----- Original Message ----- From: "David J Brooks" Subject: Pets in your home, photos and fee
> My wife works in a Pet Valu food store, and takes in my meager photos > of our cats and friends dogs as part of their monthly > specials and to help in adding extra photo work my way. > > I have heard a lot of good comments from these photos, and some of > their customers have new dogs and cats > and have inquired if i would be available to do a shoot. > > Of course i am, they just have to get dates organized etc, but i;'m at > odds for rates. > > Just recently in the Toronto Star newspaper, they had a 1/2 page > article on a couple of pet photographers scattered around Canada, > Toronto, Vancouver and another city i forget. > These people were charging upwards of $1400 for the sitting and CD. > One was a very experienced person, the other two just getting in to > it. > > I have no intention of charging these rate, but i feel a shoot at a > place both owner and animal are comfortabel with, own home, local park > etc would be best. Try some posed shots, follow the animal around and > grab the animal doing its thing candids. > > Not sure if i explained that well, but hopefully YKWIM. > > Travel would be minimal, we are still a small town, but i feel it > would be appropriate for my experience, and sense of fair play, that > a rate of $50-60 for an hour shoot, and put a CD together add another > $50-60 for time, PS work, maybe a bit more for a musical slideshow > etc.. > > Am i in the ball park out am i way out of line to start off I don't differentiate between dogs, cats, and people as far as portrait work goes. $60.00 per hour for time, whether it be shooting or post processing is reasonable. If you are supplying your own backdrops, make sure you have a cleaning clause in your contract. You may be able to get away with mopping dog piss off your muslin and then taking it to a posrtait session for people, but I guarantee that if you put another dog on it ever, you will not get any pictures of the dog doing anything other than sniffing the spot that was messed on. Cat effluent is even worse. Depending on the breed of dog, you will find that customer expectations are very different. The owner of a gun dog will probably want a very different style of picture than the owner of a toy breed. As an example, my dogs, as handsome as they are, look far more impressive in any picture in this series: http://users.accesscomm.ca/wrobb/beachday/beach_fun.html than they do in this: http://users.accesscomm.ca/wrobb/fellas/portraits/jnb2938.html. Getting a dog to chase something is a great way to get action pictures, even if all they are chasing is their boss. However, yer basic Chihuahua owner is more likely to want something like this: http://users.accesscomm.ca/wrobb/temp/chi3287.jpg Good luck William Robb -- PDML Pentax-Discuss Mail List [email protected] http://pdml.net/mailman/listinfo/pdml_pdml.net to UNSUBSCRIBE from the PDML, please visit the link directly above and follow the directions.
