Another how much should i charge question

Hi,
I over heard one of my bosses talking about taking pictures of our conference room to attract new customers. Naturally, I chimed in and said I'd be happy to take some pictures. Some background: my company is really small about 30 people and the pictures will be posted on the internet or printed in a brochure. I took about 30 shots today, using my own equipment.
I have a huge learning curve in photoshop, so it took me about 15 min to fiddle with one picture.
They have requested a CD and a small page of proofs. I am guessing its going to be license free.
I am only an amateur, I upgraded from a simple point shoot before my 30d.
So how much should I charge?
Thank you.

Here's one shot that I took today.
http://www.flickr.com …m.gne?id=309115​517&size=l

Hello,

My advice is to always charge enough to cover your costs plus what you consider to be a fair proffit. The trick is working out what your costs are. You have at least a 30D, one or more lenses, CF cards, a Photoshop CS2 license, and a computer. Your consumable costs include the CD and some printing. You also have transportation costs.

So, $1,300 + $1,500 + $200 + $600 + $1,100 = $6,000 capital costs
plus say $10 in consumables plus $15 for miles driven in your car.

A five year IRS depreciation on your capital costs works out to about $100/month. If you imagine yourself doing an average of one shoot like this per month over a 12 month period, your cost per event is about $125. For this to be worth your time, your profit (salary) should be at least 35% of revenue (according to the latest PPA photography studio study), so given these cost assumptions, you need to charge at least $200 to have a viable business.

Of course, you may decide to replace your camera body more frequently than once every five years, and you probably have other costs as well, such as cell phone charges, business cards, advertising/marketing, web site hosting, etc. You'll want to factor these into your cost calculation and adjust the price accordingly.

As far as licensing goes, I think that most folks will agree that you should draw up a contract that lets you retain the copyright for the images and licenses their use to the business for a specific purpose and perhaps for a limited time period, with an option to renew.

In all of this, I have assumed that you are interested in starting a part-time or perhaps full-time business. It sounds like these photos are for your existing employer, which suggests to me that you'll probably be doing this at a loss.

Still, I think that it's worth the time to figure out what your costs are and how much you would have to charge for jobs like this in order to be profitable. A lot of folks are jumping into the part-time photography business and lifting prices from other photographers's websites without understanding what prices they need to charge to cover their own costs.

What your competition is charging may give you an idea of what prices a particular market will support or about how effecient an operation you have to run in order to succeed in a particular market, but it tells you nothing about how to set your prices so that your own business is profitable.

Hope this helps a little.

oh thank you so much!
i wish we had rep here cause id give you a lot!

How much did they have budgeted? Do it under budget, but I wouldn't mention price until I found out how pleased they were with the final product.

the thing is there was no budget.