Pricing

I'm a user of the Black Rapid strap. I was one of their first customer. I bought the original RS1 with the lousy clip that only staid closed with a plastic tubing and the bad connector to the tripod. Eventually I upgraded these weak points (at full price) and have been extremely happy since. Now the strap is starting to fray. Should I buy a brand new one? The Canadian price is around $70 + taxes.

I always hear people gloating about how they bought such and such on eBay and paid a quarter of what I paid.

On 14-May-2012, ShutterStock Inc has filled its IPO to raise $115 million. IPO: Initial Public Offering, the first sale of stock by a company to the public on a stock market. Part of being a public company, it must file on quarterly basis audited financial statements and need to provide guidance on what they expect…

Until now, ShutterStock Inc was a private company and did not have to reveal any of its financial information, of its value, of how it operates its business.

Part of its IPO filing, ShutterStock had to reveal the number of it's customers, its sales, its expenses… and most important: the value of its average sale.

Last week, I received a call from an "old client" but it wasn't the "old client", my contact left about a couple years ago and there's a new person, Brenda. Brenda called to check if I was still available "to do some quick photos." I didn't argue and said yes, so she sent me an email asking for an "accurate estimate of the cost" with some description of the work.

The dictionary definition of an estimate is:

to form an approximate judgment or opinion regarding the worth, amount, size, weight, etc., of

The important words are:

• Judgment
• Opinion
• Approximate

But that's not what Brenda wanted. Brenda wanted a quote with a fixed price and wanted me to stick to that fixed price even when they would change the specifications and what the job entitled.

I'm doing a new website for my commercial photography and was looking for the dos and don't on how to present the pricing. Some people have no explanation, just a “contact me” web form. Of the few web sites that I have seen, 3 web sites had an almost empty web page, with just one word: Pricing or Prices, and nothing else.

But there are some really bad web pages. Or should I say photographers? Here are a couple of these web pages. These are not section of web pages, but the complete web pages minus the actual name and phone number, if it was present.

Yan of http://yanphoto.com wrote a blog post: sick of it, in which she states how hard the life of a photographer is: no business, dead... Her photos are good, so why can't she get any work?

Because like most photographers, she doesn't understand the business of photography. First the facts, then the solutions.

• Photography is booming
• Photography is exploding.