10 Things Key West Photographers Consider When Pricing Their Work

If you’re doing your research for a Key West photographer, you may have started to get an idea of pricing and may be wondering what goes into the price. What, after all, makes one photographer more expensive than another, and what makes photography in one particular city or region more expensive than in others? Well I hope to answer this for you and make the process of planning your photography budget even easier. Here are 9 things that photographers must look at when determining their rates.

1) Cost of Living

For a photographer in a destination market like Key West, the cost of living is a huge factor in determining pricing. Photographers are personal brands. Their work is based on they themselves being physically present to provide the service, so their personal living expenses must get covered by the work they do.

Consider for a moment the fact that the median price of a home in Key West is $799,000 (the average is $565,000)

and it’s nothing to pay $3000 to $3500 for a modest 2 bedroom apartment (don’t believe me? See for yourself), whether your photographer owns their own home or is paying rent, you’ve already got a solid $36,000-$46,000 a year going toward just having a roof over one’s head.

Add to that the extra cost of groceries, fuel, energy, home goods, building materials, and daily life supplies that must factor in an extra 8 hour (round trip) truck ride from the nearest metropolitan city, and before a photographer has even pulled up the shutters on her studio in the morning, she’s paying bank to be available for you for the one day you need her. (No, they don’t fly us in from the mainland every morning….the vendors who will be at your wedding or help you with your family portrait DO in fact live here year round).

If you love a destination enough to celebrate your wedding there, then you must also love the people who’s lives there cover the infrastructure and provide the services to make your trip there even possible.

2) General Business Overhead

These are the costs that any business has whether they provide their service or not. Every business pays some sort of overhead, and a photographer pays this whether she picks up her camera or not.

They stay the same (for the most part) throughout the year, and do not fluctuate with the ebb and flow of seasonality, so even if the photographer has a slow month, she still has to make sure these costs are covered. These are things like:

studio or office rent
utilities (het hem…see point #1 above)
merchant account maintenance fees
staff or employee costs
parking permits, city licenses, county licenses
office and cell phone bills
internet access
insurance

Do all photographers have every single one of these expenses? No, but they probably should! Do you really want to work with a photographer who isn’t covered in the event of something going wrong? No? Then, they need insurance. Do you want to be able to call and email your photographer whenever you want? Then, they need to pay for a phone and internet.

Short Answer: If you want to work with a professional who is insured, licensed, and will still be around next year when it’s time to order photos, then they must account for the cost to stay open and provide the amenities you expect from a full time professional.

3) Risk!

This point is specifically about weddings and why they tend to cost more than other types of photography. No one talks about this one because it’s uncomfortable, but of all the fields of photography one can go into, weddings (and especially destination weddings) come with the most risk. “What on earth could ever make my beautiful wedding so risky!?” you might ask?

Besides the obvious “once-in-a-lifetime event” aspect which makes it (unlike other types of sessions) unable to be reshot if something goes awry (photographer gets injured and can’t be there; camera glitches and erases the memory card, etc), there are two additional factors people don’t often think about that make it risky.

First, it is a genre that exists completely based on the emotions of two people

Two people fall in love, they want to get married, they hire a photographer. I know it’s not fun to think about, but the truth is that couples sometimes do break up before the wedding, thus making a photographer’s income reliant on the emotional connections of others (if that’s not the definition of risk, I don’t know what is!).
Conversely, I’ve never in 19 years had a family call me and say “we need to cancel our beach portraits because our family split up”, or a business owner call me and say “the shoot is off because my partner and I aren’t getting along anymore”.
I can hear you now…. “But we are definitely not breaking up.” That’s not really the point. The risk is factored on a macro level. Just like how your car insurance does’t return your money if you don’t get in an accident, the rates are based on the risk being spread across every couple a photographer comes in contact with. And just like how insurance rates vary for different locations and use cases, the rates for destination-based photographers are going to subsequently be slightly higher than those you’ll find if you get married in a small town back home.

