I've never posted anything on this forum; I'm an amateur. One of the branches of the not-for-profit organization I'm affiliated with is going to do a fund-raising auction, and I've offered to shoot a portrait, formal or informal, and give a TIFF file on CD to anyone who purchases. The person in charge likes the idea, and is asking if I can give a value estimate. I wonder if anyone would be willing to give me a ballpark notion. If it matters, I'd be using a Canon 5D II with multiple off-camera flashes in soft-boxes and a portable background.
I would not give a TIFF as most labs will not print it. Just making problems for the client. A JPG at 10 quality is all they need.
Portraits go from $25.00 to several hundred depending on the quality of the work, not the camera used or the number of flash units. Are you re-touching and how good are your re-touching skills will also add or subtract from the value. Link to a few samples and someone might have a range to start with.
An ideal auction item would be a portrait session with a framed print. You can certainly also offer a disc with a few image files, but I agree in not providing TIFF files. A quality 10 JPEG is all that a customer would need.
Show the person asking the question one of your portraits and ask him how much he thinks its worth
Given prints are only few bucks and a CD-only deal maybe off-putting to someone not familiar with printing photos, you might want to consider including a print in the package. That way during the auction they could show an example print of your finest work without any confusion over whether or not the print was included in the deal. It will be a bit more work for you, but you'll have better control over the outcome, and with it your reputation.
Since it will probably take several hours to shoot and but since the point of the exercise is charity the higher the value you place on it the higher the winning bid will be. If priced as a $200 value someone might pay $150 and thinking they were getting a bargain, but if priced and sold at $50 the psychology of "the deal" is lost and so it the $100 the charity might otherwise have gotten.
Thanks for the replies, guys. Probably the best one for me is the one about providing a JPEG rather than a TIFF; I wasn't aware that labs don't like to print TIFFs.
The auction is only online. I did provide several example images for them to post. My offer was to provide the files on CD because I have plenty of CDs and they're cheap, and I told them that I'd do this for any number of purchasers, not just one, so prints hadn't even occurred to me. I inquired in a relatively local city and found a range of prices from $75 to upwards of $125 for what I was asking about. I told the representative this, and he listed "retail value" on the auction site as $120.
