HOW MUCH DO FOOD PHOTOGRAPHERS MAKE?
How much should I charge for my food photography work? What kind of salary can or should I expect as a food photographer? These are questions I get asked by my ecourse students. mentoring clients and online community every single week! And, I understand why, it’s so confusing to know what to charge when there aren’t any set standards or any clear income guidelines available.
Many of the creatives I work with come to food photography after years in a 9-5 job, where salaries are generally streamlined, transparent and clear. The world of freelance work - especially the world of freelance food photography work (or any photography or creative profession, frankly), is much more muddled when it comes to income. It’s why I wrote this bog post, to inform you what you can expect to make as a food photographer and answer as many of your money questions as I can in the process!
DISCLAIMER! I’m sharing income figures to the best of my knowledge. These are based on average salaries food photographers can make in 2022, 0 - 3/4 years into their career, here in the UK. If you’re based elsewhere in the world or are reading this post in the future, please note that the numbers outlined below may be different.
How do food photographers make money?
I felt it was important to outline all the different jobs available to food photographers and the salaries attached to each option! That’s because how you make money as a food photographer, greatly impacts how much you can get paid for your work!
STOCK PHOTOGRAPHY
Most certainly not the most lucrative way to earn an income as a professional food photographer, stock photography IS however a really good starting point if you’re new to the food photography industry. To take home anything noteworthy, you’d need to upload a fair share of photographs onto stock photography sites and continue to do so month after month. But, the truth is that - if you’re anything like me - you’ve probably got an endless supply of food photos on your camera roll that are perfectly fine, yet never see the light of day. Why not share those photographs on stock agency sites and allow them to bring in a little bit of extra cash?
Can we talk about money?
Now of course that begs the question as to how much money you can expect to receive from your stock food photos. On average, you can earn around £0.35 per image you upload on to stock photography sites, though there are some variables to consider that can push that number up or down. This means that for a little bit of pocket money (rather than a decent salary), you’d need to upload at least 1000 images a month. That said, there are quite a few food photographers who upload thousands of images a month to stock photography sites and consequently earn a rather lovely salary from it!
If you love the ‘easy’ process and uncomplicated, transparent manner of stock photography and have lots of unused images you don’t know what to do with, might this be your first step towards earning an income doing what you love?
SELLING FOOD PHOTOGRAPHY PRINTS
Right, so let me be really honest from the outset - just like stock photography - for most photographers, selling prints of their images is unlikely to be the main way they earn money and pay their bills. However, selling prints of your photos can be a great way to supplement the money you earn from other parts of your photography work. This can be particularly helpful when you’re just starting out, still building your client roster and perhaps not yet able to make ends meet, solely through client assignments.
Can you make a living selling prints?
Though like anything in the world of freelance photography, there isn’t a set amount of money one charges for prints, on average it’s common to earn between £100 - £500 per print. Where exactly your work would sits on this spectrum, depends on the size and print quality of your images, how well known you are in the industry, the budget of your target audience and so on.
EDITORIAL FOOD PHOTOGRAPHY
Ok, so my cheeky assumption here is that you’re at the start(-ish) of your professional food photography journey and perhaps aren’t 100% sure exactly what editorial photography is. (If you do know what it is, please skip the next paragraph and accept my sincerest apologies :)).
Is a career as an editorial food photographer for you?
Editorial food photography is what we usually call any food imagery that appears in print publications such as magazines, supermarket recipe cards and cookbooks. Nowadays, online magazines also firmly fall into the editorial photography category. In short, it’s food shots that go alongside text and give the written word shape and context. I mean, cookbooks without lush editorial food shots would be a bit boring, am I right?
Editorial food photography is probably my most favourite type of photography as it focuses primarily on the actual food at hand, but it’s important to note that editorial photography isn’t necessarily the best paid type of photography! The truth is many magazines have tiny budgets and some magazines don’t have budgets for contributors at all!
So if now you’re left wondering what in fact you can realistically expect to get paid for editorial photography work, let me put you out of your misery! For food magazines, it’s quite common to earn between £0 - £500 for photos supplied for a specific food article. Yes, you can certainly earn more, depending on the magazine you work for and depending on whether you also provide recipes or a written story to accompany the shots, but I feel this is a really good, rough average.