Second, weddings are much more subject to the whims of weather, economy, and the overall state of the country and the world

In Key West, we know all too well the pain of losing our entire season due to a hurricane. With regard to the economy, I’m thinking back to the 2008 crash specifically, but any similar national emergency can cause people to cancel. Where other genres can easily be rescheduled around these things, jobs can be split up into smaller chunks and done over a period of time to stretch out the expense, and other contingencies made, weddings - again to go back to their “once in a lifetime-ed-ness” - are much more difficult to reschedule in such a way.

So like any line of work, the greater the risk, the higher the pay. If you’re an electrician, you probably deserve more to fix power lines than to install a residential light switch. If you’re an investor, you can put money into an interest-bearing savings account, but if you agree to lend it to your cousin to get his startup off the ground, that’s a greater risk so you deserve more in return.

The photographer’s time, talent, and energy are the resource that she has to invest…she can choose any line of work she wants….if she chooses weddings, it is going to require a slightly higher rate to offset the risk.

4) Equipment

Of all the creative services one could offer, photography has the highest startup and ongoing equipment costs. A graphic designer can buy a computer, a tablet, some software, and call it a day. A calligrapher needs some pens and paper. A web designer needs dual monitors and a keyboard. Photographers equipment lists, however, go on….and on….and on. And I say that as a photographer who is not particularly much of a gear hog…I buy what I need only, and that’s it. But I find it interesting that many people tend to forget that the very thing that allows to make the images, does go into our pricing.

Just to give you a rough idea of a very basic yet professional setup…I say “basic” in the sense that this would be a bare bones kit to do the work adequately as a professional and not leave clients wanting for something more.

$3500 - (1) Full Frame DSLR Camera Body
$1800 - (1) Standard DSLR Camera Body
$ 400 - (8) proprietary rechargeable camera batteries
$ 300 - (1) high quality unbreakable camera harness
$2200 - (1) Standard “workhorse” lens (ie, 24-70)
$2000 - (1) Long “telephoto” lens (ie, 70-200)
$1600 - (1) Wide angle lens (ie, 16-35)
$1200 - (1) Portrait / prime lens (ie, 50mm)
$1200 - (2) portable “speedlight” flashes (ie, 600EX)

$ 200 - (3) flash tranceivers to control the light off camera (ie, Godox)

$ 300 - (32) high-capacity rechargeable AA batteries (ie, Powerex)
$ 400 - (1) high-powered battery powered strobe (ie, AD200PRO)
$ 70 - (1) extra backup proprietary strobe battery
$ 900 - (3) high-power studio flashes (ie, B1600’s)
$ 350 - misc. light stands, brackets, and clamps
$ 500 - misc. modifiers, reflectors, cords, adapters, etc.
$ 600 - bags, backpacks, pelican cases, and satchels to carry everything
$ 400 - misc. supports (tripod, monopod, brackets) to hold everything

Low End: $18,000 … being replaced in rotation every 3-5 years

And beyond the initial cost of all of this, there is the cost to maintain it. With the exception of the supports, bags, and modifiers, all the rest has to be either serviced annually (lenses, flashes), replaced about every 2 years (batteries), or upgraded every 3 to 4 years (cameras).

For a destination photographer in Key West, you’ve got the added variable of salt, moisture, and sand, which accelerates the rate of replacement at often alarming speeds. The remote location also means the added cost of shipping, because we do not have a camera store or repair shop on the island.

And remember, this was for a very “no-frills” setup. MOST photographers own much more than the minimum, most incorporate tools like iPads and Apple TV’s to enhance their experience with their client, and additional backups (for their backups!).

If your photographer is a true working professional, then her stuff is not sitting on a shelf looking pretty. It’s out there in the elements, getting beat to death, and she’s going to have to account for a constant revolving door of equipment costs, whether for routine maintenance, small fixes (a blown bulb, for example), or complete replacement (a flash that finds its untimely demise at the bottom of the ocean…don’t ask).

