On the QT | The Official Newsletter of GWA February-March 2016 | Page 22

PHOTOGRAPHY

MARK TURNER

Establishing Value

PHOTO S COUR TE SY K ARE N CHAPMAN , LE JAR DI NE TDE SI GN S.COM

Above: Tender and hardy
succulents nestle together in
a rustic bowl. Black mondo
grass (Ophiopogon planiscapus
‘Nigrescens’) adds an unexpected contemporary touch. Design
by Stacie Crooks. Above right:
A remarkably drought tolerant,
low maintenance design for
a seaside home on Whidbey
Island, WA. Design by Berger
Partnership.

Late last year, Karen Chapman, a fellow GWA
member from the Seattle area, asked me to
help her put a price on photos a local landscaper
wanted to license for his use. It turns out that
figuring out the right price for a small local business is more difficult and nuanced than you’d
think. At least it is for me, and I think that’s the
case for many of you as well.
Small-business owners, as a class, often have no
concept of copyright or the value of different
uses. Everyone, today, seems to expect to share
images online, often without credit to the photographer. For a lot of people, payment seems to be
an afterthought at best.

Although I can’t tell you what to charge, I’d like to
help you think through the process of arriving at a
fair price.

FIGURING
THE PRICE

In all that we do in business, we have to consider our profit at the end of the day. If we’re not
making money, we can’t afford to stay in business.
Otherwise, photography is just an expensive hobby. Without profit, we can’t pay our bills, take a
vacation, or give back to our community. In short,
profit = income – expenses.

One way to arrive at a price for each photo use is
to determine how much income you need to cover your expenses and profit, estimate how many

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sales you’ll have, and then divide. If you need to
take in $100,000 each year and you estimate 2,000
sales, then each sale only needs to average $50.
But if you only have 200 sales, then each one has
to yield $500.

While simple division is good as a planning tool,
that method of pricing has never worked well
for me in practice. The reason is that it doesn’t
take into consideration the value the use of your
photography brings to your client. Not all uses are
created equal. Let’s look at a few examples from
the publishing world first, because there’s pretty
good acceptance of value-based pricing in that
market.

When I license a photo for a book cover, I can
negotiate for significantly more money than for
the identical photograph published at one-fourth
page or less inside the same title. That’s because
the cover image directly helps to sell the book. It’s
the eye candy that entices someone to pull it off
the shelf at the bookstore. Inside, it may well help
illustrate an important point, but small, interior
photos don’t individually sell books. The same
principal applies to use in advertising. In general,
the bigger and more prominent the photo, the
higher the license fee.

MINIMUM
FEES

One way we establish value for our work is by
setting a minimum fee, the lowest price we’ll