First off, I’d like to thank everyone who has called before and said how much they enjoy our a la carte pricing. I get warm fuzzy feelings every time as I have made it a personal goal of mine to work out the pricing schedule. Right now, it isn’t going anywhere.

But, there are some issues with the current pricing plan. A couple of these are obvious, but several of them are less apparent. In no specific order, the following are the big issues.

• “Package Price” (older printed material) or “Second Printing” (newer and web material) prices have been found to be confusing.
• A la carte pricing is nearly always lower per shoot than package pricing. This was in some ways the point, but I need to discuss it further below.
• Many inquiries of the “how much would it be to…?” type come in. 90% of the time you will be receiving a response from me. The vast majority of these do not end with a booking but consume 15-30 minutes of my time working up a package for them.
• There is no readily available path to get a DVD of selected high-resolution images.
• Package pricing is nearly always lower per print, so it is difficult to compare ahead of time the price difference between photographers.
• Packages make it easier to tell a friend about us because a lot of the services can be simply lumped together.
• Many wedding consultants will not list a photographer without a fixed package fee schedule.

To touch quickly on weddings, wedding packages have been in the works for a while now and will be rolled out next year after the exciting changes here have died down. Our schedule is allowing for very few weddings this summer so it made more sense to turn that into a long-term project that will be rolled out this fall. This may remove the a la carte pricing option for all weddings booked next year.

There’s simply no way to get around that a la carte pricing always looks higher per print than the packages. The economy is down right now, we can all see it, we all know it, and we are all looking for the best deal. When I developed our a la carte pricing setup, and yeah, I will take all credit and blame for that one, my feeling was that it would appeal to budget minded people like myself. It was last night when I was ordering some minor products and was almost ready to get 500 for 50 cents each instead of the 4 for $6 that I really needed. That was the wake-up call I needed to look again at bulk package pricing. The issue is one of perceived value, and I had forgotten that there is real value to perceived value.

So, the changes. Right now a la carte pricing is not going away, it may never go away. In the next few weeks we have a print run of marketing materials coming out and these will be updated to include some initial packages and pricing. At the same time the website will be refreshed in the same way. Feedback is welcomed.

The packages are as yet unnamed, I may put my nerd hat on and name them after the periodic table, or I may make names up, or go with silver, gold, marsupial, platinum, or even just I, II, III. At first these are simply going to be based on requests I have gotten on the phone or via e-mail and so have already worked up estimated pricing for. For instance an in-home session with 1 11×14 and 1 8×10 is already $100 since the print credit covers both of those. Yesterday I worked out that a 1 hour newborn session with 1 11×14, 3 8×10, 2 5×7, and 6 4×6 was about $150. I have to differentiate between the in-home pricing and the studio pricing. Right now both are the same, but that is changing soon there may be two separate price lists or there may be package price + surcharge.

All in all I am somewhat saddened that in some ways I see this as an end to my a la carte pricing experiment, but I look forward to working with our clients to bring forth high quality photography at reasonable package prices.