Short answer: You expect your wedding photographer to be using professional gear and tools that allow them to capture those creative images, and to have backups in case of malfunction, so that investment in their gear must be covered by the rates they charge.

5) Technology

While this sort of ties into “Equipment”, I put it in a separate category, because SOOOO many clients overlook it, or aren’t aware of how much software and computer equipment goes into getting them their images. Getting the photos into the camera is only about 1/4 of the work. Everything else happens on a screen, on a server, and in a piece of software.

So these costs are for things like:

Post-Processing Computer Station - this is not your consumer-grade dell desktop from Office Max. Photographers need a ton of processing power, and those faster processors, extra RAM, dedicated graphics cards, and more reliable and faster-running solid state drives are not cheap.

A photographer can expect to pay upwards of $2500 to $3500 for a good iMac or Mac Pro production station, and this generally gets upgraded about every 4-5 years.

Backup / Additional Laptop or secondary Station - remember the point about backups above? Many photographers also work remotely when they’re on assignment or traveling, so they have to have a laptop that allows them to edit on the go as well. Estimate $1500 to $2000 for a quality Macbook Pro. Again, expect a replacement about every 5 years.
Media Server and External Hard Drive(s)(s)(s)(s)(s)….yes, photos take up a lot of space, and the longer a photographer is in business, the more space they need to purchase, power, have room to keep, maintain, and….what’s that?….did you say backup again?….yup….it allllll has to get backed up as well!

A decent server will run about $1500, the drives that go in it having to be swapped out about every 2 to 3 years at roughly $60-$100 each (mine holds 5 drives total).

External drives for storing past jobs long term range $120-$200 each with varying capacity levels. My stack of drives has reached now upwards of about $2500 to $3000 in total over the years.

SD Cards / CF Cards / Camera Media - these are the little chips that go into the camera and are where all the images are recorded to while the photographer is taking your pictures (sort of like film…but not). While they can be re-used and last a long time, what people forget is that they provide a very necessary but very expensive original source that has to sit idyl while other jobs are in work.

A good photographer will have enough media to cycle through dozens of jobs without ever having to format her cards until the client has the finished product.

Factor a busy studio shooting 100 jobs a year, each job taking about 2 months to deliver, that’s about 16 jobs in work at any given time, each requiring an average of 2 to 3 cards per job, that means that at any given moment, the photographer will have 35-40 cards out of rotation.
At $20 to $50 per card, that’s an average of $1110 in media that is sitting unused at any given moment, and of course additional cards available for use, adding up to easily $1500 to $2000 in SD Cards for a busy working professional photographer.

I could go into more detail, but to give you a quick overview of the other technology expenses photographers have to contend with to stay in business, they include:

website hosting and domain renewals (~$20-$40/mo)
online gallery hosting ($300-$400/yr)
cloud based backup storage space (~$100/mo)
Adobe software subscriptions (~$30/mo)
Microsoft software subscriptions (~$15/mo)

accounting software (~$20/mo)
studio management system subscriptions (~$30/mo)
pro level high capacity file sharing services like DropBox (~$30/mo)
slideshow software and hosting (~$20/mo)
album design software (~$180 per year)

That’s $11,000 in hardware (~$2200 annually, replacing every 5 years), and about $4,000 in annual software subscriptions

Some of these are necessary (Photoshop, Lightroom), some are for convenience (DropBox), some could technically be skipped but make the job easier and faster (slideshow and album software), some are things you see (Online Galleries), and some are things you don’t (Cloud Backups), but all of them represent the general list of services that a photographer will require to provide his or her services.

6) Marketing

A business can’t stay open if it doesn’t not get its name out there into the world.

If you found your photographer by a Google search, on a Facebook post, in an Instagram feed, in a magazine, or on a wedding website directory, then you were part of that marketing budget.

Many studios have annual marketing contracts with things like WeddingWire or Zola, they may employ an online marketing strategy through social media or Google ads, and/or advertise in local bridal publication and wedding shows.

Some studios spend more and some spend very little, but no matter what avenues they take, the photographer has to account for marketing costs, otherwise you won’t be able to find them.

