What actually moves the number.

Why there is no number on this page.

Photography pricing looks arbitrary from the outside because two jobs with the same name can be entirely different pieces of work. One person who needs a single current portrait for a profile, and a founder who needs a library of images to carry a website and a year of posting, are not doing the same thing, even though both of them would say they are booking a shoot.

So a number printed on a page has to be wrong in one direction or the other. Either it sits high enough to cover the largest version of the work, which sends away the person who needs the small version, or it sits low and quietly excludes most of what people actually ask for. Neither one helps you decide anything.

I keep pricing off the website on purpose and answer it on the phone, where I can hear what the pictures are for before saying anything about what it takes to make them. The investment page puts the same thing in fewer words. What follows here is the part that is genuinely useful in advance: the factors, and how much each of them moves.

How much ground the session has to cover.

The first and largest factor is scope, which in portrait work means looks. A look is a combination of wardrobe, background and lighting, and each one is a separate setup rather than a small variation on the last.

A single current portrait for a profile is one look, planned and made carefully. A set that has to carry a website, a speaking page, a press request and a year of social posts is several, and each additional look adds its own setup, its own direction, more frames to work through and more finishing at the end. That is the difference between a headshot sitting, built to produce the right single picture, and personal brand work, built to produce a range.

Working this out before the call is the most useful thing you can do with an afternoon. Write down the places the photographs have to work. If that list is short, the scope is narrow and the conversation is simple. If it names a website, a set of profiles, a printed program and a wall, you are describing a library, and the plan should be built as one from the start rather than discovered halfway through.

One person, or a whole roster.

The second factor is how many people stand in front of the camera. A single sitting is one plan, one set of looks, one set of decisions made for one face. A team is a different kind of work: each person comes to the studio and is photographed in sequence, against the same background, in the same light, to the same crop, so the page they land on reads as one set instead of a collage.

That matching is both the point and the labor. The lighting has to hold steady across everybody, each person needs directing individually because nobody arrives comfortable, and the finishing has to stay consistent so that one face does not look handled differently from the next. Scope grows with the size of the roster, and with nothing else about it.

If a roster is what you are planning, count it before you call, and note whether anyone needs a different crop from the rest. Those two answers change the shape of the whole conversation, and they are the questions I would otherwise be asking you.

How much finishing the pictures need.

Every delivered photograph is retouched by hand, and hand work takes time, image by image. That makes finishing one of the honest drivers rather than a rounding error: how many images are finished, and how much attention each of them needs, is a real quantity of work sitting behind the delivery.

Depth matters as much as count. A picture that will only ever be seen small on a screen asks less of the finishing than one that will be enlarged, because a large print shows everything, including what nobody notices at profile size. A portrait heading for a wall or a printed page is worked with that in mind from the beginning.

This is also the place where restraint costs more than excess. It is quick to run a heavy hand across a face and much slower to leave skin looking like skin while still attending to what genuinely wants attention. Most of what makes a portrait read as expensive is that kind of invisible care, and what makes a photo look expensive takes the elements apart one at a time.

What the photographs have to become.

A photograph that lives on a screen and a photograph that becomes an object are different outcomes of the same sitting. Custom albums, fine prints and gallery canvases are available if you want your favorites somewhere other than a screen, and anything physical carries its own cost, because it is a made thing rather than a copied one.

Size drives that more than anything else. A small print and a large one are not the same material and do not ask the same of the original frame, which is why print intentions are worth naming before the sitting rather than after it. Which standard sizes crop a portrait, and what each one takes off the top and sides, is covered in print sizes and cropping.

If nothing is being printed, say so early. It simplifies the plan, and a set that only ever has to work on screens is a perfectly reasonable thing to want.

How much planning sits in front of it.

Planning is invisible in the photographs and completely visible in them at the same time. Every session includes a wardrobe consultation, because looks are decided together in advance rather than improvised while you stand in front of a backdrop, and the more looks a session covers, the more planning there is to do.

Some sessions want considerably more. A brand set built around a launch or a rebrand starts from what the pictures have to say and works backward into wardrobe, color and setting, which is a different amount of preparation from a single current portrait. Whether that preparation is worth commissioning in the first place is the honest question taken up in brand photography and what it returns.

One practical note that comes up on nearly every call: I work with several professional stylists who can be arranged for hair and makeup before the shoot, for an added fee. It is an addition rather than an assumption, and whether it earns its place depends on the person and on the job the pictures are doing.

What does not move it, and what to bring.

Several things people expect to matter turn out not to.

• The equipment. Past a threshold every working photographer crossed long ago, gear is not what separates one portrait from another.
• Which town you are driving in from. Everyone comes to the same private studio in Naples.
• How photogenic you believe you are. Guided posing is part of every session precisely because nobody arrives knowing what to do with their hands.
• How many frames get made along the way. What counts is how many finished photographs you actually need, which is a much smaller number and a much better question.

What does move it is everything above, which is why the call is short when your answers are ready: where the pictures go, how many looks that implies, whether anybody else is being photographed, and whether anything gets printed. With those in hand the plan takes minutes to build.

The other half of the decision is who makes the photographs, which matters more than any of this, and how to choose a photographer sets out what to look at. For what a sitting itself involves, see headshots, and for the subject taken in order from the first decision to the last, there is the complete guide to professional headshots.