Full Transcript for Worth - Why Great Photographers Get $600 Clients

each other to “know your worth.” It’s probably our favorite bumper-sticker slogan. Go on Threads right now. I’m sure some photographer is saying it to somebody else who asked about pricing. Know your worth. Okay. (Pause) What’s mine? And if the answer can apparently change from thirty thousand dollars to a few hundred bucks depending on who’s looking at the photographs… what the hell are we actually supposed to know? (Pause) HANDSHAKE I’m Patrick Fore, and this is The Terrible Creative— where we have honest conversations about creativity, identity, and what it really takes to make things for a living. (Pause) Welcome to Episode 80. (Pause) Go find those stone wash jeans, maybe those hot pink leg warmers and that fluorescent green fanny pack... we are in the 80s. I’m calling this one Worth. (Pause) If you’ve ever attached a price tag to something you created, sent the estimate, and waited in anxiety for a stranger to decide whether you’re a genius or a fraud—this episode is for you. Today, we’re stripping the romance off the bumper-sticker advice. You’re going to learn how to treat pricing as a positioning equation rather than a verdict on your soul. (Pause) If this is your first episode, welcome. Feel free to jump around. They’re in no particular order. My email is always open. Questions, disagreements, thoughts, hate mail… I answer all of it. You’ll find it in the show notes. Alright. Grab a drink. Let’s get into it. ACT ONE So let’s start with the number. If you’ve been around professional photography for any amount of time, eventually another photographer is going to ask you the question. “What’s your day rate?” (Pause) And I always find this question a little uncomfortable... annoying even. Because I know what I’m supposed to say. I’m supposed to have a number. $2,500. $3,500. $5,000. Whatever. And I do, I guess. Technically. I have a creative fee that I generally start from when I’m putting together an estimate. But the truth is, the actual amount I get paid to make photographs is all over the fucking place. And I don’t think I’m particularly abnormal here. Wedding photographers have packages. Family photographers have session fees. Headshot photographers have per-person rates. Commercial photographers have creative fees and day rates and usage and production. We’ve all come up with different ways of answering essentially the same question: How much does it cost to hire me? There’s something comforting about having an answer, you know? Because once I can say, “My creative fee is $3,500,” that number starts to feel like it means something. It feels like I’ve established where I am. (Pause) I’m not the new photographer charging $500 anymore. I’m a $3,500 photographer. Maybe someday I become a $5,000 photographer. Then a $7,500 photographer. You can almost imagine the little progress bar filling up. Except my actual career has never worked like that. You already heard the absurdity at the beginning of this episode. One assignment can live inside a production worth tens of thousands of dollars, and a few weeks later another legitimate company wants what looks, from behind my camera, like basically the same photograph for a thousand bucks. Same photographer. Completely different economics. And I think this is where photographers get themselves into trouble. (Pause) We tend to think about the photograph from the point of view of the person making it. The client is looking at it from the point of view of the person who needs it. Those are two very different places to stand. One photograph might be used in a national advertising campaign. There’s an agency involved. There’s a media buy. The company is putting the thing in front of millions of people and may use it for two years. There could be millions of dollars sitting downstream from what we make. Another client needs six photographs for their website. One goes on the About page. Maybe one goes on LinkedIn. Nobody is buying a billboard. They just need a JPEG by Friday. The experience of pressing the shutter could be nearly identical. The economic circumstances surrounding that shutter press are completely different. The camera has no idea. And neither, frankly, does the photograph. (Pause) There isn’t a little piece of metadata buried inside the RAW file that says: THIS IMAGE: $12,500. Which seems obvious. But I think photographers forget it all the time. I know I do. Because if you have spent years trying to become better at this, you naturally start connecting the quality of your photography to what people are willing to pay you for it. When I wasn’t very good, I worked cheap. Then I got better. My rates went up. Bigger clients started calling. The productions got bigger. The invoices got bigger. So naturally my brain creates a pretty simple equation: A better photographer equals more money. And there is some truth in that. (Pause) Experience matters. Your portfolio matters. Reputation matters. Being able to execute consistently matters. But it clearly can’t be the whole equation. There are photographers who are better than me who charge less than me. There are photographers whose work I don’t particularly understand who charge dramatically more than me. There are photographers making incredible work who can barely make rent, and photographers making work I would never put in my portfolio who are booked six months out. So clearly the market isn’t walking around with some giant photographic quality meter handing everybody the appropriate amount of money. And part of the problem is that the better you get at something, the harder it becomes to see the thing you’re actually selling. I can walk into a room now and pretty quickly figure out where I want somebody to stand. I can look at the available light and know whether I’m going to work with it or fight it. Things that once took me an hour to solve might take three minutes today. So what am I supposed to charge you for? The three minutes? Or everything that happened before those

