Is $12,000 Enough for a $16,000 Job? Your Questions Answered

hey guys uh so i want to put together this uh q a i'm gonna take a look at some of the questions you've been leaving on the videos and uh answer them you know you ask questions i answer them that's a q a that's how it works right hey everyone i'm kevin patrick-robbins this is studio builder and uh i make this channel to help other photographers uh in running and starting their businesses so i've got some questions uh on my phone and i'm gonna read them and put my old man glasses on and take a look at what we have here [Music] here's one from scott tanner scott says great video for multiple clients how much time do you spend on average with each client so this question is on my headshot pricing video how much time do i spend with each person when i'm shooting multiple people depends on how much time i have and how many people there are and their budget if their budget can really only account for a single day i guess i have to try and get everyone in on a single day how many people would i feel comfortable shooting in a day i would say one every five minutes that's about where i'd be comfortable at a max shooting people per day i would definitely like that to be a half of that where i really feel comfortable is about like 10 to 15 minutes per person people take time to warm up and get comfortable in front of the camera and as good as i am talking to people and getting them to loosen up and warm up that takes a couple of minutes to really get to know them find out who they are what they do and get them talking about their work maybe their family and find out what they're excited about loosen them up a bit for uh the photo shoot do you have problems with exporting multiple images from capture one i highlighted all of my picks and it still saves just one image now i'm having to do it one by one any help so what's happening here is you have to select the edit all variants option if you don't have that selected it's not going to process all the variants that you have selected it will only process the primary variant that you have selected carl victor writes the problem for those of us who do the work for a living is losing assignments to those people who do it for free i disagree with this one if you're losing jobs to people who are doing it for free i would i would question one of two things you're targeting the wrong people to photograph or your work is not better than those people who are doing it for free you have to change both of those things your work has to be better than anyone who's offering it for free or you have to target a a better potential client to have them come to you also there are people who are going to be your clients and people who are not going to be your clients and so you have to consider that everybody has their budget and that's fine if you're losing jobs to people who are doing it for free then the person who's going to the people who are doing it for free would not have been willing to pay your prices in the first place so let them go they're not your client love the layman scale i have a question how many shots do you deliver per person and how many do they get for the final images when i'm shooting headshots for a single person and they're hiring me and that's five hundred dollars they're getting three finished retouched images and many proofs uh well over a hundred proofs uh sometimes close to two or three hundred i shoot a lot i'm i'm a heavy shooter i'm heavy on the shutter so i i deliver a lot of images and when i'm photographing groups that then becomes one image per person because typically when you're shooting groups of 20 people 30 people 40 people the company is hiring you to get headshots of everyone and they really only need and want one headshot per person so that's what i deliver matrix photo design writes a quick question do you use contracts with your headshot clients my answer is not only yes but my answer is never ever ever shoot without a contract here's one from 360 aperture how do you display the layman's scale pricing to your customers for them to understand sometimes i don't and i just group it all together and i give them the final price this is typically what i do i will give them the price and i will say this is for up to 13 people and if they want to add more people then i will just add that on later on i will just reinvoice them for the additional people as needed the other way is to a line item and you would just say first person five hundred dollars persons two through five three hundred and fifty dollars each at quantity four then it might be person six through thirteen at two hundred dollars i just will line item it out so that they see if they're removing people they're removing it from the end of the line and not the start of the line i will also state in my estimate that if they want to add additional people it will be 200 per person that's it i wish i had watched this video a month ago may have gotten me a big time gig as i've been pricing my headshot groups at 200 work for six or so but a group of 40 another group of 80 not so much how would you go about pricing something like this if it's a group of forty that's that's an eight thousand dollar shoot that should be at least an eight thousand dollar shoot if they have trouble paying that eight thousand dollars then i would i would suspect that either it's way out of their budget and their budget expectations are unrealistic for you and your work and are maybe more in line with like a photographer of lesser quality if it's 80 people it should be a 16 000 shoot maybe what you're not relaying to them is that that 200 isn't just for the image that 200 is for the usage rights for that image over what type of media um and what time what kind of duration you need to convey what they are getting for that 200 because it's not just you snapping the button for another person now the one thing that i would add to that is use your discretion if they come back to you and they say 16 000 is too much but you still want the job and you think you can do it for twelve thousand dollars and you're like wow that's twelve thousand dollars that's going to pay my mortgage for six months there's no shame in taking a job that's twelve thousand dollars do what suits you and your needs in the moment in which you are bidding on the job can you afford to say no see if you can find out what their budget is and if their budget is uh reasonable to you for the work by all means go ahead and do it if it takes a month then you've earned twelve thousand dollars for that month twelve thousand dollars is great amount