It’s been almost two years since I began my halting migration from film photography to digital. I felt such exuberance a couple of months ago when I discovered I could use my excellent lineup of lenses on this D70, and that I could apply all my old knowledge about shooting a 35mm camera in manual mode on this new equipment. I had been wondering when that accumulated wisdom would pay off and am excited that it just took this old gal a couple of months to figure it out.

Along with the change in format comes a different workflow. That part felt quite comfortable due to my background in web development and desktop publishing. Somehow the cost factor had eluded me until this week when I was going out on a shoot. My client Michele PW (seen at right with one of her three Border Collies, Nicky) asked me how much per image and I realized my old price sheet for photography and other imaging services had become obsolete.

For instance, the old pricing included terms like “fiberbased archival print.” What?! I don’t even have a darkroom anymore.

I did some quick research and found some excellent resources for both calculating appropriate pricing for the digital realm AND making the case for the price you charge.

Most of us equate digital with instant. And everybody and their grandma has a digital camera and can make an image. Even though the images themselves may be captured immediately, the equipment and photographic skill that differentiates a consumer from a pro, and which enables great quality “instant” shots, is expensive, comes with a learning curve, and becomes obsolete as quick as you can wink an eye. Educating your clients about the digital workflow will help them to understand and accept your pricing schemes. Following are two excellent treatments of this subject.

Peter Krogh presents his pricing along with very clear discussions of how digital capture works, what details the professional photographer needs to know about the client’s needs both going into the shoot and in the processing, and the various delivery options of the images collected during a shoot. Review his site here: http://www.peterkrogh.com/Pages/Capabilities/digital.html

Peter’s site references the American Society of Media Photographers, on whose site you will find a number of excellent white papers on such topics as “On Photography Rates,” and “The Universal Photographic Digital Imaging Guidelines.” This particular page is here: http://www.asmp.org/publications/analyses.php.

So, all you digital photogs (self, included), time to study up and make sure that if you’re asking people to pay you for taking photographs for them, we’d all better adhere to professional standards.