Hey all, I want to begin this with admitting my fault in not starting with an offer. The reason I didn’t send one in is because my customer had already worked with a few different photographers and the project is part of a networking exchange. My bad. So I went there and took pictures for a bit more than two hours. My own expectations of quality make me edit every set of pictures by hand, so no presets. That makes another two hours in editing. Now I’m based in Europe and I calculated my prices based on my cost, my taxes, my expected wage, available hours deducted by holiday and sick time and an overall paid workload of 40% of those hours. That makes me start my prices at 130 per hour of photography and 70 per post processing hour. Of course there is deductions for longer bookings, and networking opportunities etc. Overall I gave my customer the price of a bit more than 300 euros for the job. Sadly my customer wasn’t to happy and very confused as her recent partners oy charged her 100 or got invited for dinner. The customer also wanted to edit the pictures themselves. Again I’m at fault for not following proper procedure here. My questions are the following. Was the price unreasonable? Do you not edit your pictures the way I do and do you only use presets? What would you recommend to do in that situation. Thanks!
Arguably yes. And certainly the client is partially at fault too for not getting on the same page about that beforehand.
But the client would argue that their perception of the business standard would be the lower pricing they got from these other photographers in that circle. And many jurisdictions have laws and judges that tend to side with consumer protection. In California, for example, many businesses are really careful to present the customer with a written quote of pricing, and to get a signature on that before doing anything. Caveat emptor is a thing too, but when it comes to a “they should have known better” situation, often it’s the business that’s primarily on the hook for having the responsibility of knowing better. Otherwise you open things up to predatory situations where a business charges what they want, hoping the client never asks first, and claims the client agreed to whatever their charge was going to be. It’s a lot easier for a court to just require that the business be upfront on pricing, and the business is screwed if they aren’t (an easy, objective, hard line decision); as opposed to having to research and evaluate if whatever surprise pricing was reasonable or not (a subjective decision with a lot of gray area).