three minutes became possible? Photography has another weird problem too. A lot of us started doing this because we liked it. When I lived in Washington state, I was an amateur photographer. I walked around with a scratched-up Canon 5D Mark III and 50mm 1.2 taking pictures for absolutely no reason. Nobody hired me. Nobody needed the photographs. Except Instagram, I guess. I bought my own camera. I bought my own lenses. I spent my own money driving somewhere just so I could photograph something. Then eventually somebody comes along and says: “We’d like to give you $5,000 to do that.” And there is still some small part of my brain that goes: Wait. You’re going to give me five thousand dollars to take pictures? Okay. Yeah. Absolutely. I can do that. And if you’re having a slow month, that voice gets even louder. The mortgage is coming. The calendar is empty. The client seems cool. You want the job. You think it could turn into something bigger. Suddenly that very solid number you told another photographer was “your rate” starts getting softer. Maybe I can do $1,500. Maybe I don’t need an assistant. Maybe I’ll handle the retouching myself. And I want to be careful here because I don’t think taking less money automatically means you don’t value yourself. Sometimes taking less money is a completely rational business decision. I’ve done it. I’ll do it again. Sometimes cash today is more valuable than protecting some imaginary number I’ve decided represents my status as a photographer. But sometimes when I’m putting together an estimate, if I’m really honest with myself, I’m not actually asking: What is this assignment worth? I’m asking: How high can I make this number before they say no? Those are not the same question. And underneath that second question is an even worse one. How much can I ask for before this person looks at my portfolio, looks at my estimate, looks at me… ...and decides I’m not worth it? (Pause) That’s the part we don’t talk about nearly as much. Because at that point we’re not pricing photographs anymore. We’re pricing ourselves. ACT TWO So while I’ve been thinking about all of this, a photographer friend of mine texted me. And I have their permission to tell you this story. They had gotten an inquiry from a company. This wasn’t some tiny company nobody had ever heard of. It was an established brand. They had a celebrity involved as one of the founders. And what they wanted was a full-day brand shoot. Six hours. Two or three models. Lifestyle and product photography. Coastal and beach images. A private backyard or patio. Cocktails. Products. Friends. Food. Sunset. They wanted what they described as “a strong library of lifestyle and product images” for social media, paid advertising, their website and email. And they wanted seasonal concepts beyond the beach too. Tailgates. Bonfires. Fall. Harvest. So my friend sends me this and I’m reading through it thinking: Okay. This is a real shoot. By my standards, this wasn’t remotely a $600

assignment. Properly produced, I could imagine that brief getting into the tens of thousands pretty quickly. Then I read their budget. $600. Yep. Not six thousand. Six hundred. They did say they had “some flexibility” and were open to expanding the budget depending on my friend’s rates and what they recommended for the scope. So six hundred wasn’t necessarily the ceiling. But it was the number they chose to start with. Naturally, my friend was frustrated. Why am I getting inquiries like this? Is it my website? Is it my positioning? What am I doing that makes a company like this come to me with six hundred dollars? And before we go any further, you need to understand something about this photographer. They’re good. Really fucking good. (Pause) I would comfortably put this person among the best photographers working in San Diego. Along with myself, obviously. Their work doesn’t look cheap. They have experience. They’ve worked for recognizable clients. They know how to make exactly the kind of photographs this company was asking them to make. Which is why I was confused too. And this is where I think we were both looking at the wrong thing. We were comparing photographers. Their work. My work. Their portfolio. My portfolio. Their experience. My experience. Trying to find some difference between us that could possibly explain twenty times the money. I couldn't find one. When my friend texted me, I had basically just wrapped a lifestyle advertising shoot myself. Products. People. Locations. A real production. My original estimate was around $15,000. We ultimately brought it in at around twelve. So I’m sitting there, fresh off a twelve-thousand-dollar shoot, talking to one of the best photographers I know in San Diego, and they’re showing me an inquiry for six hundred dollars. Twenty times less. And I’m thinking: I’m not twenty times better than this person. I’m not even sure what twenty times better at photography would mean. (Pause) But there was another difference. The clients weren’t necessarily arriving at us the same way. Around seventy percent of my work comes through Google. And even inside my own website, different pages seem to create completely different kinds of conversations. I have a page targeting product photography in San Diego. It works. Right now it’s sending me a roughly $1,300 job photographing two racquetball racquets. Same Patrick. Same website. Same portfolio. Same fucking photographer