Quote Originally Posted by Ben Syverson View Post
Don't worry about the local market. If you were opening a restaurant, would you research local fast food prices? Turn up any rock, and a DSLR shooter will crawl out offering to shoot a wedding for $150 or do a portrait session for $50. No research needed.

Look, you can't compete on price. You have to emphasize the unique experience and quality of an 8x10 portrait session, and charge accordingly. Listen to Frank.
With all due respect this is not good advice, you always need to do your market research, and local prices across the US actually do vary quite a bit. You need to find out what your competitors are charging (and by this I mean experienced high end photographers in the portrait market, not wankers who bought a Rebel 3 days ago) - otherwise you might find you are actually under cutting people with lower costs than you. You may decide that what you offer is worth twice or three times what a high end digital photographer charges but that figure will be very different depending on where you live. Prospective clients might have visited a few websites before coming to you - as a photographer you have to understand the market and explain why you're the best option. You simply cannot do this in a vacuum, Frank's $2000 figure might be on the money, might be too expensive or too cheap for the client base you have available to you. Every large company in the US does extensive market research. Why would anyone think that a photography business is any different?