What's my rate?
March 3, 2010 9:51 PM Subscribe
A friend wants me to process 1000 photos and needs it done in a hurry. She wants to know what my rate per pic will be. I have no idea!! Help!
It won't be anything fancy - just essentially crop, correct any glaring faults (like colour), and save it to disk.
I figure it'll take me around 3 minutes of work per photo which is 50 hours of work. At $20/hr, that comes to $1000.
Is a dollar per shot too much? Too little?? I've never charged for this sort of stuff before and I'm a long way from being a professional.
Could someone who's familiar with the business give me some guidance please??
It won't be anything fancy - just essentially crop, correct any glaring faults (like colour), and save it to disk.
I figure it'll take me around 3 minutes of work per photo which is 50 hours of work. At $20/hr, that comes to $1000.
Is a dollar per shot too much? Too little?? I've never charged for this sort of stuff before and I'm a long way from being a professional.
Could someone who's familiar with the business give me some guidance please??
My advice when doing freelance work is to go in higher than you think you're worth and let them talk you down. You never know, they might be okay with your suggestion.
By which I mean, I'd go ahead and suggest $1500, if you're comfortable with that. Especially for a rush job, I don't think a little premium is out of the question. Unless you're completely and utterly out of the range the customer had in mind, they will probably suggest the general area they were thinking of anyway.
posted by gern at 10:21 PM on March 3, 2010 [1 favorite]
By which I mean, I'd go ahead and suggest $1500, if you're comfortable with that. Especially for a rush job, I don't think a little premium is out of the question. Unless you're completely and utterly out of the range the customer had in mind, they will probably suggest the general area they were thinking of anyway.
posted by gern at 10:21 PM on March 3, 2010 [1 favorite]
Best answer: I'd ask for some sample images and then perform the tasks on them (with a stopwatch), make sure the output is acceptable to your friend, and then run the numbers so that you're making $20/hr or whatever you want to make. Even if you have to create the samples yourself, show your friend the raw and finished products and get her OK, just so that you're both absolutely clear on what you're going to be expected to do to each image.
I'd probably also pad by at least 10-15% or so to cover images that may be hard to process or take extra time, and just to compensate for the inevitable slowdown that will occur as you get tired as you're working, plus necessary stretch/bio breaks. But that's up to you.
It probably wouldn't be a bad idea to write up a short Statement of Work and both sign it (the sample 'before' and 'after' images could be included in or attached to this SOW) just so that everyone is 100% on the same page and there aren't any misunderstandings or re-work later. Even though this project might not be much in the scheme of things, it's not a bad habit to get into, and 50 hours of your life is no joke. At minimum you'd want to include what you're going to do ("crop to 4:3, resize to 800px wide, subjective color correction"), what you're going to turn over at the end (i.e. deliverables: 1000 JPEGs? 1000 TIFFs? PSDs? your choice?), when you're going to have it done by, and when and how much you're going to get paid. It could be just a few sentences, plain language, nothing fancy, and you don't need some template or anything.
It's not that you're going to take your friend to court or anything, it's more that the act of writing something like that up together may surprise you with how many issues it forces you to hammer out that you might not have thought of up front, otherwise.
posted by Kadin2048 at 10:28 PM on March 3, 2010 [5 favorites]
I'd probably also pad by at least 10-15% or so to cover images that may be hard to process or take extra time, and just to compensate for the inevitable slowdown that will occur as you get tired as you're working, plus necessary stretch/bio breaks. But that's up to you.
It probably wouldn't be a bad idea to write up a short Statement of Work and both sign it (the sample 'before' and 'after' images could be included in or attached to this SOW) just so that everyone is 100% on the same page and there aren't any misunderstandings or re-work later. Even though this project might not be much in the scheme of things, it's not a bad habit to get into, and 50 hours of your life is no joke. At minimum you'd want to include what you're going to do ("crop to 4:3, resize to 800px wide, subjective color correction"), what you're going to turn over at the end (i.e. deliverables: 1000 JPEGs? 1000 TIFFs? PSDs? your choice?), when you're going to have it done by, and when and how much you're going to get paid. It could be just a few sentences, plain language, nothing fancy, and you don't need some template or anything.
