Pricing your photographs (tip)

18 Feb
2011

This article deals with pricing images that you’ve already captured. The trick which I reveal to you can be successfully tweaked to give you reasonable price ranges for services also.

You’ve taken many photographs and you’ve honed your skills to the point that you think you could sell some.

Now the question is: what price exactly? Overprice your photo, and you will never hear from a buyer again; sell it cheap, and you are losing money.

How to find the right price?

In business terms, you would have to look into demand and supply forces and deduce the market clearing price. But we don’t want to over complicate things here; you certainly don’t need a business degree to sell a photo or two… What we need to do is what businesses have been doing for ages: to look how competition is pricing its products. I’m sure you knew this, but here comes the tricky part; this type of information isn’t freely available…

The Solution is simple!
Next best thing to a photographer’s price list is a stock agency website! (And when I say stock agency, I don’t mean micro stock agency, which is basically a rip-off, a type of slavery for photographers).
I’ve been successfully using: alamy.com
Procedure is easy. Use alamy.com to search for similar photographs, and look up prices based on the usage specified by the person who has inquired about images. Check multiple photos, so you can have a good average.

To make it work as intended, you will need to get following information from your customer: Image use, Details of use, Image size, Print run, Placement etc.

Let’s see it in action: