Transparent pricing

Most photography in this country is quoted after a conversation, which means the number depends on what the photographer thinks you will pay. Publishing a starting price for every session removes that, and it is the reason the figures here are lower than they would be if you had to ask: a published price has to be defensible to everyone reading it, not only to the person in front of you.

The starting price covers the photographer’s time on the session, the selection, the colour work, and a private gallery at full resolution with a print release for personal use. The number of edited photographs is stated per service rather than described as "a selection". There is no per-image charge and no retouching sold back to you afterwards.

What moves the price is time and scope rather than anything hidden. A longer session, a second photographer, 24-hour delivery: each is listed as an option and quoted before you book. Travel inside the metro you booked is included, and the suburbs covered from each city are listed on its page so there is nothing to discover later. Where a location charges a permit fee — and in this country a great many do — it is named before you book and appears on the invoice as a pass-through rather than a markup.

Nothing is due to get a quote. If conditions make a location genuinely unusable, the session moves at no cost. If the photographer cannot attend and no equivalent replacement is available, every payment is refunded in full. Those two sentences are the whole of the guarantee.

The one cost that is not ours and cannot be waived is a location permit. A great many of the best places in this country charge for professional photography, and the fee is set by whoever owns the ground: Piedmont Park in Atlanta charges and the BeltLine beside it does not, every Hawaii state beach requires a permit for a portrait session and not only for a ceremony, and Sedona needs a Forest Service authorisation that the parking pass everybody buys does not provide. Those fees are named before you book and passed through at cost rather than marked up.

Four questions make any photography quote comparable, and they are worth asking of everyone rather than only of us. How many edited photographs, and is there a charge per image after that? What does editing include, and what is billed separately? What may you do with the files — print, post, advertise? And are location fees quoted up front or invoiced afterwards? Every one of those is answered on the service pages above, which is the entire reason the prices are published rather than quoted.