of money to make for uh a month's worth of work here's a question from howard macmillan uh he writes what do you think about creating a photography studio in an indoor climate controlled storage unit and he goes on to explain um that he's not talking about a cheap unit but that he's talking about a nice unit um that you would find in a storage facility like an indoor controlled storage facility and the reason he talks about this is because you can get some of those for about 300 per month i think it could work under a couple of conditions uh the first would be that the facility even allows it and the second would be that you're not bringing clients there yeah if you're going to bring clients to a studio find a studio or rent a studio charge it back to the client if you're just using it for your own purposes to build your portfolio it's it's an interesting idea yeah it's an interesting question don't take clients here that's the bottom line if you do it don't bring clients to that space here's another question from matrix photodesign hi kevin is there a guild or calculator i think it means guide or calculator to reference to how to calculate uh usage uh image nuisance and licensing my recommendation is to use software like photo quote which does have conditions for canada and you will notice that when you enter canada uh the usage decreases and also blink bid link bid you used to just be software for licensing and estimating but now it's more much more of a complete crm in which you pay a subscription for it if i were only commercial and not shooting headshots at all and didn't have to have interactions with people and i was working directly with agencies i would probably use blinkbid instead of sprout studio but for getting numbers for usage and licensing your best bets are blinkbid and photo quote and i would lean towards blinkbid eric marcinkowski writes so you're saying i should actually use my website's blog feature for things question mark uh eric is one of my best friends and he knows the answer to this and the answer is yeah obviously do it there's another one from eric he writes do you feel there is value in going back and renaming old jobs files from years past personally i do but this comes with caveat if you have everything in sessions and no catalogs then go into each session individually and rename the images using the naming schema that i laid out in that previous video and if you do it that way you'll be fine if you have sessions then you also have a master catalog then rename the images in the catalog the session will be fine because when you open the session file it will it will see the files and the folders it doesn't use a database it references the files directly in the folders that are created for that session so the session will be fine and the images in the catalog will be fine if you have sessions and then you back those up into a master archive the way i do if i went and renamed the files in the sessions then those referenced images would no longer have connections in the catalog my catalog would be broken so i wouldn't be able to refine those images again i would have to re-import them all again and the old images would just exist as dead links and be able to be unfound on the disk and that just sucks you end up with all these broken images that's not going to work you don't want that don't do it get rid of that if you have anything in catalog rename in a catalog of you only have sessions rename in the sessions if you only use a catalog then just rename using the catalog it's it would be the same process as using the session so catalogs trump sessions in the renaming process of old images and old jobs and a final one from eric and he writes i'm glad you picked my best self-portrait and he is of course referring to this photo right here which i love i think is awesome but uh i don't think that's his best self-portrait now uh because he has since that video came out made this self-portrait prior to cutting off all his hair and i think this is awesome and this is my new favorite so that's what i'm going to be using in the future so um i hope you dig it guy more of a statement from christy bolton and this is on the video in which i was explaining why i was quitting wedding photography i actually have my last wedding coming up in about two weeks next tuesday i'm shooting the engagement session for it with a horse and a baby that should be interesting and fun but christy writes uh this was such a breath of fresh air thank you and i love that you're an improviser too improv teaches us how failure is okay and not really failing i hope everything goes well with your shift i know i'll be subscribing to see what you do next thank you very much christy it has been pretty great i still know i know a number of wedding photographers who during the pandemic shut down the wedding side of their business and pivoted to other things my friend eva has gone heavily into food photography with recipe development my friend katie has really blown up her boudoir photography business unless there's some dramatic change i don't see myself moving back to weddings anytime soon we'll see how i feel after i shoot this wedding in a couple of weeks but uh for the most part i think it's done i'm pretty sure it's done i'm okay with that and i'm i'm pretty happy with that i want to want to focus much more on my advertising and editorial work i'm subletting a studio for a month starting tomorrow that is going to be great a lot of development in there there's a big event with graffiti artists happening here locally and some rappers and i'm gonna be involved with shooting a lot of that as well and so i'm pretty excited for what the next month has for me and for my portfolio um and really fits with like who i am as a person and a photographer my my sense of style my aesthetic my personal taste in in music as well thanks that's it for me everyone thanks for watching i really appreciate it if you have any other questions leave them in the comments below or leave them on the comments of other videos i'll try to get to as many as i can but i'm gonna tell you now i'm not gonna be successful at getting back to everyone or responding to every question or comment if you enjoyed this video please hit like subscribe turn on the notifications but one of the best things that you can do is just watch another one of my videos youtube likes it when you watch uh many videos on a channel at the same time and yeah there's always some interesting stuff that you can go back and take a look at so i appreciate it that's everything for today thank you so much for watching take care