If you're hiring a photographer to make images for your business — your website, your ads, your product, your brand — there's one thing worth understanding up front, because almost nobody explains it: you're not buying the photos. You're buying the right to use them.

That sounds like a technicality. It isn't. It's the whole thing. And once it clicks, everything about how photography is priced makes sense.

Think of it like music in a film

A movie can't just drop any song it wants into a scene. It has to license the music.

And here's the part that matters most: when a company licenses a song for a commercial — say McDonald's wants a Beatles track — they're paying for the specific right to use it. They can't chop it up or rewrite it to fit the ad. The license covers a use, and the work stays intact.

Photography works exactly the same way. My camera time creates the images. The license determines where those images are allowed to live and what they're allowed to do for your business.

Why the use sets the price

A photo on your website is doing one job. That same photo running as a paid ad — reaching thousands of people, working to sell your product day after day — is doing a much bigger one. You're not paying more for a bigger file. You're paying for the bigger job the photo is doing for your business.

That's why "how will you use these?" is the first question I ask, and why it sets the price more than almost anything else. The shoot is the shoot. The license scales with the use.

What's included, and what needs more

To keep it simple, here's the line:

Included with your session (standard license):

• Your own website

• Your organic social media — your accounts, posting your own content

Requires an expanded license:

• Paid advertising (Meta and Google ads, sponsored or boosted posts)

• Print marketing and packaging

• Billboards, signage, and other out-of-home placement

• Third-party, reseller, or stockist use

• Published or editorial use

If you're only using images on your own site and socials, you're covered — no extra step, no surprise. If they're going to work as ads or reach an audience beyond your own channels, that's an expanded license, quoted based on how far and how long they'll run.

Yes, this is genuinely how it works

‍The question I get most is some version of "wait — is this how all photographers do it?" Yes. I did not invent this.

Under U.S. copyright law, the person who creates an image owns the copyright to it the moment it's made. When you commission a shoot, you're not automatically buying that copyright… you're licensing the right to use the images, on the terms we agree to. If you'd like to read the source, the U.S. Copyright Office lays it out at copyright.gov.

This is the same framework that protects every photographer, illustrator, musician, and filmmaker — and it's what lets me keep making work at the level you hired me for.

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One related note: the images arrive finished

Because it comes up often… You will have a say in how your images are edited and what changes you’d like made. However, once they are delivered - they are final. Applying your own edits, filters, FaceTuning, heavy cropping, or running them through AI is not legally allowed as it changes the work you licensed. (More on that here → "editing your delivered images")

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The bottom line

‍ None of this is meant to make photography complicated. It's meant to make it clear… so you know exactly what you're getting, and so we set the right license for how you'll actually use your images instead of guessing.

‍ If you're planning to use your photos to grow your business, just tell me where you want them to run. That's the whole conversation. From there, it's simple.

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