I did a search on the forums & couldn't find what I was looking for.

I'm a student currently, and I was contacted by a school association asking if I could take photos at one of their award events. I am used to pricing sporting events & doing weddings, so the corporate stuff is new to me

I know the shoot will be about 3-4 hours, with 1-1 1/2 hours driving time each way that I plan on charging for. They want me to edit down the photos that I take to the best 25-30, and they would like exclusive rights to those photos.

Also, what books can ya'll recommend that I can get to learn more about pricing events & things like that?

I am currently planning on charging them $60 an hour including driving/shooting/editing time, but I'm not sure about how I would go about pricing the exclusive rights part. I will be giving the potential client tomorrow, so I can get more info on her about usage then.

Thanks!

I might consider breaking your time up into driving and shooting/processing rather than lumping them. To bill the same time for driving as for shooting/processing seems a little unfair (though fairly common). How about charging something like $.60 per mile for driving and at least $100/hour for shooting considering these "exclusive rights". 3-4 hours of shooting is really not that much (in fact, one-third to half of it will be driving!) and so you want to get your money's worth. With gas prices the way they are these days ($3.75 in Washington DC!!) you'll want to get at least $150 for driving, especially if you are going "out of town".

You and your $3.75 for gas. I'm in San Jose where we're at about $4.05 or so.

It'll be about 100 miles round trip driving for me, so by charging $100 an hour shooting time for the couple hours of shooting, plus a separate line for editing costs, which I'm guessing will take me an hour or so to find the best 30 & edit them at $60 an hour. Then they would get the exclusive rights to those photos. Does that sound like a decent proposal?

Do you mean an hour to find the best 30 + editing time @ 60/hr, or an hour to find and edit them, the total being 1 hr at 60/hr? If the latter, then it's about $400 total for the entire event.

If I were doing this event and say it starts at 12 pm I would leave my house at 10:30 in order to get there with enough time to set up, I would shoot until 3:30, get back in my car and get home at maybe 4:30. Say I shot 250 photos at the event (not unreasonable), it would probably take me about 4 hours to go through them, pick out the ones I like and make minor edits to 30 of the best ones. Assuming I skip dinner I'll be done by 9 or 10 pm. That's about 12 hours from start to finish.

If I invoice this event at $400 then I have made about $30/hr including subtracting for gas money. If $30/hr sounds good for you, then go for it. For me, that's not even close to worth it.

Ah, good point. I got myself into my sports mode where I'm shooting jpegs & its quick for me to cull/edit the ones I want.

I've been thinking about this all morning, and I've come down to $100 hour shooting/processing + $.60 mile driving.

I currently have a 4 day a week day job, so this is all extra income for me. I don't want to lowball any other professionals in my area, or lowball myself as well. She did mention that if everything went well they'd put me on their list of photographers to use for future events.

Check your PM