Worth - Why Great Photographers Get $600 Clients

Episode 80 — Worth

Photographers love telling each other to “know your worth.”

Okay. What’s mine?

One client trusts you with a production worth tens of thousands of dollars. Another pays you a few hundred bucks and tells you that you didn’t do a very good job.

Same photographer. Same experience. Same eye.

In this episode, I’m trying to figure out what those numbers actually mean. We talk about day rates, lowball inquiries, why better photography isn’t always more valuable to the person buying it, and what happens when we take economic information from the market and turn it into a judgment about our work—or ourselves.

Because maybe the estimate tells us something useful about the business.

But I’m not sure our worth has any business being on it.

Featured clip: Moneyball — used in Act Three as we get into how markets assign value, what they measure, and what they sometimes miss.

Handshake music: Instrumental version of “Take On Me” — a small nod to entering the 80s.

Episode artwork: Photograph by César Rincón.

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