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Pricing and Negotiating for Food Photography

Pricing and negotiating is, every single job is totally different. There is no single job. So what I do is, when somebody calls, I'll extract as much information out of them as I possibly can. I'll actually ask, do they have budget. Nobody's ever given me a budget. I don't even know why I ask anymore. But, and they all, I mean, yeah, their budget's zero dollars, so I'd love to work with you, you know, so. And the next question is, and there is, there actually is a budget, but they just, they wanna know where you're coming in and how you're getting there. But what I'll do first is, I'll actually calculate this, based on what the information, how many shoot days, will I be providing, will there be talent, will I be providing catering for, or craft for how many people, who's coming, who's not coming. I need a representative from the actual brand there to okay images, typically, or at least an art director. Just tons of questions, there's a list of questions that I have that I actually wro...

te down. So every time we got a call, I'd have it on my phone to read off. And eventually, it just goes in your head and you already know exactly the questions you need to read, which is very helpful, because you can't pull that out every time. That was early on, but you need to learn how to, and also gauge the tone of their voice, are they serious. You get the most bizarre phone calls and some really exciting phone calls, so, I mean. I got a call from a producer in LA who wants to do a reality show based on what we do. And it's not really a reality show in the corny, like, it's a legitimate sort of documentary-esque style reality show. And I don't think we're fully on board, but it's, we get bizarre requests like that all the time. And so, there's all kinds of stuff that you can do. You can travel and do cookbooks. Cookbooks are my favorite. And it's still not something I get asked to do because my style is so different. And we're also in a market that doesn't have a lot of publishers. In New York and San Francisco, cookbooks galore. Even still now, because people love to buy cookbooks. And they should because they're awesome and they're heavy. (laughing) That shelf's gonna come down. So, and they inspire you, they see what people do when it's just about the art form. They wanna show off, they want the food to look awesome. So yeah, so I get a, my estimates are basically creative fee, which is the licensing, plus my cost of doing business. So it's my cost of doing business for each day of shoot, you know, it's my cost of doing business, what I need to recover to stay in business, maintain my studio, all the expenses, divided by the number of days I expect to work in a year. And so that's my, that's what I need to make per shoot to stay in business and make no money. And on top of that, I go through the licensing, which can go, there's calculators all over. I kind of use Getty Images sometimes. There's different things you can use to at least get a ballpark figure of what an image might be worth to what they're asking for. Like we want usage for one year in North America for billboards only. So you can look that up. And that'll be at least, that'll be the price that you get for an image that already exists as a stock image. And so you need to charge more, because your image, you're creating a custom image. But generally, the licensing will be within the same range. So you don't wanna totally over-bid yourself. So it's generally in that realm. So you plug that into the creative fee on top of your cost of doing business. That's your creative fee. Then the second line item is styling fees. So that's the cost of the stylist, the cost of the food, the cost of the prop stylist, the cost of anything style-related, makeup art, everything. That all goes into the styling fees. And then so the third thing is, the production cost. Any studio rentals you have to do, if you're off location, the rental, I charge for the gear I use as a small rental fee to maintain my gear because it costs money to maintain. It goes out of date. All that stuff related to the production, catering, just everything, every logistical thing that happens, like when we're doing this class here, there's logistical things involved, there's costs involved with actually producing that. So that's your production costs. And then the last one is post production. So it's anything, hours related to Photoshop work after the fact, hours related to file delivery, cost of hard drives, just the act of getting the file to the, and any subsequent edits you have to make that you have to charge, that are, that they know they're gonna have to do. So you say, we're gonna have potentially three edits, edit stages during this shoot, after the shoot. So you'll return it to us, we'll do an edit, come back to you, you'll re-edit in Photoshop, and then send them back. So all those go to post production. So what you've done is created this really complex estimate in your head, and it's all right, and it's all accurate, and you have it written down that way, but then you put it in the four neat columns that they can wrap their head around and say, how much is this gonna cost to do? Oh, bang, bang, bang, bang. It's not this laundry list of everything that goes on. Because they can get really stuck on small things, like oh, we don't need roll of seamless. We kind of do, but, they don't get hung up on that. If they ask for stuff, I'll provide that. And then especially for bigger shots, shoots, where they have like a cost estimator or somebody on site who's really in charge of making sure nothing is wasted, that's when I really get into detail. But I can do it if they want. But sometimes they just wanna know what it costs to shoot. They don't, but you do need to break it down a little bit. And I'll put the amount of licensing, the licensing that they want on there, all terms and conditions that indicate what the terms are. Those are individual to every photographer, what you need to cover yourself on, so you can look online and find terms and conditions that match and then maybe talk to a lawyer, is this right for my situation, because I have a studio or I don't. And so I'll deliver those. And they will, if it's, and I get back to them really fast. They love that when I do that. If I'm not on set, I am all over it. Even if we have downtime during a set, I will actually quickly get it out. And I've gotten really fast at it, so it's important that you know how much everything and everyone costs so you can just go bang, bang, bang, bang and be done. Because they love getting that response back really fast. And that makes a lot, it shows that you are punctual and prompt. Sometimes you just can't do it, but I've always gotten, whoa, fast delivery. And then the waiting game begins and they tell you if you are awarded the job. And then pre-production, like I talked about earlier, about the phases of a commercial shoot, go into effect. But it's really about