends are shutting down their business within 2 years just to not being concern about pricing and setting the great packages to their clients.
1 – Considering Your Gears Depreciation Value
There is no fix idea how to calculate your gears depreciation value but because I’m concern enough about it than this is the first reason why I’m broke in 2013 and can not buy the new one when I sell it for covering my living cost. Due to my personal experience, as a photographer we should able to buy a new gears after 5 years so it means you gears depreciations will ended within 5 years, if you could afford a new gears or saving with the same amount that you can spend for photography gears than it’s so great.
Let me share some gears that I regularly use on my studio:
- Nikon D810
- Nikon D7100
- Nikon speedlite SB 800
- SMDV wireless trigger
- 3 pcs Sandisk extreme pro Compact Flash 32GB
- 2 pcs of Sandisk extreme pro SDHC 16GB
- 14-24 mm f2.8 Nano lens
- 70-200 mm f2.8 Nano lens
- 21″ iMac
- 13″ Macbook Pro
- 1 Terabyte Transcend external hard drive
- 1 Think tank roller camera bag
Please remind this, to start your new career in photography you don’t need to buy a brand new camera cause using the used item also reliable to begin your photographer journey.
2 – Printing Items
I highly suggest you to print your photos in an album, once it belongs to your artwork’s representative and second one you have a good potential income by receiving an additional album printing. The worse decision for photographer is they not put album on their photo packages just to reduce the cost but what I believe is “There is NO PHOTOGRAPHS till you print it!”
In my photography collection I always put an album in it even I offering my clients to buy some additional album such as parents book, light magazine till one by one printing. When I’m shooting for an overseas pre wedding in Angsana Maldives I got additional income too by charging for the additional photos that will be appeared in the album and it cost $25 per photo.
3 – Travel Expenses
You could charge more for this item or put it together on your wedding photography packages but calculate your travel expenses properly will affected to your pricing for sure. I have few lists about travel expenses that my client should be concern such as:
- Accommodation – I always use Agoda.com to proceed my hotels and resorts no matter where I goes, from a small room in the downtown of Hong Kong till luxury water villa room in crystal clear venue like Maldives.
- Insurance – When I travel for business than I always buy an online travel insurance cause I don’t wanna waste hundred of dollars just to pay regular disease like flu or fever in a local hospital.
- Meals – You can’t live with it and one of the best moment while having wedding photo shoot is I able to enjoy the local culinary and cuisine like what I did while having 11 tasty street food in Hong Kong after portrait shots.
- Local transportation – When you go to a city like Hong Kong than owning an octopus car is really matter cause you can sightseeing around the city using this card or even you rent a car to take you and your couple while having a photoshoot.
- Visa – some countries that I visit allow me to go in with paying few bucks so I need to put this item too on my travel expenses parameters.
4 – Professional Fees
I put a professional fees under my wedding photography packages Microsoft excel (this is just for me and not for my clients), so like my own fee or Nina’s assistant and make up artist daily than I always put it into my packages. Here in my studio Nina will earn $350 to $500 for every session that she did with me, she helps me do the make up – hair do and she also helping me back up my files or taking care my camera bag.
5 – Company Profit
I put this company profit too on my packages parameters and I used to put about 30 to 40 percents from the whole total costs. For example if I have a total cost for $100 than I will put $30 to $40 more just to company profit. I use this money to buy a new gears, pay the electricity or even some other bills due to my working costs and in the end of the year I will share this profit together with my wife, Nina.
Recommendations
Through this post I hope you have a good inspiration about how to calculate your wedding photography packages, you can use my parameters, your friend’s parameters or even any kind of new things that related to your business. Always remind that all those 5 parameters that I mentioned above is works well on my studio but may it doesn’t work at all at your company so always test and make sure these parameters and connected to your business habit so you can figure out which one could be reliable and which one not.
If you want to learn a bit more about how to retouch wedding photos than I will welcoming you to my Photoshop Action class.
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