You've probably heard this advice at some point in your photography career: Charge what you're worth.

It sounds empowering. There's just one problem. What exactly are you worth, and how are we calculating that?

Your photography prices aren't a measurement of your value as a human being. They aren't even a particularly useful measurement of your talent as a photographer.

They're numbers, and those numbers have a job to do.

Your prices need to cover the cost of running your business, compensate you for your time, provide the income you need, leave room for profit and reinvestment, and allow the business to continue operating next month, next year, and hopefully well beyond that.

If you're still working through the bigger picture of turning equine photography into a business, start with So You Want to Be An Equine Photographer? What to Know Before You Build the Business.

So I'd like to retire “charge what you're worth” and replace it with something considerably more useful: Charge what your business needs.

Because if the numbers don't work, no amount of believing in your worth is going to fix the math.

Your Prices Are a Business Decision, Not a Measure of Your Worth

Photography pricing gets personal very quickly. We tie our photographs to ourselves, and then we tie our prices to our photographs. Suddenly a client saying, “That's more than I wanted to spend,” doesn't sound like information about her budget. It sounds like a judgment about our talent.

It isn't.

A photographer can create incredible work and have terrible pricing. Another photographer can be earlier in her photography journey and have a much better understanding of her numbers. Charging more doesn't automatically make someone a better photographer, and charging less doesn't make someone less talented.

Your pricing needs to be based on the economics of the business you're trying to operate. That means understanding your expenses, cost of goods, taxes, time, income goals, business capacity, and profit.

It does not mean looking at another photographer's website, seeing that she charges $750, and deciding that $700 sounds about right.

That's not pricing. That's guessing with a calculator nearby.

Your Client Isn't Responsible for Making Sure You're Profitable

One of the ideas in the original version of this article was that clients won't necessarily tell you when you're undercharging. That's still true, but I think there's an important distinction.

Your clients aren't taking advantage of you simply because they pay the price you gave them.

Imagine walking into a store and finding something you want for $25. You take it to the register, and the cashier tells you it'll be $25.

Are you going to respond, “Absolutely not. I've considered your overhead, labor costs, taxes, retirement contributions, and desired profit margin, and I really think you should charge me $47”?

No. You're going to pay the $25.

Your photography clients aren't responsible for determining whether your prices support your business. You are.

Most clients assume you've set your prices intentionally. They don't know how much your insurance costs, what you spend on software, how many hours you work on their photographs after leaving the barn, what your cost of goods is, or how much the business needs to generate for the numbers to work.

That's our job as business owners.

The Session Isn't the Only Time You're Working

This is where photography math gets particularly entertaining.

Let's say you charge $500 for a two-hour photography session. Two hours and $500 means you're obviously making $250 an hour.

Look at you go.

Except that two-hour session probably involves considerably more than two hours of work.

Think about everything that may happen before, during, and after one equine photography session:

• Answering the initial inquiry and having a consultation

• Preparing contracts, invoices, and other booking information

• Helping the client plan clothing, locations, horses, and tack

• Preparing equipment and traveling to the barn

• Arriving early, scouting, and photographing the actual session

• Driving home, downloading files, and backing everything up

• Culling and editing the photographs

• Communicating with the client after the session

• Preparing and conducting an ordering appointment

• Designing artwork and placing product orders

• Inspecting, packaging, and delivering finished products

• Handling the bookkeeping and follow-up

That two-hour session hasn't been two hours for quite some time.

This is one of the easiest mistakes to make when you're new to the business side of photography. You calculate what you're earning based on the time the client sees you working, while a substantial portion of the job happens when the client isn't there.

When you're determining your prices, you need to understand the total amount of time required to serve that client, not simply the time you spend holding the camera.

Revenue Is Not Income

Here's another photography-business trap. A photographer says, “I made $2,000 from that client.”

Maybe.

Or maybe the business collected $2,000 in revenue from that client. Those aren't necessarily the same thing.

If you sold $2,000 but had product costs, payment processing fees, travel expenses, packaging, shipping, and other costs associated with that sale, the entire $2,000 isn't yours.

Then there are all the expenses that aren't attached to one particular client. Your business may be paying for insurance, website hosting, software, accounting, marketing, equipment, professional memberships, education, office expenses, taxes, and all the other tiny recurring charges quietly nibbling away at your bank account every month.

Hello, subscriptions you forgot you had.

Revenue tells you how much money came into the business. It does not tell you how much of that money ultimately became income for you or profit for the business.

