What is an average salary for an owned photography business?
Posted by brian | Posted in General Photography Help | Posted on 12-05-2009
Tags: average, Business, different types of photography, owned, Photography, photography salary, salary, types of photography
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I’m planning on starting my own photography business with many different types of photography, from sports, landscape, and even portraits. I plan on starting at schools for High School sports and then working my way up eventually. Does anyone know what a yearly salary could be averaged or anywhere close? Thank you so much!
Image taken on 2008-09-24 18:37:17 by publikaccion.es. Image Source. (Used with permission)
If you are self-employed you can pay yourself anything you want.
To establish what you charge for shooting and prints, you will have to do a P&L sheet which includes your fixed and variable costs as well as the cost of capitalizing your business.
If you figure that you will have to generate cashflow that is about 5x what you want in your pocket at the end of the day you can do a rough estimate of your fee schedule
Remember to include replacing your camera body every 18-24 months and your computer(s) every 2 years as well as upgrading your photo software
To pay myself $80,000 a year (before taxes), I have to generate just over $250,000 in cash flow.
I hope you are an expert in all of these categories, because you will never make any money unless you are.
I’m wondering what kind of photos you are going to take for schools? Individual pics of players, and hopefully their parents will buy some? Or just general shots of games? You do realize that most schools have a photography dept. where the kids shoot the pics for the school paper and yearbook? That is how the kids learn.
I don’t mean to burst your bubble, but I hope you have the experience to pull all of this off. If not, I hope you have a day job, and try this in your spare time to begin with. It is a very competitive field, and everyone with a decent camera thinks they can start their own business! But good luck to you! I hope you make it work!