It's not that you're going to take your friend to court or anything, it's more that the act of writing something like that up together may surprise you with how many issues it forces you to hammer out that you might not have thought of up front, otherwise.
posted by Kadin2048 at 10:28 PM on March 3, 2010 [5 favorites]
When I was pricing scanning work it came to between $.30 and $.75 each. I presume these are electronic and don't need scanning, but it should give you some sort of idea about the value.
posted by Joe in Australia at 10:36 PM on March 3, 2010
posted by Joe in Australia at 10:36 PM on March 3, 2010
Best answer: I do this professionally. I start my estimates for color correction at being able to process about 100 pictures an hour, at about $20/hour, and I would add a few hours for cropping, rush, and miscellaneous issues. There are many variables, but $1000 is... well, please memail me if she wants to pay someone that to color correct 1000 pictures :)
Honestly, I would probably not do this in your position, unless you have the time and really enjoy the work. This will take you longer than it should (this is NOT a 50 hour job, I would plan for 16 as a worst-case scenario). A decent hourly rate for you is unfair to your friend, and a fair rate for your friend isn't fair to you.
posted by ruby.aftermath at 10:57 PM on March 3, 2010 [1 favorite]
Honestly, I would probably not do this in your position, unless you have the time and really enjoy the work. This will take you longer than it should (this is NOT a 50 hour job, I would plan for 16 as a worst-case scenario). A decent hourly rate for you is unfair to your friend, and a fair rate for your friend isn't fair to you.
posted by ruby.aftermath at 10:57 PM on March 3, 2010 [1 favorite]
I mean, I'm assuming a lot of things, like her photos are of a reasonably professional quality. The recommendation to avoid it goes, like, quadruple if these are drunken iPhone shots or something.
posted by ruby.aftermath at 11:02 PM on March 3, 2010
posted by ruby.aftermath at 11:02 PM on March 3, 2010
Best answer: Don't bid on a set price for the whole project. Only work for an hourly rate. Agree to do one day of work - eight hours. At the end of the day she sees how far along you are on the project and can determine whether she wants to continue. That way, you can take your time and work at the level of quality you want. If it's not fast enough, she finds someone else.
posted by conrad53 at 11:11 PM on March 3, 2010 [5 favorites]
posted by conrad53 at 11:11 PM on March 3, 2010 [5 favorites]
Like ruby.aftermath, I'm in the industry, and I'll vouch that what she says above is dead on.
A dollar per shot, especially for very basic work, is too much. There are professional post-production companies out there catering to wedding photographers, family photographers, and other high-volume photographers that do this sort of basic work for a flat fee per image. I know of one company (which I won't name because I can't personally vouch for them) that charges $0.32 to $0.44 per image for the most basic processing.
For cropping and other basic edits, if you're doing this in Adobe Camera RAW (or Lightroom, or Aperture), it absolutely shouldn't take more than a minute a picture. 100 per hour, as ruby.aftermath says above, is entirely reasonable for someone who's practiced and comfortable with high volume digital post-production, but it would take you some time to work up to that if you're not already comfortable with at least one of those programs. It would be a waste of your time and your friend's money to do this in Photoshop, this is exactly the sort of job programs like ACR are meant for.
Absolutely charge hourly, as everyone above says, because you can't know until you get going how tricky the images you're dealing with are, how finicky your friend is, how much time you'll waste going back and forth with her, etc.
posted by TayBridge at 1:38 AM on March 4, 2010 [3 favorites]
A dollar per shot, especially for very basic work, is too much. There are professional post-production companies out there catering to wedding photographers, family photographers, and other high-volume photographers that do this sort of basic work for a flat fee per image. I know of one company (which I won't name because I can't personally vouch for them) that charges $0.32 to $0.44 per image for the most basic processing.
