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Hey photographer friends! Welcome back to our Photography Blog, Mastering the Wedding Photography Biz with Hunter and Sarah! If you’re NOT using dynamic pricing in your wedding or portrait photography business, but have set your prices in stone and stick to them rigidly, then you might be missing out on great jobs, money, or opportunities. So if you want to learn a bit about how we price our own wedding and portrait photography jobs using our own “intuitive pricing method”, then keep reading!

 

 

Dynamic Pricing: Price for the Jobs You Want

You don’t have to have been in business for years or have a degree in economics to understand this very basic principle: all else equal, people will buy more of a product or service if it’s less expensive. So, generally speaking, if you sell a product at a specific price — let’s say LED TVs for $1,000 each — then you’ll sell some number of that product. Let’s say 50 TVs per month. But if you went back in time and sold the same exact TVs in the same exact town during the same exact month, but for $750 each this time, you would most likely sell more TVs, maybe 100 this time.

 

Now, we aren’t going to talk about maximizing profit or any big-picture concepts like that. We just wanted to really bring home the point that: all else equal, if you lower the price of a good or service, it’s more likely to sell.

 

Duh, of course, that seems obvious. But how you apply that to pricing your own wedding and portrait photography services can actually be pretty new and different. Here’s what we mean by that. In most western cultures, we’re used to prices being an absolute, and largely set in stone. If you go to a grocery store and the price below a box of cereal says $3, you know that you’re going to pay $3, unless it’s on sale or you have a coupon. And that goes for just about every good that we buy. However, as a professional photographer, and especially as a solopreneur, we don’t have to operate that way. We have the freedom and flexability to set our prices however we want, whenever we want.

 

Now, we’re not advocating that you totally make up your prices from scratch or off the top of your head every single time you get an inquiry. That would be infuriating and honestly waste a lot of your own time, and the time of your clients. However, you also don’t need to stick to your standard pricing in every situation and for every client. You’re allowed to have flexibility — again, it’s your business.

 

 

Our Version of Dynamic Pricing: Intuitive Pricing Method

Back in our video about travel fees (HERE), we talked about our “Intuitive Pricing Method” that we use to determine travel fees. Basically, this is our version of what many photographers call “dynamic pricing,” where we ask ourselves how badly we want to shoot that session or at that location, then balance that against the time, energy, and money it will require to get there, and set our travel fee that way. That’s why we might charge a $200 travel fee for one location and no travel fee at all for another location, even though they’re the same distance from our house. Because we want to go to one, and don’t want to go to the other.

 

When we do this, we make sure that, on average, we shoot more frequently at locations we like and less frequently at locations we don’t like. And when we do shoot at the locations we don’t like, we make a bit more money to compensate us for it.

 

But the thing is, we don’t just do this for travel fees, but we can do this for any wedding or portrait session we want! If a couple inquires with us about a wedding that’s at a really awesome location or is on a date we aren’t very likely to book, or even if it’s just a friend and we want to bless them with wedding photography we know we can’t afford, we have the flexability to deviate form our standard pricing whenever we want. Sometimes we’ll even give a discount if we feel like the clients are well-connected, and could be good for the growth of our business!

 

On the other hand, if we get an inquiry for a job that just doesn’t get us excited, or is at a location that we don’t like shooting at, or is for a peak date that we know we’re going to book one way or another, we can stand strong and not budge a single dollar from our standard pricing. At the end of the day, it’s totally up to us.

 

 

ALL Our Best Pricing Advice and Wisdom…

Now, if “dynamic pricing” or our “intuitive pricing method” is all new to you and sounds really exciting — but you’re also nervous or confused about how to actually implement it — then don’t worry. You’re definitely not alone. After leading almost 200 hours of coaching calls and workshops with newer photographers, we know that pricing is one of the most common things that our students stress about.

 

And it kind of makes sense! As we’re sure you know, charging the right price is absolutely essential if you want to run a photography business that’s both profitable and sustainable. But figuring out what to charge for your wedding and portrait photography services or how to structure your pricing can feel overwhelming. We get questions all the time like, “How much should I charge? Should I include travel? What if they want extra hours? What if they ask for a discount?!”

