The Three Commissions

The Corporate Headshot · The Senior Portrait · The Family Holiday Portrait

Three commissions – three real clients

Commission

Who the client can be

What they get

Why this one is hard

The Corporate

Headshot

An adult who needs a professional photograph of themselves: a teacher or staff member, a coach, a club or ASB officer, someone running a nonprofit, a parent who needs a better photograph for work.

Three retouched digital files at three specifications — full resolution, web size, and a square crop for a profile — delivered in a named folder with a written usage licence.

The definition of success is narrow. The person either looks credible to the people in their industry, or they do not. There is nowhere to hide behind a nice location.

The Senior

Portrait

An MVHS senior. They are already on campus, which makes them the easiest client to book and the hardest to direct — they are your peer.

A ten-image online gallery, one file built to yearbook specification, and one 8×10 print, packaged.

Two audiences from one session. The yearbook wants a specific outfit, background, crop and resolution. The family wants something that looks like their kid. You have to serve both, and they do not want the same photograph.

The Family

Holiday Portrait

A family who wants a photograph for a holiday card. Families of staff, families where siblings both attend MVHS, or your own families.

A designed 5×7 holiday card, printed and packaged, plus five retouched digital files.

Groups. Sightlines, spacing, depth of field across several people, and children who will not do it twice. Plus a deadline that genuinely cannot move — a holiday card in January is not a product.

Research task 1 — What does this work cost in Mountain View?

Find five providers for each of the three session types — fifteen total — who publish prices and work in this area. Record what they charge, what is included, and how they package it. Then calculate the median for each genre.

Where to look

Tool	What it gives you and what to watch for
The photographers' own websites	The most reliable source, because it is what they actually charge. Search “headshot photographer Mountain View,” “senior portraits Los Altos,” “family portrait photographer Palo Alto.” Look for a Pricing or Investment page. Many will not publish — note that too, because it is itself a pricing strategy.
Thumbtack · thumbtack.com	Aggregates local providers with price estimates. Good for range. Skewed low, because it is a bidding platform — do not treat it as the market.
Yelp · yelp.com	The dollar-sign band and, more usefully, the reviews, which often name what someone actually paid and what they got.
Bark and Snappr · bark.com, snappr.com	On-demand national services. Useful as a floor — the cheapest a client could reasonably pay — not as a comparison for custom work.
BLS wage data · bls.gov/oes	Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics for Photographers (SOC 27-4021) in the San Jose–Sunnyvale–Santa Clara metro area. This tells you what photographers earn, which is not the same as what they charge — and the gap between those two numbers is the whole point of the next task.
PPA · ppa.com	Professional Photographers of America. Business resources including cost-of-doing-business material.

Judge your sources (CR 11.5)

For every price you record, note where it came from and how confident you are in it. A published package on a working photographer's own site is strong evidence. A range on an aggregator is weak evidence. A number somebody said in a forum is not evidence.

Note when a provider will not publish prices. “Contact for pricing” usually means the price is high enough that publishing it would lose them enquiries — which tells you something about the top of the market.