I’ve been approached by a golf course who want me to visit on days when the sunrise is favorable and take some shots for them.
I’d quite like this to become a long term thing if I can but I can’t work out how to structure the pricing.
Price per photo used seems most fair but how would others structure it and how much?
Thanks
Mark
Tot up all of your expenses (including a fraction for your equipment), time involved including away from the site and then add on your ‘profit’. What that is depends on you, but certainly don’t undersell yourself.
Yes, this is it.
I run another well established business which I started with zero loans. Started cheap and worked up to a sensible price.
I want to charge enough but not so much to put them off using us again or recommending us.
It’s the age old balancing act but I’m starting with zero experience again.
Thanks for your input.
Factor in the cost for your A2CofC and insurance too
Just looked at converting my coverdrone insurance and it’s peanuts (£120 more) that can’t be right surely?
A2CofC bought already so yup.
You already run a business and know how to treat clients, so you don’t need to be told that your professionalism, service and quality of results is worth the client paying for. Now the rules have changed, you will get loads of bob-a-job merchants vying for jobs, charging next to nothing and very probably giving potential clients a bad impression of the business.
My opinion is that if a customer is not prepared to pay what a job is worth and would rather go with some fly-by-night, then that is not a customer I would personally need. I’m pretty sure that the golf club would not let you go and play a round of golf for 50p.
It certainly feels cheap. I used to do mine on a per flight basis, which worked out to around £5 a time with Flock. They used to be PfCO only but not sure if they have changed.
My view is don’t race to the bottom. Realistically you’ll be there for a while, then editing time etc. I’d be looking for a few hundred for that. I did a repeating job for a client that was simple video work and charged £200 per visit
I have done similar non drone photo work. Pricing depends on how you feel about it and what effort costs you incur from the “job”. I say job with inverted commas as it might be great fun and for a mate etc. It also depends on what they will do with the images and you might want / need to specify if they can be used on their website, or in a magazine, advert and for how long.
It might be worth looking at things like this video / page - What Should You Charge for Your Pro Photography? for an idea.
I guess if I was doing this as a job, I would consider the planning ( working out where to be when on the course, what looks good on google earth, ties up with sun ), travel, the actual doing ( flying, photographing ), going back a few times to get different shots / better shots based upon a previous flight, then the editing time etc.
Having done weddings, I worked on the biases you needed to charge more than grand per ( afternoon / day ) shoot just to make it worth while ( to cover marketing, editing, travel and shooting, kit, insurance etc etc ) as it used to take a week to shoot, edit and print the work.
Of course, if you get to play somewhere cool and have a free range to shoot then thats different, but its worth while finding out what they expect from the relationship ( ie ten great shots for use on web / magazine adverts( so appropriate size / quality / colour etc ).
Shout if you want any more ramblings from me ( or if your Hampshire based you want an extra pair of hands ).
Have fun and good luck with it!
Great, thorough answer. Thankyou.
And that’s a good basis to work your time on. £1000 per day isn’t a lot really taking all the above great advice.
What kills the game for all, is ‘its just a hobby’
This.
I guarantee you’ll hit the “my mate will do it free” scenario at some point
Hah. Given I already have a business that runs me ragged I won’t be doing it for mates rates.
I’ll be doing it for my own enjoyment mostly but it has to cover the loss of income from not being available for my original business as a minimum.
A lot will depend on their expectations also if the’ve used a professional photographer before. As a commercial photographer, (retired now) my first question would be to find out what their budget is. These days, unfortunately the value of the profession has been badly eroded by the market being flooded by poor to average digital ‘wannabe’s’ using the ‘cheap as chips’ scenario. Only you can decide what your bottom line would be. I would be looking at a half day rate of £350 plus £30.00 minimum per purchased shot.
If you are supplying these as digital images find out what they intend to use the images for and supply a suitable file size accordingly. ie. for the web a small file size is all that’s required. If for instance it’s going to be a billboard then a much larger file is needed. So you would charge for the appropriate usage. I would sell it on the advantage to the client of providing the proper file size for the job. If they decide that they want footage, I would price it at a base price of £150.00 including one minute of footage and £75.00 per additional minute.
This is what works for me. However, everything is negotiable, to a point. Hope this helps.
For the record I went with £350 for a morning and 5 images.
Then £50 for each extra image.
Now you just need to do five of those morning jobs per week and you’ll be sorted 
Nope. Never want it to get to that level.
Every now and then is fine.
The existing business is for paying the bills. This is and always will be for enjoyment and a bit of extra bunce.