Our general rate for photography is $230 per shooting hour, per photographer. If you would like more angles and footage, we recommend more than one photographer. That fee includes the cost of capturing the images, editing the images, and storing the images.
Out of that $230 about $100 goes to staffing cost. Our team need time to prepare the required equipment, decide on the proper lenses for the job, shoot the images, edit the images, travel to the shoot location, and upload the images so they can be shared with you.
$25 or so goes to hardware. Photography equipment is extremely expensive and we make sure our team has the best equipment to fit your project.
Another $15 goes to covering our software cost. The Adobe programs we use to edit your content have high monthly fees and we also pay for online file storage through Google.
About $60 from every hour goes to monthly costs such as rent, marketing, accounting, support staff, office equipment, and taxes.
Finally the last $30 or so dollars is for profit and is devoted to planning expansions, saving for internal projects, doing pro-bono work for nonprofits, sponsoring causes,, and trying out new technology.
When you hire us for photography our quote may be more than you expected for the hours we were in your space. That is usually because your project requires our staff to do research or planning ahead of time, rent or purchase unique equipment, or spend increased time editing footage. We will break down these elements in our estimates so you have a comprehensive understanding of how your money is being used.
Creating videos is significantly more time-consuming than photography. We generally charge $2,000 to $4,500 for instructional videos, $3,500 to $5,000 for interview or day in the life videos, and $5,000 to $15,000 for commercials, ads, and other planned or directed videos.
We require that clients have a storyboard or script for video projects, or pay us a consulting fee to create them.
It’s harder to break down where each dollar goes in videos, due to the wide range of cost associated with any given project. Below are percentage calculations of how your payment will be used.
About 15% of the cost of any video goes into planning. In-order to ensure we create content that accomplishes your goal we have to plan everything. This includes lighting, sound, angles, time of day, transitions, location, movement, orientation, and distance.
If you wanted to create a video showing your company’s construction management expertise we would need to brainstorm angles, decide if and where drones could be effective, create procedures to keep our staff and your staff safe on a construction site, and find ways to properly light a space with no windows or electricity. The amount of planning changes depending on the complexity of the video, but every video requires planning.
Another 20% of the cost goes to hardware, software and storage. This includes everything from cameras and lighting equipment to SD cards, portable drives, online storage, and editing software.
Around 10% of the cost goes to overhead, which covers everything from rent and office supplies to support staff.
40% of the cost are staff cost. Video jobs usually take at least two staff people to shoot, and many hours to edit. The editing process is a large portion of our staff cost.
The final 15% of the cost is profit, which allows us to make investments into the future of our company, sponsor things we care about, and experiment with new technology.