marketing properly. You'll get to a point in your career where you're not worried every month about money. And it's not this massive survival, because the economy is doing pretty well. A lot of agencies are still trained from the last dip to be working and doing double duty. That never really recovered in its own sense. So there's still a lot of ad agencies really tight on money and they don't know where to put it. And you can be a, as a photographer, you can problem solve for the agency. You know, let's do cinematographs, those are great for social media, they're extremely effective. But they are, they do have a lot of value, no less than the billboards, though. You need to train them, eventually, to understand that everything on Facebook has the same value because it still gets the same traffic. So there's no difference. But right now, they do have less value, as far as what you can negotiate. Yes. How exactly are you making your estimate? Are you, do you have all this information in a spreadsheet somewhere, and then you copy/paste, or where are you? It's in an Excel spreadsheet. And I can't, I won't provide the template because everybody's so different in the way they approach it. You'd kind of have to look at your own, and you can, A Photo Folio or, a, there's a website that has tons of estimate examples. I think it's found, A Photo Folio is the website, or Rob Haggart. If you look at Rob Haggart's blog, I think it covers tons of estimates that are real, that have all the information blocked, the names, but you can see the, what the estimated, and what they came back with, how the negotiation process went. So there's no better resource for actually looking at real world negotiations. Because they actually show you the final estimate and the original estimate, so what they ended up at. And I can't, there's not enough time to even go into that, but that's a really good resource to look at for negotiating and what really happens when you charge a certain among and what their response is. Is it aphotoeditor.com? A Photo Editor, yeah. Rob Haggart, aphotoeditor.com. But you have to search in the bar, I think, for just pricing. Because I didn't see a subheader. But you cannot, it's a treasure trove of information. And it tends to be, a lot of those, I've found, are a little, sometimes on the high side to begin with and they really come back. There's not as much negotiating that, I don't do a lot of negotiating. I have to guess very accurately whether or not, it's not passive aggressive, but they don't, there's not a back and forth as much because everyone's so busy. So either you kind of get it on the first try and you're in the ballpark, or if you're outside of this realm, they don't even reply. So there's like a bubble that you have to be within and it only comes with practice and experience on your end because my value and where I'm at is different than your value and where you're at and where you could have something so unique that you get these, you get fewer massive jobs that pay really well. And I'm more, because everybody's completely different. There's no one, if you do only packaging, your scenario's totally different, your estimates will look different, your terms and conditions are different. If I'm doing tons of on location work, terms and conditions are probably four pages long. So it's, everyone really is different, but hopefully, especially through reading that blog and what I've given you, you can at least know where to look and how to form, because it does just come with time. You get it after a while. Because when I first started, I'm like, do I really want to, I knew I have the talent to be a food photographer, and I had the background, and it was all coming together, and I'm like, do I really want to do this? There's a lot of stuff that's not related to the photography. It's mostly not photography. So do I really want to do this? And so, because I knew very little. You just chip away at it, just like the marble analogy. And you just get it. Like, one day you're just, my estimate, my estimate came back and they didn't take me, and it wasn't because of the estimate, it was because I just wasn't a good fit. So it can be for various reasons. And it's okay to ask people why wasn't I chosen, or what can I do better. I'm always asking people where they found me, what they read to find me, or, you know, it's okay to have a dialog about that. They're fine with it. It makes you grow every time you have a failure, it's way more valuable than a success. Because a success, you don't know. Maybe they were totally in a pinch and they just had to use you. I've had that happen, and they paid tons of money. And then they come back and they're like, you're expensive, you're way too expensive. And so I go like, yeah, I kind of knew that. So why didn't we have a negotiation? And that just doesn't happen as much anymore. But it still does, you have to be ready to negotiate. And that just comes with practice, too. It's all about practice. It's, there's no, you can read all the books you want, but you just have to have a feel for people and what they're willing to budge, the tone of their voice. That's why the in-person stuff is great and I find the bigger the job and the bigger the agency, the more used they are to negotiate, whereas in-house clients just want to know. And you can kind of, I usually come down, I usually, there's different concessions I will make based on who I'm dealing with. Do I, especially if you're starting out, give them, waive your creative fee for the first day of shooting. Sometimes they want a day rate. So I actually just take the total of the estimate that I've created that's not day rate based, because I don't like day rates, and I just divide that by the number of days we're shooting. There, you have a day rate, there you go. And they're like, oh, okay, that makes more sense, and they're fine with it, and that's the day rate, it's expensive, I mean, it's not your normal day rate, sometimes. But if they demand a day rate, I just divide that by the number of shoot days. That way, it doesn't get to be about the time, it gets to be about the number of images that you're expected to shoot and the value of the license of those images. The actual creating of the images is meaningless, as far as the price. It's all about what they're getting out of it. So don't be afraid, if a big dog comes calling, to charge, even if it feels weird, because they're expecting that out of you. If you charge like $1000, they're gonna be, oh, okay, they're getting started, obviously, they don't know. They're gonna lose some respect and they won't know. So I charge a little higher and say, okay, you're a new client, we'll be happy, we wanna work with you, obviously, so instead of just saying, "Oh, I'll do it for less, "I just want the exposure," all that stuff, which can happen, and I've done, you know, that's okay at the beginning, especially to work for free. I'd rather work for free than work for a little bit because it undermines what you're trying to become.