Photographing products is not something that many photographers relish doing. It is a very tedious and time consuming process, especially when you are working with particularly challenging products like jewellery and glassware. Everything in the studio gets reflected in the product, so working out how to minimise those reflections can take a long time. Clients don’t like it when they don’t know how long something takes and they are paying by the hour.
At the same time as a photographer you don’t want to shoot yourself in the foot by saying that you will charge X for a particular job and then you discover once you are doing the job that there are serious challenges to be overcome, which are going to take you an inordinate amount of time that you hadn’t budgeted for when you drew up your quote. I’ve been in this situation many times.
My first big product photography job I thought I was going to ace (photographing text books), so I charged what I thought was a fair price – a significant amount of money for the time. When it came to doing the photography part of it my planned method of standing the books upright inside a light cube seemed like a good idea at the time, but after about the 20th book (out of 1000-odd!) I realised that not all books like to stand upright. Or keep their covers flush with the pages when they are stood upright. I literally had to sticky tape them closed and then remove the tape in editing. I also discovered after delivering the first batch that “deep etching” wasn’t a simple case of making the background white, it meant removing the background entirely using a process in Photoshop that I had absolutely no clue on. Three months after finishing the shooting I was still deep etching text books and cursing the day I ever agreed to take on that job.
So how do I balance the pain of producing acceptable pack shots and the reward of charging a price that is fair on both myself and my clients? It’s a fair question and one that isn’t always easy to answer.
Over the years I have been trying many different things when it comes to pricing. At the beginning of my journey in this line of work it was standard industry practice to charge a rate per image, so that’s the method I have been following (mostly). But the problem is that this method precludes a lot of small businesses and start-ups who desperately need the images but when you look at the aggregated costs of having a lot of products to photograph it becomes prohibitively expensive for them. For example, currently I am charging a R100 per image base rate for standard head on shots with white backgrounds, so if you need 5 shots for each product to list on Takealot and you have 20 products you will be spending R10,000. Not many start-ups can afford that.
In the past I have also done pricing on a sliding scale where the rate per shot gets cheaper, depending on the number of products / shots sent to me. This gets tricky and to be honest it doesn’t help my cause much because I still have to do the work and as I mentioned at the beginning of this piece, it is very time and labour intensive work. There are only so many hours in a day and the hours are my only inventory. If I was guaranteed to be getting work every day I might well be happy to reduce my rates, but historically I have found that this does not increase the demand for my work, so I simply don’t do it anymore. The rate I charge for product photography is based on the estimated amount of work I get in any given month and what people are prepared to pay for it.
Enter the alternative I have been trying in 2024, pay per session.
In 2023 one of my clients brought me over 100 pharmaceutical products (pill bottles) and we got through these all in just over an hour, for which I billed R1000. He did the product positioning and I did the button pressing and file organising. There was very little editing to be done and the client undertook to do this himself with his Canva subscription. We both left the session very happy and this was the shoot that sparked the idea that timed sessions would actually be much more beneficial in situations where there are a lot of similar products that do not require any setup changes.
Unfortunately many of the product photography jobs I get don’t have homogenous products. There will be different things sent, each of which needs to have a specific setup and it is really hard to estimate time for these jobs because they involve a lot of trial and error. A recent example was a job for a regular client who sent through a bunch of bathroom accessories. Some of these were small items like soap dishes and toothbrush holders, but there were also a lot of bigger items including an entire range of bathroom mirrors. The mirrors were actually not as difficult to photograph as you’d imagine as I have a good method of doing these, but it took us a lot of time to unpack these items from their boxes, clean them up and then repackage them after the shots were done. I hadn’t budgeted for this in my time estimation so I ended up carrying the cost of an extra half day to finish this job. Another lesson learned.
The timed sessions can definitely be favourable to both parties in some circumstances, but the problem I didn’t expect this year was that not every client likes the idea of not knowing what their shoot is going to end up costing them. They’d simply go elsewhere. This is why I have brought back the pay per shot option for those clients who would rather know exactly what they are going to pay to get all the images they need for their products.
I’m looking forward to serving my clients regardless of whichever pricing method they decide to use.