Dream of shooting foods for a cookbook?
For cookbook photography it’s once again a range rather than a specific number. That’s because a food photographer can earn a set rate per day worked on a cookbook (and depending on how many recipes need to be shot and what the agreed recipe per day ratio is, their take home salary will vary project by project). In turn, another photographer might agree in advance to a set fee for the completion of the entire project; in the latter scenario it’s in the food photographer’s hands how many days they take to shoot all photographs and therefore how much their day rate ultimately works out as.
To make matters extra complicated, your salary from cookbook photography will also depend on which publisher you work with; some of the more established, bigger publishers tend to have bigger budgets, with the smaller book publishers in turn offering less money for the same amount of work. Hence, please take the following figures with a pinch of salt.
What salary ranges are we talking about here?
So, on average, it’s pretty common to get paid between £550 - £1800 a day for a cookbook shoot. Again, you can certainly earn more (or less!), but for a food photographer who is newer to the industry (as I’m cheekily assuming you are), that’s a good ball park figure. Considering how varied it all is, can you see why good negotiation skills can come in handy here and why I hence focus in depth on developing this skill in my work with my mentoring clients?
COMMERCIAL FOOD PHOTOGRAPHY
This style of photography involves taking shots of food or drink products for packaging, websites, flyers and so on. Nowadays, commercial food shots are also used a lot on social media platforms like Facebook and Instagram.
Commercial photography is used for marketing delicious foods!
The aim of this type of photography is to capture a shot of a food or drink product and show exactly what it looks like and how absolutely amazing it is! Because the aim of commercial food photos is to drive brand recognition and sales of the actual food/drink, budgets can be a whole lot bigger than in editorial photography. It’s for this reason I often advise my mentoring clients to include a good range of commercial shots in their portfolio!
Despite the possible higher financial reward, personally I find commercial photography less fun (blush). Though definitely challenging - which is creatively very stimulating and allows for lots of growth as a food photographer - briefs tend to be a little bit tighter, cleaner and more minimal with a clear emphasis on the food product at hand (and its packaging) and less so on visual story telling or intricate food styling.
Of course, I’m generalising here and commercial photography can most certainly comprise of beautifully styled food photos too, however it usually is no! Now that you know that you can indeed earn a fair amount as a commercial photographer, the question remains, how much!
If you want to make money, could this be the job for you?
I may sound like a broken record here, but how much you make from commercial food photography depends a lot on the food companies you’re working with, their respective budget as well as your skills and experience behind the camera. Consequently there is no one size fits all salary for a commercial food photographer.
I know of a food photographer here or there starting out in the industry charging around £150 a day (!) for images of packed food products. I also know quite a few whose take home pay is around £2000 - £2500 for a day shooting content for larger brands and quite a few who create commercial food photographs for anything between those two/three figures. Yes, you can earn more money, but here in the UK bigger brand deals and bigger budgets beyond £2500/day often (though not always!) tend to go to the more established food photographers and that’s not who I’m writing this blog post for ;).
RESTAURANT PHOTOGRAPHY
Now before we talk about making money as a restaurant photographer, did you know I wrote a previous post sharing my top 5 restaurant photography tips? You can find it, along with a downloadable PDF right here.
Ok, sorry ‘bout that, but I had to get that off my chest. Right, so what can you earn as a restaurant photographer? I think you know what I’m gonna say; just like every other branch of food photography, it’s a moveable feast. Depending on whether you’re shooting content for small, independent local restaurants or a big internationally established fast food chain, the salary you’ll earn is very attached to the job at hand, the type of clients you’re working with as well as what you decide to charge!
So what financial compensation can you anticipate?
Now, as a rough average, I know quite a few photographers at the start of their career who charge restaurants around £350 - £550 a day, and some who expect restaurants to pay between £700 - £1750 for their services. To be honest, I wouldn’t be surprised if the pay range is even wider than that (excluding what the very experienced food photographers charge when they work for top restaurants!), with lots of newbies - worried about their lack of experience and knowledge - charging clients even less!
With such a wide range of income levels possible, see why it’s so, so important to position yourself correctly within the market, create a stellar portfolio and ensure you attract and get to work with the right type of restaurants? It’s for this reason that positioning, portfolio building and branding is something we explore in depth in my mentoring program!
