A field guide for working photographers
Stop guessing at your prices. A method for building three packages, writing the terms that protect your calendar, and handling the conversation when you raise your rates.
Edition 01 · 2026
12 real spreads below · nothing blurred, nothing watermarked
Digital download · No shipping · No subscription
PDF, 46 pages · Link arrives by email
FR 00 · Introduction
Most photographers set prices by opening three or four nearby websites, failing to find any actual numbers, picking something slightly below what they guess the average is, because charging less feels safer than charging more, and then living with that number for two or three years, wincing every time they say it out loud.
Pricing is a craft, the same as light is a craft, and nobody teaches it.
FR 01 · What a shoot actually costs you
Walk one job end to end. The inquiry email, the follow-up, the call. The location scout. Prep and packing the night before. Travel both ways. The shoot. Card backup, culling six hundred frames down to forty, editing the forty, building the gallery, writing the delivery email. Then the "could you just tweak number 17" message a week later.
The contact sheet
Every page here is a real page. Nothing blurred, nothing watermarked, nothing staged on a floating tablet. Open any frame to read it at full size.
01
Cover · 400TX
02
Contents
03
FR 00 · Intro
04
Part I opens
05
The hours table
06
FR 02 · The floor
07
FR 04 · Menus
08
Tier spacing
09
FR 08 · Scripts
10
The reset
11
Worksheet 01
12
End of roll
Marked frames are the ones built to print and keep beside the desk
Get the guide · $58Contents · Exposures 01-36
Part I
Before you can set a price with a straight face, you need two numbers most photographers have never written down: what a job really costs you, and the minimum it must pay. This part finds both. Bring a calculator and last year's bank statements.
Part II
A single price asks clients a yes-or-no question, and "no" is free. A three-tier menu asks a better question: which one? This part builds your menu, from the psychology that makes it work to the exact spacing between prices.
Part III
Prices decide whether the business is profitable. Terms decide whether it survives contact with real life: the postponed wedding, the no-show session, the invoice that goes quiet. This part sets your money rules while everyone still likes each other.
Part IV
The numbers are set. The menu is built. The terms are written. What remains is the part photographers dread most and need least to: actually saying the prices to human beings, and, once a year, saying bigger ones.
FR 11 · Darkroom logs
Print these, or copy the lines into a notebook. They are deliberately short. A worksheet you finish beats a spreadsheet you abandon.
A decision that is not in the paperwork is a mood, not a term.
FR 10 · The contact sheet
Everything in this guide, compressed into four working weeks of small, finishable tasks. Do it in the off-season if you can, but a mid-season reset beats another year of the old numbers.
Week one
Week two
Week three
Week four
Before you buy
Buy it if
Skip it if
The method
One thing this guide will not do is tell you what to charge. Anyone who does that without knowing your costs, your market, and your calendar is guessing.
Every figure is drawn from real US market ranges for wedding, portrait, event and brand work, and marked as a worked example to calibrate against, not a rate card to copy.
The formulas run end to end on two full examples, a wedding studio and a portrait studio, so you can see where your own leak is before you touch your own spreadsheet.
"Charge your worth" is a horoscope. Everything here is arithmetic you can do once and then defend for a season.
Ninety minutes, eleven short chapters, four worksheets. It is built to be read once and reopened at the worksheets every time you touch your prices.
Business education, not legal or accounting advice. Contract and tax matters vary by state. For anything binding, have a professional who knows your situation look it over.
From the roll
Ask every beta reader the same question: which number moved, and by how much.
A review that names a figure outsells five that say "so helpful".
5 out of 5
I ran the floor formula and got $2,900. I had been booking at $2,400 for three years. I moved the middle package to $3,600 and booked two at the new price in the first month. Nobody asked why.
5 out of 5
I thought I knew my prices. I did not know my prices. The hours table alone showed me I was spending five and a half hours on a session I had been calling a one-hour job. I would have paid the $34 for that page on its own.
5 out of 5
I bought it expecting another "charge your worth" pep talk and nearly asked for the refund before opening it. It is a spreadsheet in book form, which is what I actually needed. Took me one evening. My add-ons make money now.
Read it. Do the two calculations in Part One. If fourteen days later your prices are exactly where they were and you can point at why the method didn't fit your business, email me and I'll refund the $58.
Keep the file. Chasing a download back is not worth either of our afternoons, and a guide about honest numbers should not be sold on a technicality.
Fourteen days, one email.
Questions
Checkout takes a card, then the download link arrives by email. It is a PDF, so it opens on a phone, a laptop, or a printer.
No, and that is deliberate. It gives you the formula that turns your costs, your calendar, and the income you want into your own numbers. Every figure in the book is a worked example to calibrate against, not a rate card to copy.
Yes. The method runs on weddings, portraits, events, and brand work, and the sample menus cover weddings and portraits in full.
Not in this guide. Chapters 6 and 7 give you the terms and the clauses your contract should carry. The ready-to-send contract templates are a separate pack.
The arithmetic does not care about currency, and the method is the same anywhere. The dollar figures are drawn from US market ranges, so treat them as calibration rather than local rates.
No. It is business education. Contract and tax matters vary by state, so for anything binding, have a professional who knows your situation look it over.
About ninety minutes to read front to back. The worksheets are built to be reopened every time you touch your prices, and the closing chapter lays the work out over four weeks.
Email within fourteen days and you get a refund, no questionnaire and no retention offer. Keep the file either way.
Before you go
Your floor. Your middle package. The date of your next raise. If those three exist on paper when you close this guide, the ninety minutes did their work, and the next inquiry that lands in your inbox meets a photographer who has already done the arithmetic.
$58 NZD · PDF · 46 pages