 

And by the way, that “Intuitive Pricing Method” is just a tiny fraction of what we’ve learned — and taught our photography students — about pricing over the years. It took us almost 5 years of trial and error, but in that time we’ve learned that how we price our work as photographers is almost as much of an art as photography itself!

 

That’s why, last fall, we taught a 2-hour workshop called: “Pricing for Wedding and Portrait Photographers — How to Know What to Charge to Get BOOKED!”. The link for the workshop replay is on our Workshop Page, and in it we break down how and why we set our prices the way we do, so that you know exactly how much to charge for your own photography products and services.

 

 

The Importance of Pricing Yourself Correctly

Because here’s the deal: if you’re under-charging for your services, you could be missing out on money every time you book. So the sooner you figure out how to charge what your photography is worth, the sooner you can make more money, feel better about your sessions, and grow your business in a way that feels good to you!

 

And here’s the real magic of a course like this. Let’s say you photograph a portrait session once a week. If you were able to raise your prices by just $50 per session, that would be an extra $2,400 in your pocket at the end of the year, for doing the exact same work you’re already doing. That’s enough to buy a brand-new, high-end mirrorless camera! Or let’s say you photograph one wedding each month. If you could raise your prices by just $500 per wedding, you could make an extra six thousand dollars this year, thanks to this one workshop. And we’ve seen photographers do far more than that! So a one-time investment in yourself and your business for less than $100 should be a no-brainer.

 

 

“Price for the Photogapher You’ll Be, Not the Photographer You Are”

But our “intuitive pricing method” isn’t the only crucial pricing wisdom we teach on in that workshop, and we’re about to give you another peek at an essential part of how we do dynamic pricing, specifically when it comes to wedding photography. Here’s how most wedding photographers price their services. They decide on a starting price or a range of packages. Let’s say $2,000 is their starting price. And so when clients reach out to them, whether their wedding is this month, in six months, or in 18 months, they send them their starting price: $2,000.

 

Then, let’s say six months go by, they book a handful of weddings, so they up their starting price to $2,500. And when someone reaches out about their wedding — no matter the date — now, they’re starting at $2,500 no matter what. But here’s the critical mistake that they’re making. They’re pricing themselves based on the photographer they are not the photography they’re going to be. In other words, it doesn’t matter when a couple is getting married. All that matters is the date that they reached out to the photographer. A couple who is getting married two years from now but reaches out today, gets today’s prices. But a couple who is getting married in 8 months, but reaches out 6 months from now might get a higher starting price.

 

 

Date-Based Pricing

We think that this is backwards, and here’s why: if you’ve shot 20 weddings, then you have the skill, experience, and portfolio of a photographer who has shot 20 weddings. If you shoot 10 more this year, then next year, you’ll have the skill and experience and portfolio of a photographer who’s shot 30 weddings. And we think that’s a big difference. If a year from now you’re going to have another 10 or 20 or 30 weddings under your belt, you’re going to be a better photographer. You’re going to be better at shooting, at posing, at editing, at managing a day, at directing wedding parties, and at reacting to changes in the timeline when the day inevitably goes outside of the plan. So your dynamic pricing should reflect that.

 

That’s why we price our services based on the photographers we’re going to be, not the photographers we are right now. So if two couples reached out to us today, and one was getting married in 6 months and the other in 18 months, they might see two totally different price sheets. The further out you book, the more you’re going to pay, because you’re going to be getting an even better version of us by the time that day rolls around. Again, if that concept seems confusing to you, or you like the idea but wonder how to actually implement dynamic pricing and date-based booking, then you should check our workshop page, and learn all about our Pricing Workshop for photographers!

 

 

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If you’re interested in learning more from us personally, and joining a community of other photographers also striving to grow their businesses, click here to join our Facebook Community, Mastering the Wedding Photography Biz with Hunter and Sarah!