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Your Salary - The aggregate assignment fees you earn throughout any given year should be at least equivalent to the annual salary of an employee doing the same kind of work for someone else.

Net Profit - At this point it is appropriate to include a more academic definition of profit. Conventional wisdom has always defined a simple formula for photographers and other sole practitioners to follow.

The Components of a Price - Considering all of the different kinds of fees, expenses, mark-ups, and taxes, the criteria for pricing break down like this.

A Wide Range of Fees Means a Wider Range of Clients - Each one of the many skills you have mastered corresponds to a discrete fee that should be billed to your clients, either directly or indirectly.

A Shift in the Dialog About Value - You have learned what a price is, if not - yet - how to come up with one. With that in mind, the first thing to understand about pricing photography is that you're not really pricing photographs at all.

You are not in business to be a photographer; you are in business to make money!

The Grand Convergence. At one time your phone was plugged into the wall with a wire and your TV signal came through the air into an antenna. Now that's reversed. The iPad is blurring the distinction between a TV program and a magazine.

At one time the Internet was going to be the "Great Leveler." Small companies would be able to play on level playing fields with the large multinationals, thanks to smart web search engines like HotBot, Yahoo, AltaVista, Lycos and later, Google.

No matter how hard we professional photographers fought, when the clock ticked into the 21st Century, our old business models started to fall apart.

Beginning professionals are rarely told that taking the picture is the easy part of the photo business. For the majority of you, finding work and making a sustainable living at photography will be the hard part.

They lost me at the "Cost of Doing Business" calculator. You know, the formula everyone starts you out with: Your overhead expenses + desired salary = your total annual cost ÷ number of billable days = your CODB.

Depending on which segment of the photography industry you're working in really determines the extent to which you can negotiate how much a job will pay. Very often in editorial, the client calling on the telephone presents you with a take-it-or-leave-it fee, leaving virtually no room for negotiation.