This also covers things like branding materials:

business cards
'a professionally designed website
beautifully crafted welcome kits and referral cards
timeline builders and checklists

That stuff does not design itself. The photographer either has to purchase software to help them do it themselves, or they have to hire a designer. Oh yeah….then print them and have them ready and waiting for when you come in to see them in person.

This is one area that can fluctuate wildly between studios…some have whole advertising campaigns, some barely do a boosted Facebook post every now and then. But on average, figure about $200 a month for an online wedding listing, website updates, and social media posts, and roughly $1000 a year in limited print ads and/or promotional events like trade shows.

7) Professional Network

To the #3 point above, you might say “But I found my photographer through a planner”, or “A friend referred me”. To that I have two points:

First - just because some clients come from referrals does not mean that a photographer can ignore the cost of marketing in other ways. Would you? No way.

Planners retire, venues get closed, vendors cycle through new up and coming favorites who grace the scene every few years, and especially in a transient town like Key West, people you may have worked with solidly for a couple years suddenly up and decide to move “back home”. For a photographer to put all her trust in one marketing source (referral or otherwise) is asking for trouble.

So, a photographer must still pay for marketing even if they have a strong network.

Second - that network also represents a “cost” as well. Those relationships take years to build, and come as a result not only of professionalism and consistency, but also from the time, energy, and tangible costs to maintain contact with other vendors at networking events, over coffee, lunch, dinner, through participation in professional associations…all of which is obviously very enjoyable, but it does also costs money.

Short Answer: Would you put your trust in someone halfway across the country who no one else you’ve hired has ever heard of or worked with? Exxxaaactly. So, the cost of building and maintaining a professional network is critical and also must therefore go into a photographer’s pricing.

8) Availability / Volume

Karrie Porter shooting a beach wedding in Key West

Here is where we leave the area of physical products and services representing a cost to the business, and go into something that is a little bit more subjective, which is the concept of supply and demand, and the idea that a photographer’s time they can be shooting is limited. Unlike businesses where there are multiple employees to spread the workload, a photographer generally IS the product.

You are buying THEM: their time, their energy, their brain power, their experience, their creativity, and their COMMITMENT to your date. They can’t switch shifts with someone if they don’t feel good or don’t feel like working that day. Not only that, but weddings are a LOOOOT of work. It’s the most physically demanding and time-consuming of all photography genres, so by sheer quantum mechanics, it requires volume control.

Karrie Porter shooting among the sea grape bushes at Fort Zachary Taylor State Park

For a photographer to make it long term (which, you want them to do, right?), they positively MUST limit their availability to a specific number of shoots/weddings/clients per year. They need time to service each client sufficiently, but also need to leave time for themselves. After all, do you really want to work with a photographer who is so ragged from exhaustion that they don’t show up 100% on your day? Heck no.

Every photographer has their own limit, but in my experience,

most photographers can only shoot a max of about 25 to 40 weddings a year while also maintaining quality work and good customer service

(less if they shoot other services like portraits, more if they only focus on weddings)

That’s it? Yep….that’s it. There are 52 weekends in a year. Shooting 25 weddings means that you’re covering an event every 2 weeks. Remember it takes about 8 weeks of work to edit and deliver, so that’s a really busy studio.

Now if you’re thinking “But I’ve heard of photographers who shoot 100 weddings a year”. That certainly exists, but generally these more budget-friendly photographers tend to take more work because they have to (not because they want to….think about it, if you were at a point in your career that your services were so sought out that you could cut your clients in half and still be profitable…wouldn’t you?) Yes.

A photographer doing 100 weddings a year ends up getting burned out; they overcommit, underdeliver, are tired, defensive, frustrated, behind schedule, and usually hang up their cameras. Or, like me (because I was once that photographer), they join the ranks of sustainable studios and align their pricing and volume with a number that can be handled year in, year out, and still enjoy it.

