We charge by the project, not by the hour. We don’t publish rate sheets because each project is unique and gets a custom price quote. The exception is real estate photography — you can see our price guide for that service here.
Before we begin a project, we work with you to discover your needs and define the scope of your project. Then we quote a price for producing the agreed-upon results. That way, you know, up front, what your project will cost.
The main factor in determining the cost of a project is the amount of time we expect to spend on it — time preparing for the project, time shooting the photos, and time processing the images. Depending on the project, there may be numerous other factors to consider as well, but time is usually the big one. It’s our responsibility to get that time estimate right before we give you a quote. Once quoted, the price doesn’t change because it ended up taking somewhat longer than expected. (If that happens, we consider it a learning experience and try to do a better job of estimating future projects.)
The quoted price remains fixed as long as the scope of the project remains the same. However, projects can, and often do, change between initial planning and the final implementation, so our pricing must be able to adapt.
The quoted price is tied to a defined scope of work. If you change the scope of the project, the price changes accordingly. Examples of a scope change for a product photography project: changing the number or kind of products to be shot, requiring a different background for each individual product when the quote was for shooting all products on the same background, separating the products to be shot into batches when the quote was for shooting them all at the same time, and so on. You get the idea. Sometimes, a small change can be absorbed with no impact on the price, but any significant change will change the quoted price. We’ll always inform you of the impact your scope change will have on the price and get your approval before proceeding.
Most projects are quoted at one fixed price for the entire project, but we occasionally do quotes with built-in flexibility when we know in advance that it will be needed. For example, we might quote a base price for X number of products, and a price-per-piece for each additional similar product up to a maximum of Y total products.