Those are very different numbers, and knowing the difference matters when you're setting your photography prices.

Your Photography Business Has to Work Beyond This Month

It's easy to think about pricing in terms of what you need right now. Can this month's sessions cover this month's bills?

That's important, but a sustainable photography business has to think further ahead.

Equipment eventually needs to be repaired or replaced. Software prices increase. Insurance renews. Education and professional development cost money. Marketing costs money. You may want to attend conferences. And eventually, you might even want to retire.

You also cannot photograph clients 52 weeks a year.

You get sick. Clients reschedule. Horses get hurt. Weather happens. You take vacations, attend education, and need days to actually run the business instead of photographing clients.

And sometimes it's February and everyone owns a muddy yak instead of the beautifully groomed horse they'd like photographed.

Your pricing has to support the business through more than the days you're actively standing in a field with a camera. That means thinking about the year as a whole.

How much does the business need to generate? How many clients can you realistically serve? What does an average client need to spend for those numbers to work?

Those questions are considerably more useful than simply asking, “What should I charge for a horse photography session?”

Stop Asking What Everyone Else Charges

I know. You still want to know.

And there's value in understanding your market. You should know what alternatives your potential clients have and where your business fits within that market.

But there's a big difference between market research and copying someone else's price list.

When you look at another photographer's pricing, you don't know her expenses, income goals, cost of goods, client volume, business model, or financial situation. You don't know whether she has employees or a studio payment. You don't know whether she's trying to support herself entirely through photography or photograph three clients a month alongside another career.

You don't know whether she's wildly profitable.

You don't even know whether she did the math.

Another photographer's prices can give you information about the market. They cannot tell you what your prices need to be.

This is also why there isn't one universal answer to how much a new equine photographer should charge.

Low Prices Can Create a Capacity Problem

Let's say you've figured out how much income your photography business needs to generate. Great.

Now there's another question: How many clients can you realistically serve?

Not theoretically. Realistically.

If your pricing requires you to photograph 30 clients every month to hit your financial goals, but you can only serve 10 clients well, you don't have a motivation problem. You have a math problem.

There are only so many sessions you can photograph, images you can edit, ordering appointments you can conduct, and emails you can answer before you begin considering throwing your computer out a window.

Good systems and workflows can increase your capacity, but they can't fix pricing that requires an unrealistic number of clients.

Equine photography adds another layer because we're working around horses, owners, barns, weather, travel, show schedules, daylight, and approximately 4,872 other things that can affect a session.

Trying to compensate for prices that are too low by simply photographing more people can create an unsustainable workload very quickly.

More clients isn't always the answer. Sometimes the numbers themselves need to change.

Pricing Isn't Just About Covering Your Expenses

Breaking even isn't the goal.

If you bring in enough money to cover every business expense and there's nothing left for you, congratulations. You've created yourself a job that doesn't pay you.

Your business needs to compensate you for the work you perform, and ideally, the business itself should also generate profit. Those are not necessarily the same thing.

Profit gives your business room to grow, absorb unexpected expenses, invest in opportunities, and survive when things don't go exactly according to plan.

And things will not always go according to plan.

We're photographers. We work with technology, weather, clients, and, in our case, thousand-pound animals with opinions.

What could possibly go wrong?

So How Much Should an Equine Photographer Charge?

There isn't one number I can give you, and anyone who gives every equine photographer the same number is ignoring how businesses actually work.

Your pricing depends on your business model, expenses, products, market, capacity, income goals, cost of goods, taxes, and the experience you want to provide.

A photographer selling digital-only sessions has a different financial model from a photographer selling finished artwork. A photographer working from home has different expenses from someone maintaining a studio. Someone photographing five clients a month needs different numbers from someone capable of serving twenty.

That's why your pricing has to start with your business, not somebody else's price list.

You need to know what it costs to operate, how much time you're actually spending on each client, how much income the business needs to provide, and how many clients you can realistically serve.

Then you can start building pricing that supports those numbers.

Stop Charging What You're Worth

I understand why photographers say it. The intention is usually good.

Stop undervaluing your work. Stop apologizing for your prices. Stop assuming nobody will pay you.

All fair points.

But I'd still like us to separate personal worth from business pricing.

Your photography prices don't determine your worth. They're numbers, and their job is to support the business you're trying to build.

Know your costs. Know your capacity. Know what you need the business to provide. Understand where the money goes after it comes in.

Then build your pricing from there.

Because the goal isn't simply to stay busy photographing horses.

The goal is to build an equine photography business that actually works.