Are you a busy photographer?

What should you do if you are busy with shooting schedule while your customers want their pictures to be edited?

Exactly. If you are so loaded with bookings then outsourcing the editing is a great idea.

 

So is raising your prices: for example if you cost your shooting time at X per hour (to include editing time also) and you are so busy that you have no time to edit the shots that you take, then restructure and charge 2X or 3X per hour, if you want to edit all your own work.

 

What type of Photography do you specialize in and where are you located?

 

I expect that the membership generally would be interested in knowing more about someone with so much work pouring in.

 

WW

I think it's incumbent on any professional to alot their time in order to satisfy whatever it is they promised their customer. If you have led your customers to believe their photos will be edited and available within a certain time frame, you should book your time accordingly and not commit to shooting other jobs until you can complete what you've already promised. If you haven't indicated a time frame in which your customers' photos will be ready, and they seem to be getting impatient, then you might consider starting to indicate that time frame when you book their job and fulfill what you've promised them. Your own time management and ability to fulfill your commitments in a timely manner is part of a good business practice.

I promise depending on what the workload is but I always l leave plenty of room. For a wedding I can usually do an edit and give digital proofs in a day or three but never promise in less than a week, usually two. Proof books about the same but I know what they want going in. For other work it usually quite a bit faster.

 

Rick H,

I just started a business, specializing in eyewear photography.

It's seem difficult to find a job.

I just started a business, specializing in eyewear photography.

It's seem difficult to find a job.

I started a business as a guitar photographer. I found little or no paying work. When you specialize, you must make sure there is a real market for your work before you begin.

expect that the membership generally would be interested in knowing more about someone with so much work pouring in.

 

It's not uncommon in real estate photography which is a high volume . . .

 

Yes I agree.

 

It is still not uncommon to outsource Post-production in Wedding Photography, (though less common now than several years ago), especially for those who are existing 'studios' which take on several jobs on the weekend and employ or subcontract the shooting.

 

However, the question to the OP was more general: in a time when long-time Professional Photographers generally tend to note a downturn in intrinsic customer numbers, I think that the membership would be interested in an overview of a business which has a shooting schedule so active, that there is no time for Post-production, even if the OP's business is Real Estate Photography.

WW

Yes. Agree.

 

That's one key difference between Real Estate Photography and (as one example) Wedding Photography: we owned three studios over a period of about 35 years. The second had a Real Estate Photography subsidiary. That subsidiary's workload grew, but the client base reduced as we honed the target toward the high end housing market. We found as a result of that, we were 'attractive' to fewer Real Estate Agents and we ended up mainly servicing only three agencies and we realized a lot of work from them, basically because they too tended to pitch mainly to the high end and thus they were viewed as 'specialized' in that market place - and fewer lower-end sellers were attracted to them.

 

Additionally, those high end properties typically required more images per property and those were for presentation across a multiplicity of marketing platforms - meaning each one shoot and post production required more time than a typical property selling in the lower priced markets.

 

That said, my last Real Estate job was around 2012: the relationship between Real Estate Agents and their Marketing Photography Strategies has changed: well it has here (SYD, AUS). That's why I wrote (in the other thread started by this OP):

"my experience is that Real Estate Photography pricing, for a lot of the market, is very competitive and often driven by Real Estate Agents and not Photographers: this is not the case for High-end Property Sales, this may vary from location to location"

It's unfortunate that the OP has not replied to either of the threads that s/he began.

 

WW