For the purposes of comparison, a lawyer earns around $15.28 per hour.
A photo editor earns around $11.00 per hour.
Illustrators, cameramen, and graphic designers make $13.00 to $15.00 per hour.
Lawyers, engineers, and technicians make $15.00 to $19.00 per hour.
Innovators and dreamers earn around $19.00 to $19.99 per hour.
What does a photographer get paid an hour? That depends on many factors listed in this article. The type of photograph and production required does play a role in pricing. It’s also more common today for photographers to consider your website traffic in their estimate.
I recommend before you hire a photographer on price, take a look at his portfolio, to see if the work that he creates is right for your needs. This rule is true at all levels of photography. It’s also worth noting that a great landscape photographer may not be the best choice for your wedding, or that a food photographer may not produce exactly what you want for your portrait. That is, knowing how to work a camera doesn’t mean that the photographer understands how to create what you desire. Once you narrow down the portfolios of the photographers you like, then make price a consideration.
One of the hardest parts of being a photographer is determining how much to charge for your work. If you work from a reasonable starting point, it will not be as difficult as you think. The key is to have a written schedule of prices from which to work, for each and every proposal. This way, you don’t have to re-invent the wheel each time you are called on provide a proposal. It’s not always easy, especially when you face new types of photographic opportunities, but over time, repetition will make this process much smoother, quicker, and easier.
The photography industry regularly faces disruption and the business landscape continuously changes, so it’s good to check which of your prices you need to increase, and which products or services call for a lower rate. Hopefully, decreasing your pricing is a rare occurrence. However, sometimes it’s the right thing to do.
It is important to make sure you are covering your expenses, and meeting your income goals.
What does a photographer get paid an hour? Per-image-pricing is based on several assumptions. The photographer assumes that all photography buyers are risk-averse, and would rather pay the fee upfront than risk missing out on a sale. However, many photographers do not understand that increasing your rate of payment does not automatically make you a better buyer. Raising your rate of payment also does not a good buyer make.
Many buyers do not consider your recent work to be original, and would rather pay the buyer a discount because they asked for, rather than the other way around.
An early stage startup costs money. To meet their expenses, startup customers often charge another 50%-100% of their gross income. To cover expenses, they often charge you an additional 20%-30% of their income.
Since you have to be there during the listed hours, I recommend you charge a cover charge to entice customers. Inexperienced photographers often charge nothing for a 40-minute session, while professional photographers often charge $2000-$3000 for a single photograph.
I know that this may seem harsh, since I have to face the same questions regularly. I lose bids to people who charge extortionate rates and high prices for low-quality images.
The truth is that low-quality images do not sell very well, and many customers don’t care much about photography. To my knowledge, there is no industry in which low-quality images do not sell.
I get asked this question all the time, “How much should photographers charge per image?”
The short answer is that it depends on many factors listed in my book, How Much You Should Know…. I’m just going to list a few of the things you can do to reduce your cost of doing business (CODB), while still earning a living as a photographer:
Know your customer.
