As LEDs are becoming more more popular, more companies are developing new products to meet our industry needs – well at least trying to meet our needs. A popular LED that you will see at this year’s NAB show is Lowel’s Blender LED

The Blender LED has both daylight and tungsten LED, the top 6 are daylights and the bottom 6 are tungsten. Both can be controlled individually by a way of a dimmer on the back.

From what the person that owns this told me is that this LED is 2x the wattage of Litepanel’s Micro light but he didn’t have the exact wattage on it.  The light weighs around 2lbs  so that is 2lbs extra on your camera. You can get the adapter that attaches to this to take Sony L series, Panasonic CGA series and Canon BP series batteries and this has to be mentioned when ordering.

The video I shot below was a quick shoot, sorry for the bad footage but I just wanted to display the capabilities of each LED light. I shot this on the Canon XH A1 at 1/48th at f3.4. The first light is Litepanel’s Micro light, 2nd  is Sima LED and the last one is Lowel’s Blender LED.

Have a look and judge for yourself and if you have any questions pls don’t hesitate to ask and if you have comments then put them in.

For the HD version click here

(Originally posted December 14th at geordansaunders.wordpress.com)

This post was inspired by my good friend while discussing a job he was working on. While chatting about some of the problems (or “opportunities,” right?) he was having, it became obvious that the missing piece was firm timelines and expectations. So, after giving him my advice, I realized that it’s just the kind of thing that belongs on this blog.

Quoting for a job is a lot more than just throwing a price in the air. The three parts to a proper, complete and professional quote – the pricing breakdown, the timeline, and the expectations.

Pricing Breakdown

When pricing a job, you need to take into account three things: your incurred costs, your fixed costs and your labour. Your incurred costs are things you may have to rent/buy/borrow/steal to achieve the job. For example, you may need to rent a second camera for a shoot, which will cost you $200; as well, you may need to buy more paper for your portable printer for $75. So we now know that it will cost you $275 to shoot this event. This will clearly be recouped in your payment – you can either be very generous and only charge the client your cost, or you can mark it up. For example, you may run on a 25% markup, meaning you will bill the client $275 x 1.25, or $343.75. In my case, I would likely round that down to $340. Most of us bill for travel time as well – this year my travel rate is $0.50/km.

Now you have to consider your fixed costs. In relation to us as photographers, this usually comes into play as item value depreciation. After all, every time you use your gear, it’s worth less on the resale market than before. As such, we build this depreciation into our invoices. The easiest way of figuring this out is the following: determine how many working hours you plan to do in a year. For example, if you plan on doing two gigs per month at an average of 6 hours per gig, that’s 144 hours of use a year. Now you need to set yearly depreciation. In my case, I use 40% a year for this figure. Now, what is your gear currently worth? Let’s say you have $5,000 worth of equipment. Now, determine what 40% of the current value is - in this case, it’s 5000 x 0.4 = $2000. Now, divide $2000 by 144 working hours (2000/144) for a final value of $13.88 – I would just use $13.

Last, consider labour cost. This is what you want to walk away with at the end of the day. What is your time worth? My billing is $100/hour. If you’re young, new, or very inexperienced, consider billing a lot less – somewhere in the neighbourhood of $40-$50 an hour. This determines your hourly site fee as the main photographer. Personally, my hourly is higher as I include editing and post-production within that site fee – some other photographers bill a lower hourly but charge extra for an editing time.

Consider whether you are bringing an assistant or two and include their labour as well. Let’s assume we’re paying our assistant $15/hour.

Now, let’s add this up. Let’s assume we are quoting for an 8 hour event, with all of the rentals and costs discussed earlier. We are traveling 20km each way to get there, and our assistant will be joining us for the entire event as well. So what will it cost?

INCIDENTAL COSTS

Rentals and Supplies: $340

Travel: $20 (40k x $0.50)

FIXED COSTS

Equipment Rate (depreciation): $104 (8 hours x $13/hr)

LABOUR COST

Main photographer site fee: $800 (8 hours x $100/hr)

Assistant photographer site fee:  $120 (8 hours x $15/hr)

TOTAL COST OF JOB: $1384.00

… to be continued…

- Prashanna