who just finished a $12,000 production. Different doorway. And I think that’s important. Somebody looking for a photographer for a campaign may be shopping very differently from somebody typing “San Diego product photographer” into Google because they need two racquets photographed. One might be looking for a creative partner. The other might be looking for a service provider. Neither one is wrong. But those two people can land on the exact same photographer and assign dramatically different economic value to what he does. I don’t know if that completely explains what’s happening with my friend. It probably doesn’t. But suddenly the question wasn’t: Why am I worth $12,000 and they’re worth $600? It was: What is happening before either one of us ever sends an estimate? My friend said something else that made the whole thing harder to diagnose. “Usually they don’t tell me their initial budget in the email. I go through with the phone call and send a detailed estimate, then never hear from them again. But I suspect that they are essentially the same type of client.” And I thought: Huh. Maybe the unusual thing about this inquiry wasn’t the $600. Maybe the unusual thing was that they told you. How many times have we gotten an inquiry, had the call, asked all the questions, spent an hour building an estimate, sent over five thousand or eight thousand or twelve thousand dollars… and then nothing? Gone. You sit there wondering if you were too expensive, if you fucked up the call, if they found somebody better. When maybe the person on the other side had six hundred dollars in their head the entire time. Most of the time, we never get to know. And sometimes the reason these budgets stay low is brutally simple. Another client once told my friend, essentially: “We’ve never had trouble finding someone to do it for this price,” “...so we refuse to raise the budget.” (Pause) Well. There it is. Photographers love complaining that clients don’t understand what good photography costs. Sometimes they probably don’t. But sometimes they know exactly what they’ve paid before. If you offer $700 and good photographers keep saying yes, why would you offer $2,000? And photographers contribute to this confusion too. We tell each other our day rate is $5,000. We say we don’t take the camera out for less than two grand. Then there’s nothing on the calendar next Tuesday, somebody offers $1,500, and we take it. I’ve done it. Sometimes I wanted the client. Sometimes I wanted the pictures. Sometimes I needed the money. Six months later, when another photographer asks my rate, I’m probably telling them about the $8,000 day. I’m not telling them about Tuesday. Which means the photographer standing next to me thinks I charge five grand. The client I worked for on Tuesday knows I accepted fifteen hundred. Those are two completely different datasets. So when the next photographer quotes $6,000, the client isn’t necessarily ignorant about photography pricing. They’re remembering what a perfectly competent photographer accepted last time. We help create the market we’re trying to understand. And I don’t mean that as a moral judgment. Maybe the photographer taking $1,500 has lower overhead. Maybe they want the client. Maybe rent is due. Or maybe they’re a fantastic photographer who can give the client exactly what they need for $1,500. And that last possibility is the one I think we really don’t like talking about. Because quality and value are not the same thing. Imagine two photographers make a portrait of the same CEO.

One is substantially better. Better light. Better direction. Better composition. Better retouching. The other makes a perfectly competent picture of Steve. It’s in focus. Steve looks good. It’s usable. The photographer sees the difference. An experienced art director sees the difference. And maybe the marketing manager sees it too. Then they look at the estimates. Photograph A costs $7,500. Photograph B costs $1,500. And the marketing manager says: “Yeah... the first one is better. But this one is good enough.” That’s actually worse. (Pause) Because we’ve spent our careers learning to see the difference, and because the difference is obvious to us, we assume it must be valuable to everybody else. It isn’t. If Steve’s picture is going on an About page that gets a few hundred visitors a month, spending another six thousand dollars because I can make Steve look fifteen percent better might be a terrible business decision. That doesn’t mean my photograph isn’t better. It doesn’t necessarily mean I’m charging too much. It means the difference isn’t valuable enough to that particular buyer. And when somebody chooses the $1,500 photographer over us, what we hear is: “They think that photographer is as good as me.” Maybe what they’re actually saying is: “You’re better. We just don’t need better. (Pause) And if you’ve spent ten or fifteen or twenty years trying to become better at this… that’s a pretty fucking difficult thing to hear. But there’s something more dangerous than that. My friend spent two years looking at the clients coming through their inbox, looking at the budgets attached to those clients, and eventually concluded: Maybe I’m just not very good. The market gave them a number. They turned the number into a judgment about the work. And then they turned the judgment about the work into a judgment about themselves. Maybe the $600 isn’t telling us what my friend is worth. Maybe the $12,000 isn’t telling me what I’m worth either. Maybe they’re telling us something about two completely different transactions. And we’re the ones turning those transactions into a ranking. ACT THREE So let’s go back to that email for a minute. “I didn’t think you had done a great job at all.” Because after everything we’ve talked about, there’s still a problem here. This client didn’t just pay me relatively little money. They also didn’t think the work was good. I got both. Congratulations to me. (Pause) And I think that’s why this particular situation got under my skin more than I expected it to. It’s one thing for somebody to tell you: “We don’t have the budget.” Okay. We’ve established there could be a hundred reasons for that. But this person looked at the actual photographs. The thing I’ve spent years learning how to make. And said: I don’t think you did a great job. That’s harder. Because now we’re not talking about what the photographs cost. We’re talking about whether they’re any fucking good. (Pause) And I could feel myself doing exactly what my friend had

