Quote Originally Posted by Richard Lane


I think Brendan is on the right track. $150-$200 sounds fair, you should make them aware that they are not just paying you for the Photo, but for your time as well...; taking the photo, post-processing, editing and cropping.


Jumping on that bandwagon, consider travel time, travel costs, vehicle costs, equipment investment, equipment insurance, disk space, costs for offsite backups of your disk space, computer hardware and software investment, power and cooling costs for your computing hardware, spare equipment (if any), loads of AA batteries (and likely chargers) for your flash.


One tiny datapoint: a typical home PC draws 250W with peripherals. At $0.06/kwhr, you're talking a penny and a half per hour, or $10.80 per month. Rough estimates for cooling, and assuming you don't have an efficient datacenter in your home office, you're looking at another $10.80 or perhaps $13.50 to cool that PC, so nearly $25/month. If you replace that PC with a screamer for editing purposes, you not only have a higher power cost, but you could have $3600 in hardware costs and that'd be $150/month over a two-year span. You'd better sell at least two photos!