Short Version: Photographers have to be on point when they show up, so they can’t book themselves to the point of burn out, and they have to allot for production time This means their billable hours must be spread over a very limited number of available dates.

9) Experience

I forget the exact saying, but there’s a phrase that goes something like “Wow, she did that in 5 minutes!” and the response goes “Yeah, it only took me 10 years to get that good”.

The same could be said for professional photographers. The more experienced they get, they not only add to their creativity and talents with a camera, but it also means they can work fast, under pressure, in the rain, with everyone in chaos, and still get magazine-worthy images AND with a smile on their face. Your wedding day is not the time to wonder if your photographer can handle the unexpected.

That investment of time and effort, blood sweat and tears, and money on training, classes, workshops, seminars, and the cost of making mistakes over decades, is something that gets accounted for in the final price tag.

Short Answer: A Photographer with years of experience is going to be able to handle anything and can deliver no matter what. That tenure comes with a cost that is reflected in their hourly rate

10) Investments, Safety Nets, and Joy (aka “Salary”)

I hesitate to simply list this section as “salary”, (1) because the cost of living in #1 above is “technically” also what gets covered by a “salary”, but I wanted to make the clear point that the cost of living in a particular region significantly drives what salary a photographer must take home, and (2) because I feel like the natural reaction could easily be “well, just take a lower salary and you can therefore reduce your price”. So, instead, I decided to list what a salary makes possible for the photographer, to make it more real. No matter what you call it, though, the point is the same: You can’t just add up your expenses and hope you have enough left to work toward the future. The work has to be priced so that it can cover these items as well…reasonable things like:

saving for a rainy day
investment in the future
personal activities/vacations
kids’ college funds
retirement (wait…photographers want to retire someday?…Yes….Yes, we very much do)
and to keep a buffer handy for the inevitable seasonality of an industry that follows the ebb and flow of the economy, weather, and tourism

Photographers who are not charging enough to cover these things usually end up in one of a few boats. They look up one day from their overworked stupor (usually after a client has asked for the 5th time in 3 days if their images are ready, and it’s only 3 days after their shoot) and either decide the stress is no longer worth it and they close up shop (let’s hope you got your photos before that happened), or they manage to break even juuuuuust long enough until some disaster happens….an illness, a hurricane (it is the Florida Keys, after all), a lawsuit….and they don’t have the means to ride the storm.

If they haven’t quit by then, then they decide they do want to be around 10 years from now, they price themselves correctly, they join the ranks of photographers who’s prices seem at first to be “significantly higher than the guy down the road”, and then gain the opportunity to educate others about what it really takes to run a thriving photography business.

This part is hard to give a blanket number or percentage, but let’s just say a photographer wants to take a modest vacation once a year ($2500), let’s say they pay $150 a month for a kid’s prepaid college fund ($1800 per year), they are maxing out their Roth IRA ($6000 per year) and putting a little in the stock market, let’s say $200 a month ($2400); then they want to build up 6 months of expenses in savings (that cost of living above…$5500 x 6 = $33,000) and they’re going to give themselves 5 years to save it (so, setting aside $6,600 per year). That’s a very modest $19,300 per year, which we’ll round up to $22,000 to leave a little wiggle room.

Short Answer: If you love a photographer enough that you want to book them, with that - like it or not - comes your support of their plans for their own future, and being okay with the idea that they’ll have something to show for all their hard work.

Conclusion

Factoring all the expenses, budgeting for cost of goods (aka “cost of sales”) which benchmarks say should account for no more than 35%, and leaving in a 10% room for profit at the end of the year, then allocating for experience and professionalism, and spreading those costs over a limited number of available dates per year, AND you realize how many hours of emailing, consultations, prepping, shooting, editing, fulfilling, and follow up goes in behind the scenes, you can see how actually very reasonable a photographer’s rates become.

If you have any questions about this, or you’re a photographer and are trying to nail down your own numbers, leave me a comment or shoot me an email and I’d be happy to help!

Client EducationKarrieOctober 15, 2019pricing, photographer education, package detailsComment

Photography