done with those $600 inquiries. I started turning information into identity. The client doesn’t like the photographs. Maybe the photographs aren’t good. If the photographs aren’t good, maybe I failed. If I failed, maybe the service wasn’t worth what I charged. And if I wasn’t worth what I charged on an assignment that was already pretty cheap… well. You can see where this goes. The easiest thing for me to do is build a case for myself. I’ve worked with major companies. I’ve worked with advertising agencies. I’ve worked with creative directors and art directors who spend their careers looking at photography. I’ve had clients spend tens of thousands of dollars on productions and tell me they love the work. So obviously this client is wrong. Except that’s bullshit too. ...then I’m still allowing somebody else to decide whether I’m good. I’ve just selected a jury that’s more likely to agree with me. Why does the creative director who loves my photograph automatically get more authority over my work than the client who hates it? Experience probably means something. But what if the creative director has terrible taste? What if this client noticed something everybody else missed? What if they’re right? I have to leave room for that. There were things about this assignment I could have done better. I didn’t ask enough questions. I made assumptions. There were expectations that clearly weren’t aligned. Those things are real. And if somebody hires me and doesn’t like what I deliver, that matters. It matters a lot. But “I don’t like these photographs” and “these photographs aren’t good” are still different statements. Sometimes a client may even be identifying a legitimate problem they don’t have the photographic vocabulary to explain. That’s information. Useful information. Sometimes painful information. But information. It isn’t a verdict. And praise works exactly the same way. Otherwise this is just some elaborate psychological trick I’m using to dismiss criticism. A creative director telling me I’m brilliant doesn’t make me brilliant. A client paying me $30,000 doesn’t make me a $30,000 photographer. Somebody telling me my photographs aren’t magazine worthy doesn’t suddenly make them unworthy. They’re data points. And freelancers are constantly collecting these things. Great shoot. Apparently I’m good. Client books me again. Even better. Lose an estimate I really wanted. Shit. The photograph I love gets completely ignored. Maybe I’m losing it. Agency calls with a huge campaign. Never mind. I’m back. Then some guy sends me an email telling me I didn’t do a great job at all. Fuck. And somewhere in my brain I’m waiting for the polls to close. I want somebody to count everything up and finally announce: Yes, Patrick. You’re good. You can stop worrying about this now. Except the polls never close. (Pause) There’s another client next week. So maybe the better way to think about all of this is data. One client telling me they don’t like my photographs? I should pay attention. I should look at the work and the communication and ask myself what I could have done differently. If seven out of my next ten clients tell me they don’t like my photographs? Okay. Now I have a fucking problem. That’s a pattern. One estimate rejected because I’m too expensive is a data point. If almost every estimate I send gets rejected because I’m too expensive, I need to figure out what’s happening. The point isn’t to ignore what the market tells you. Quite the opposite. Listen very carefully. Just learn to separate the data from your identity. (Pause) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uoAaeaZxVF8 [BACK TO PATRICK] “Like we’re selling jeans.” That’s what photographers do when a client says $600 is their budget... or an email comes in saying your work isn't “magazine worthy.” We sit in our rooms talking the same old good-body nonsense. We make it about our talent, our eye, our dignity, or whether clients "respect the craft." We treat a pricing issue like an attack on our soul. But Billy Beane didn't care about feelings. He cared about the actual problem. The client offering six hundred bucks doesn't mean photography is dead and you’re a failure. It means there are high-budget buyers and low-budget buyers, and your current system just delivered a low-budget buyer to your inbox. Listen to me carefully... it’s not about your identity, it’s about math. (Pause) And looking back, I think I learned some version of this when I first went freelance. I came into photography late. I had basically zero clients and a portfolio that was somewhere between mediocre and decent, with a disturbing amount of guitars in it. And I had a family and a mortgage in San Diego. So five-hundred-dollar shoots weren’t going to work. But I didn’t sit down one morning and decide: You know what? I’m worth $3,500 a day. I decided I needed to build a business capable of producing $3,500 days. Those are very different