Going Pro, Rants & Raves - Wednesday, January 27, 2010 11:29 - 33 Comments

Pricing Issues: One Big Monster of a Problem

A day or two ago a firestorm of sorts broke out on the interwebs on pricing. It got heady and angry and although I initially made a post on one of the players in this dramas posts here, I subsequently found that I had stumbled on to something that was just getting going.

You can see how it unfolded here. Be sure to read the comments, as that is all part of the context of the argument. Mr. Bourne’s post is linked here.

This issue on price, undercutting, ‘ruining’ the business all gets so dicey and tricky in the crazy light of the real world, I thought I would throw out some of my opinions… and I do have some opinions. (And if you disagree, I will be totally fine with it, not call you names or deride you in any way. I am not the end all of photographic knowledge, just a guy with an opinion.)

So here are a few subjects that keep coming up on forums and blogs all over the net.

1. Undercutting is wrecking the business.
Let me be clear. I think that undercutting is a problem. It demeans the business, it demeans the photographer doing the undercutting, and it demeans the client. There is no win. What professional photographers do is valuable. It demands years of work to do well, and it provides a unique and very special product. But the term ‘undercutting’ means we have to be apples-to-apples. And that is where I think a lot of these arguments come off the rails.

Let’s look at the $500 wedding scenario with a bit more of a realistic set of parameters. I think that there some situations where a set of variables must be known, compared and weighed. A $500 wedding in my little area of Phoenix is laughably inexpensive for most of the folks living and working here. Upper middle class area, lots of Saabs and Volvos and Tahoes. Nice folks and quite diverse. Average wedding shooter in this area: $3000 – $5000. Average. So where would a $500 shooter fit into this wedding market? And do you really think that a bride in this demo wants a $500 shooter for her wedding?

A little area north of me is a community with a demographic that puts $1200 weddings at the upper echelon of wedding photography. I have no desire for the people in that neighborhood to get bad wedding photography, or worse… get no photographs of their wedding at all. They are hard working people at the lower end of the scale and they don’t have that much discretionary income. They don’t drive Hummers and Mercedes, nor do they do open-bar weddings with $4K cakes at the Phoenician. A wedding with a budget of $3000 could be a place where a $500 wedding shoot makes sense. Not for a wedding shooter who has a different demographic for a clientele, but I don’t have any problem with people of modest means getting their weddings photographed. Do you?

12 miles north of that little area, $8000 wedding photography shoots are norm. And there a $500 wedding shooter would be terribly stupid. The market can bear, and work with pricing at that higher level. If someone in that demo wants to hire a photographer at the $500 rate, they are either playing the photographer, have no concern about what the images look like (or what their friends say – and believe me that is a big concern for a lot of brides in that demo) or have some other agenda. None of those clients are ones I want to work with, how about you?

I think that making a well researched investigation into the venue, expenditures and budget of the couple is easily handled int the pre-wedding meeting. If they are spending a lot of money, you would be a fool to do the photography for a cut rate. If they are spending money of other stuff, they can afford to pay for great photography. However, there are times and clients who fall below the budgets we would like to see. Here is my take on it. If the bride and groom have rented a big, fancy hotel, spent a couple of hundred on a cake, got themselves a DJ, open bar and some rubber chicken dinners, then they can take that $500 fee and stuff it. If you are a $500 wedding shooter and that is your market, you are still crazy to take a gig where you are making 3 times less than the DJ, ya know. Pride in your work and your value counts for something.

And while I am saying that there may be a place for lower end wedding work ($500 is way, way lower end) I am sure as hell NOT advocating anyone do cut rate work. I don’t think anyone in this business should do any less than excellent work. I am simply saying that there are issues beyond simply the black and white issue of undercutting. Apples to oranges in many cases… and we end up yelling PAST each other. And if you are a photographer who is doing really great work, and shooting far under what YOU are worth, then that sucks for you, and your clients. If you are a moderate priced shooter and are being killed by the lower end shooters, you need to look within. What are you doing or not doing that your clients cannot see the difference between your work and someone who has far less value identification?

Commercial photographers are a little different. There are a lot of challenges to world of commercial shooters… ad budgets are down, magazines are folding, micro-friggin-shit-stock is evident in some regional and even national magazines. But I don’t believe the Conde Naste folks are pouring over Flickr and Craigslist looking for a shooter for the next issue of Vogue… and neither are their advertisers and their ad agencies. They aren’t. Really, they aren’t.

And the same thing with the better ad agencies and design studios and corporate communications clients out there. In my town and your town. There are plenty of artistic, creative people who are looking for quality, creative, professional shooters who know all the ins and outs of producing the kind of work that they need. Quality work. Work with vision.

2. “Craigslist photographers” are killing the business.
Here I have to disagree. Not my business. I don’t work for people who look for cheap photography. Do you? And if you do, then you are working in the client area you work in.
(more after the jump)

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