Why is it so hard to put a value on your skills?
No, I am not going to cry around about pricing my art, that I have no trouble with at all. Give me a buyer and watch me sell that sucker, patron for all I’m worth. I know just exactly what my prints are worth to me. The fact that the public at large has never shared my enthusiasm means nothing, that’s the price and I’m sticking to it.
But bring me a troubled camera or a worn out computer, ask me to shoot your work or cover and event and watch as my eyes roll back in my head and I begin to speak in tongues.
See there’s a clear disconnect between what I understand and do for sale and what I enjoy and do for fun. True, along the way I have collected some skills and I can produce results, maybe not in such a timely manner, but results none the less, but fix a price on it? Might as well ask which arm I’d like cut off.
I have been attached to a camera in one form or another since 1965. Back then, yes the dinosaurs were extinct but just for a few years, I took a course in journalism at North Texas State.
NTSU is a suitcase college forty-five miles north of Dallas, with enough money in the till to attract top-notch talent to their football team and a Jazz oriented band program which draws students from all over the country. (There’s some considerable debate about which program has the largest number of professionals in it, the football team or the One O’clock Lab band.)
NUTS, sorry, NTSU had standards low enough to let Joe Green in and make him a professional football star without too much of an education interfering. They also let me in for a while and even though I didn’t make as much of an impact to campus as “Mean” Joe Green, I spent five of the worst years of my life there.
The one bright spot was Smith Kiker’s photography class, nasty smelling chemicals, arcane rituals to coax the images out of the silver-coated paper into life and the promise of everlasting fame as a hard-drinking, two-fisted photo-journalist.
I was in hog-heaven as we say in the South. I was never sure why a person should be so excited about heaven for hogs, given their eating habits and the fact that their pens often consisted of foul-smelling mud, but then that’s the phrase and it wouldn’t make any more sense unless you said Hefner heaven which any red, white and blue-blooded male knows is what happens if you are very, very good. That’s right straight past the pearly gates and down the long drive to the Playboy Mansion West and the infamous grotto. That’s where I want to spend eternity.
So there I was fresh out of high school, (Thank God), and green as grass, not an idea in my head and nothing planned for the next twenty of thirty years when I noticed the photography class and signed up. The fact that my roommate was the instructor’s nephew might have had some influence, but for the purposes of this story we’ll say not.
The class kept my grade-point high enough to stay in school for that semester and when it was over, I was adrift. Then Smitty gave me his old camera. He had just laid-out the two hundred bucks for a Nikon FTN and didn’t need the old Petri rangefinder any more.
I fell deeply and truly in love and spent the rest of that semester and many more days after that taking the Petri apart, taking pictures, taking time, away from studies, social projects and school and never regretted it. North Texas took a somewhat harsher view and invited me to not come back for a semester.
But I had my camera so that was okay.
From that day to this I have never been far from a camera and have taken over fifteen thousand frames, that I know of, counting was so much easier when you bought film by the size of the roll and barely tucked the leader under the take-up clip so that you could squeeze another two frames from a thirty-six exposure roll. Since my cataracts forced me to switch to digital it is harder to maintain the count since I can shoot away and never have to re-load.
Shooting all those frames taught me two useful skills. I can still meter the light faster and better by eye than any meter can and I know just what to charge for a print. I won’t go into the pricing math, you probably slept through that portion of advanced avarice anyway, but I know and can do it is the twinkle of an evil eye.
But when it comes to pricing out my skills, photographic, computer, or writing, for a small job for another starving artist I might just as well be a sixteen year old boy meeting Stella Stevens. (You’re not that old, Stella was a chestier, strawberier, bee-stung lipped Marilyn Monroe clone and made every sixteen year old boy sweat bullets just by whispering in that husky voice.)
Why is it so damned hard to set a price for something you know how to do, something many people don’t, something that they want and something that they’d have to pay for anyway? And what is it that makes it so terrifying?
Just what are you afraid of?
I don’t have a clue.
But when that time comes and your palms start to sweat and your mouth gets dry and you wish, at that very moment to be struck by lightning, just take a deep breath and know, you are not alone.
No, that’s it. I haven’t got a good answer or way to make it stop. Just do it and take whatever happens. Remember your work, whether professional or hobby has value and you should get paid for sharing your skills.
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