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100 sessions a year carrying $64,400 means every shoot must bring $644 — a $350 portrait session is $329 of unpaid you.
The most expensive sentence in photography is “it is just a one-hour shoot.” One hour behind the camera is 4.5 hours of shoot, cull, edit, admin, and client email — and every session must also carry a share of gear, insurance, software, and the income you need to live. This calculator prices it honestly: annual business costs plus your income target, divided by the sessions you can actually book, gives your cost of doing business per session. Add direct costs like gallery hosting and travel, and the $679 answer is what a portrait session must cost — at $350 you are donating $329 a shoot. See your real effective hourly and the annual gap before you book another season at the wrong price.
Photographers use it before booking season: 100 sessions carrying $64,400 of costs and income need $679 each — the "one-hour shoot" is 4.5 hours, and $350 is a $329 donation.
Fewer than you think. Two sessions a week for 50 weeks is 100 — a genuinely full book for a solo portrait photographer, because the other 25+ hours of your week are marketing, editing backlog, client management, and bookkeeping. Most solo photographers shoot 60–120 paid sessions a year. The failure mode is pricing off a fantasy book: dividing annual costs by 200 imagined sessions halves the CODB per session and sets a price that guarantees a loss on the 90 you actually shoot. Count only sessions a client pays for — model calls, portfolio builders, and freebies are marketing expenses, not sessions, and they belong in the annual costs line instead.
In products — that is the model, not an accident. Industry standard: the session fee covers CODB, and 60–75% of total revenue comes from product sales — prints, albums, wall art, and digital collections sold after the gallery reveal. A $679 session that sells a $900 collection is a $1,579 booking with the costs already paid. This is why in-person sales (IPS) photographers out-earn shoot-and-burn digitals by multiples: the digitals-only photographer caps revenue at the session fee and hands over the product margin with the files. If you hate selling, the alternative is honest packages — bundle the collection INTO the booking price at this calculator’s numbers plus margin, and let the client choose between priced tiers instead of whether to buy at all.
Only in batches, and this calculator shows why. A 30-minute mini still carries edit and admin time — about 2.25 total hours — so at these numbers it needs $357 to hold the effective rate. Sold as a standing offer, minis cannibalize your full sessions at a worse hourly. Sold as an EVENT — ten slots, one day, one location, setup amortized across all ten — the per-session overhead collapses and a $357 mini day is $3,570 for one setup. The rules that keep minis profitable: limited dates (scarcity is the marketing), smaller galleries (fewer edits per client), product upsells at the same margins as full sessions, and a price within one notch of your full session — if a mini is half the price of a full session, clients correctly wait for minis and your annual book collapses into the cheapest format you offer.