For cropping and other basic edits, if you're doing this in Adobe Camera RAW (or Lightroom, or Aperture), it absolutely shouldn't take more than a minute a picture. 100 per hour, as ruby.aftermath says above, is entirely reasonable for someone who's practiced and comfortable with high volume digital post-production, but it would take you some time to work up to that if you're not already comfortable with at least one of those programs. It would be a waste of your time and your friend's money to do this in Photoshop, this is exactly the sort of job programs like ACR are meant for.
Absolutely charge hourly, as everyone above says, because you can't know until you get going how tricky the images you're dealing with are, how finicky your friend is, how much time you'll waste going back and forth with her, etc.
posted by TayBridge at 1:38 AM on March 4, 2010 [3 favorites]
Quote per hour, do 100 photos and review with her. If it's too slow/too expensive, she's able to re-evaluate your work/time/cost.
posted by filmgeek at 4:22 AM on March 4, 2010
posted by filmgeek at 4:22 AM on March 4, 2010
I know very little about photo processing, but I do have often been in the position of being asked to do work at which I am not expert, and which I know from the outset will take me longer than it would take someone who does it all the time. Contrary to what ruby.aftermath and TayBridge argue, market rate is not always the controlling factor.
Some people approach me for various sorts of work because they imagine that the full-time professionals in the relevant field all want to overcharge them due to unreasonable overhead expenses or some sort of cartel. They hope that I will be cheaper. Those are the customers I decline to deal with.
However, some customers actually want to buy convenience, immediacy, trust, or some similar intangible commodity along with the nominal product being traded. They like me because I'm a one-stop shop that can solve a wide variety of problems, or because I'm available on short notice, or because they trust my judgment about how to resolve conflicts that they neither see a way through nor want to think too hard about. These customers are often willing to pay a premium for such intangibles, and that premium is enough to make it worth my time to do the work despite the fact that I'm slower than a pro might be.
posted by jon1270 at 4:41 AM on March 4, 2010 [1 favorite]
Some people approach me for various sorts of work because they imagine that the full-time professionals in the relevant field all want to overcharge them due to unreasonable overhead expenses or some sort of cartel. They hope that I will be cheaper. Those are the customers I decline to deal with.
However, some customers actually want to buy convenience, immediacy, trust, or some similar intangible commodity along with the nominal product being traded. They like me because I'm a one-stop shop that can solve a wide variety of problems, or because I'm available on short notice, or because they trust my judgment about how to resolve conflicts that they neither see a way through nor want to think too hard about. These customers are often willing to pay a premium for such intangibles, and that premium is enough to make it worth my time to do the work despite the fact that I'm slower than a pro might be.
posted by jon1270 at 4:41 AM on March 4, 2010 [1 favorite]
Response by poster: Followup: she never got back to me and appears to have vanished off the map, so I guess that's one more way of resolving the problem.
Despite that, a big THANKYOU to everyone for trying to help. I really appreciate it.
posted by ninazer0 at 5:19 PM on April 3, 2010
Despite that, a big THANKYOU to everyone for trying to help. I really appreciate it.
posted by ninazer0 at 5:19 PM on April 3, 2010
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Now, for this, I know my local photo lab charges $36 per hour (which includes the burning time). Do a little bit of research and find out what the local pros get, and adjust your rates down based on what percentage of competency you think you honestly have, and what level of friend discount you'd give (10%? 20%?). If you were 75% as competent as my local lab, that would be $27 per hour. A 20% discount for a pal, rounded off, would be $22 per hour. At 60 hours of work (because I find that I underestimate how long it will take me to do tasks that I'm not professional at), that's $1320.
But again, make a couple of calls to folks in your neighborhood. And talk with your friend, too. Find out what their budget is.
posted by klangklangston at 10:19 PM on March 3, 2010