Three Ways to Save Money on Aviation Photography Without Getting Cheap Photography
Buying a retail product is easy. You go to a store or online, you find what you want, and you pay the retail price. Simple. But this isn’t necessarily the best way to purchase a commercial product or service. Other factors such as quantity, quality, location, customizations, etc, come into play.
As a commercial photographer, I’m often asked, “Can you send me a rate sheet?” I’m more than happy to but I try to share some tips to help guide a prospective client through the process and not let them pay full retail. Here are three tips I send along in addition to my rate sheet.
Share the Costs
Think about sharing costs with the interior completion company.
This is probably the biggest cost-saver, the easiest to pull off, and it’s almost always the way my architect clients do it. Identify any other parties that could possibly have a need for your aircraft photos such as the interior completion company, owner, broker, etc, and ask them if they’d like to share the cost with you at a discount over going it alone. I’m more than happy to do this calculation for you and send it along with a quote. Although I do add an incremental amount of usage fees for each additional party, the entire invoice is then split (including any other expenses) among each party. In many cases, adding just two additional parties could cut your original investment in half.
Schedule Multiple Days of Shooting
Scheduling more than one aircraft is an efficient use of time and resources.
Although I do my best to keep my travel costs to a minimum, things like hotel and car rentals can get a little pricey when I need to fly to a shoot. But doing two or more consecutive days of shooting will spread that cost over multiple aircraft so it’ll be a much smaller portion of your overall budget. For example, we can do an incredible amount of shooting in three days where the increase in productivity more than offsets the travel costs.
Let’s Shoot More Than Just Your Fleet
Let’s shoot your facilities, headquarters, and more while we’re on-site.
When I said I am a commercial photographer, that means I can do so much more than just aircraft photography. With more than 30 years in the business, I have experience with many types of imaging. So let’s go the extra mile and maximize our time together with architectural images of your headquarters, updated and consistent headshots of your team, images of your MRO, FBO, interior finishing processes, etc. It may also be a good idea to consider replacing old photos from different sources and of varying quality with updated and consistent images to refresh your entire brand.
