The Day Rate Is the Wrong Question

The first question in most commissioning conversations is the day rate, which is understandable and almost entirely beside the point. The day rate prices an input: a person, present, with equipment, for a number of hours. What the client is actually buying is an output, and the output is not hours. It is the difference between photographs that get used once and photographs that keep working.

Consider what happens to the two kinds of photograph over five years. The campaign image is used for the campaign, then replaced by the next campaign. The editorial record keeps being reached for: the website refresh, the press request, the anniversary, the moment a journalist needs something honest rather than something polished, the day the space is renovated and the photographs become the only evidence of what it was. One of these depreciates like content. The other appreciates like an archive.

The costs that matter are mostly invisible in the rate. The photographer who arrives the evening before and walks the space unpaid, because the commission deserves it. The hours of sequencing and editing where the record actually gets built. The judgement, accumulated across years of looking at rooms, about which frame is the honest one. None of this appears as a line item, and all of it is what separates the photographer you remembered to call from the one you found by searching.

A better first question: what do we want to still have in five years? Answer that, and the rate conversation becomes short, because both sides are pricing the same thing. The cheapest photography is the photography that has to be redone. The most expensive is the record that was never made.