Most people get involved in photography because they want to create some kind of art. But if you want to make a living as a pro photographer, you must approach photography from a business perspective.
Suppose you own a retail photography studio and want to earn enough to support a middle class lifestyle. The median household income in the U.S. was 50,233 USD in 2007. See this Wikipedia entry on Median Household Income. Let’s call it 50K income per year, before taxes.
Determine Your Required Day Rate
Here is a Cost of Doing Business Calculator from the National Press Photographers Association. You can plug in your expenses and it will calculate how much you must bill per day of shooting.
I plugged in some numbers assuming a 1600 square foot warehouse studio at $1.25 per square foot per month, utilities, insurance, photo and computer equipment, health insurance, etc. The numbers are based on a studio I once operated in Orange County, California at prices I could rent for today. No other employees were included in the calculation, although we normally did have one or two employees. The total annual expenses are $86,600 per year, or $1,665 per week. If there are 100 billable days per year, which means shooting two days per week, the overhead for a day of shooting is $866.00. For an 8-hour day that is $108 dollars per hour billing rate. In round numbers, about $100 per hour. Obviously the overhead depends on individual circumstances so a shooter with a 3000 square foot will need a higher rate. Run your own numbers to determine your required day rate.
Post-Production in the Film Age
Back in the days of film, the lab did all the film processing and printing. All the photographer did was drop off exposed film and pick up proofs, mark up proofs to be printed and place the order. Medium format negatives could be retouched if the head was at least the size of a quarter. Retouching was usually minimal, taking less than a minute to remove a few blemishes, at a cost of about one dollar. (I don’t recall the exact cost. Pro finishing labs had retouchers sitting in a back room somewhere that did nothing all day but retouch portraits at a rate of about 100 per hour.)
Post-Production in the Digital Age
Now everyone shoots digital and we all have Photoshop. We can do all the re-touching we want on our Macintosh workstations. But how much time are photographers spending editing, color-balancing and retouching images? One informal survey showed that photographers regularly would spend 1, 3 or 5 hours or longer per image.
But from the cost of doing business calculator, each hour spent in post adds $100 to the cost of producing that image.
The salient question is, does 3 hours of retouching add $300 of value that a customer is willing to pay for? Unless you are shooting very high-end work for customers with deep pockets, the answer is NO. Most images are not going to earn anywhere near 300 dollars. Certainly not in a retail photography business.
Streamline the Post-Production
The conclusion is you have to streamline your post-production. If you finish 60 pictures in one hour instead of just one picture, that adds only $1.67 to the cost of producing each image and probably adds more than that to the value to the customer.