IMAGE LICENSING, CONTENT CREATION ON SOCIAL MEDIA & RUNNING A FOOD PHOTOGRAPHY WORKSHOP
Ok, I admit, I’m being a little bit very sloppy here, pulling together all these really varied ways to earn an income and capturing them under this HUGE one-size-fits-all umbrella, but please hear me out!
In this blog article I really wanted to hone in on what it’s like making a living as a self employed food photographer, rather than delving into influencer work, teaching and so on. That said, there’s never been a better time to be a food photographer because no two clients are ever the same and we have so many different ways to make some serious cash precisely because of all these different monetisation opportunities!
So with that in mind, I wanted to touch on the following three revenue streams briefly and point you to where you can explore them in more depth, as this blog post here isn’t quite the right place to do so!
Image licensing
I set out to write this piece for the food photographer who is in year 0-3/4 of their career. For said group of creatives, knowing how and when to charge for licensing fees is certainly vital and hence - you guessed it - something I cover in the mastermind and mentoring program. However, making money from licensing fees is more of a consequence of all the other financial and career opportunities outlined above, rather than in and of itself the core of your salary as a food photographer.
Now, - I’m generalising here, but - the really big, noteworthy bucks connected to image licensing tends to be made by the more experienced photographers who work with established, international brands on billboards and ad campaigns. In fact, in those cases, the financial compensation these photographers get from image licensing often exceeds their earnings from the photography work itself!
If you’re at the very early stage of your career as a photographer, but nonetheless wish to delve deeper into this topic and get an example of how and when to charge licensing fees, you can check out a short video I recorded covering the basics right here. I also shared further thoughts on the topic in this podcast episode. I hope both are helpful!
Content creation & sponsored posts
If you have your very own website where you regularly write blog posts and/or if you have a sizeable social media following consisting of a loyal, engaged audience than creating content or doing 'influencer work', can be a great, alternative way to earn money whilst still drawing on and utilising your photography skills.
That said, to be a success food photographer doesn’t require you to have a thriving social media community, whilst working as an influencer most certainly does! It’s for this reason that I wanted to exclude this route of monetising your work from this written piece here.
If you are curious about what you can earn as a content creator and want to develop this revenue stream further, I’d recommend reading this post about influencer work I wrote a few years ago OR if you’re really serious, applying for my creative business mastermind ;). Just saying’.
Teaching
Teaching food photography is incredibly lucrative and I know of several photographers who make the bulk of their earnings from teaching rather than actual photography work! There is LOTS to be said about the financial benefits of sharing your knowledge about lighting, editing, composition and so on with eager students, but in this post I wanted to shine a spotlight on what it means to ‘do’ rather than to teach! I hope that’s ok.
So, how much can a food photographer make?
It’s impossible to give a ball park figure here as so much depends on how many and what type of clients you have, what style of work you do and what you charge. However, I hope this piece brought you value and has given you a rough idea on what to charge as you take the next step forward on your journey! Good luck, you got this!
BEFORE YOU GO….
Found this post helpful? Why not download my FREE mini pricing guide PDF which includes my top 10 pricing tips ! You can download the PDF by signing up to the newsletter community below.
And,… If you’re committed to take the business side of your food photography to the next level, want support on developing an empowering pricing structure and are looking for accountability, tips on attracting your ideal client and more, why not apply for my creative business mastermind and mentoring program. I’d love to hear from you and am always happy to answer any questions you might have about the mentorship program!
Hi, I’m Kimberly Espinel
I'm a food photographer, creative business mentor, teach, podcast and author.
I have created content for beautiful brands including SONY, KitchenAid, Ottolenghi, Waitrose and many, many more. My podcast, Eat Capture Share, has over 100,000 downloads , my debut book, was an Amazon best seller and my DOMESTIKA course for food stylists was one of their most popular courses in 2021!
I now run a thriving 6-figure food photography biz from my home studio in London, earning more than I ever could have done in my 9-5 job!
Having learned from my MANY mistakes as well as from incredible business coaches and masterminds throughout the years, I’ve developed creative business strategies, specifically for an up and coming food photographer like YOU, that work! More importantly, my aim is to pass on my knowledge so that you can build a thriving photography career too!
