Fiddlehead Images

Or even more…

This is typical of the prices at professional photographic studios. The first reaction people might have is …WHY? Everybody knows that it only costs between $2 and $5 to get an 8×10 done themselves. The markup seems way too high.

So, why is it so expensive? The answer is found in the way that photographers have traditionally marketed their products. Unlike most service industries they have tried to price the outputs rather than the service.

We would not expect an electrician to give us a bill that looked like this:

Description          Per Unit         Total
Labour:                                  $60.00
2 wall plugs:        $150.00         $300.00
2 wall switches:   $150.00         $300.00

————
Total:                                    $660.00

Everybody knows that you can buy wall plugs and switches for a fraction of that price at any hardware store. It is the labor and experience of the electrician that costs.

Yet photographers often do the opposite. They offer their services for almost nothing and hope that clients will make up the difference by ordering enough prints. This has a number of disadvantages.

• Photographers do not give value to their time. They end us rushing through orders or get overworked. Creativity, quality or health can suffer. Some photographers, even gifted ones, just give up and throw in the towel.
• They end up with print prices that seem exorbitant.
• Clients who buy a lot of prints end up subsidizing those who buy fewer.

Fiddlehead Images will be operating under a different pricing philosophy. We will use ‘packages’ to combine time and print costs. Any additional prints or products can then be bought ‘a la carte’ but with a more reasonable markup to cover the extra time for processing and production. I will give more details in a future post.