things. So I started treating what happened in the business as information. Where were inquiries coming from? What kinds of companies were finding me? What were they searching for? Which pages were producing good jobs? Which ones were producing shit I didn’t want? People in the photography industry told me I was doing some of it wrong. Too many words on my website. Too much messaging. It looked too much like an agency. Art buyers wouldn’t like it. They may have been completely right about the kind of photography business they understood. But my first full year freelance, that business generated more than $124,000. That didn’t make me a $124,000 photographer. It meant I had built a system that captured $124,000 worth of demand. That’s all. (Pause) And really, deciding I was a great photographer because the business made $124,000 would have been the same mistake my friend was making when they wondered if they were a bad photographer because somebody offered them $600. Different number. Same mistake. We were both taking economic information and

turning it into creative identity. So that’s what I would tell my friend. Don’t use those $600 inquiries to decide whether you’re a good photographer. Use them to figure out why you’re getting $600 inquiries. Something is producing that result. Find it. Because “Something in my business is producing low-value inquiries” is a completely different problem from “I’m a low-value photographer.” One gives you something to work on. The other just makes you want to quit. And maybe that’s what I’ve been trying to understand through this entire episode. We use the word worth for too many different things. There’s what it costs me to make the photographs. There’s what those photographs are economically worth to the client. There’s what the market is willing to pay. There’s what I’m willing to accept. And then there’s what I think all of those things say about me. That last one is where we get into trouble. Because the first four can change tomorrow. The client changes. The assignment changes. The market changes. My bank account changes. None of those things are stable enough to carry my identity. And maybe that’s why “know your worth” has always bothered me a little bit. Because I don’t think my worth has any business being on an estimate. RESOLUTION So what do we do with that? I don’t know. I wish I had something cleaner for you. I wish there were a rate card somewhere that told us exactly what we’re supposed to charge, and a panel of qualified judges who could look at our portfolio once a year and tell us whether we’re still good. There isn’t. Instead, we get clients. Budgets. Estimates. Ghosting. Compliments. Criticism. Jobs we can’t believe we landed. Jobs we can’t believe we lost. And every once in a while, an email telling you that you didn’t do a great job at all. That’s the game. (Pause) That small assignment I told you about at the beginning? Taking it was probably a mistake. But I want to be precise about what I mean by that. The mistake wasn’t that accepting a cheap job somehow made me a cheap photographer. The economics didn’t make sense for the problems that came with it. The expectations. The confusion. The risk. The emotional bandwidth. Ultimately, arguing over a few hundred dollars. I learned something. Next time I might walk away. Not because I’m too good for an $800 assignment. Because I have a much better idea now of what kinds of problems I’m willing to take on for $800. And sometimes I’ll still get it wrong. I’ll undercharge again. So will you. You’ll send an estimate that’s too high and lose the job. You’ll send one that’s too low and realize halfway through the shoot that you’ve made a terrible mistake. You’ll take something because the calendar is empty. You’ll get rejected. You’ll get ghosted. You’ll fuck something up. And sometimes you won’t really fuck anything up, but you’ll swallow your pride, knock three hundred bucks off the invoice and move on with your fucking life. That’s part of it. So is watching somebody you think is worse than you land the campaign you wanted. So is watching somebody you know is better than you struggle to get hired. So is having the best month of your career followed by a month where you wonder if your contact form is broken. This is a strange way to make a living. The market isn’t standing there with some objective quality meter making sure everybody gets exactly what they deserve. It never was. And look, the work does matter. The years you spent learning how to see matter. The judgment you developed matters. The experience you carry onto a set matters. That doesn’t mean every client is going to value it. They won’t. Sometimes they’ll see the difference and decide they don’t need it. That’s their decision. You still have to make yours. Pay attention. Learn. Adjust. Get better. Raise the rate when the market tells you there’s room. Take less when there’s a good reason. Walk away when the math doesn’t make sense. Swallow your pride when you need to. And then get up tomorrow and do it again. Because getting rejected is part of the game. Undercharging is part of the game. Making mistakes is part of the game. Occasionally getting paid an amount of money that makes you wonder how the hell you pulled this off is part of the game too. The goal is to keep playing. A $30,000 client can’t tell you what you’re worth. A $600 client can’t either. The client who loves everything you make can’t do it. And neither can the one who tells you that you didn’t do a great job at all. They’re all giving you information. Listen to it. Then keep making the work. Keep building the business. Keep figuring it out. And stay in the game. Stay curious. Stay courageous. And yeah… ...stay terrible.