Clients are under the mistaken impression that now that we don't have film & processing to charge for, and the cards are reusable, there should be no processing fee. WRONG. As GRS says, you now charge a "digital processing fee", which can be per hour, or something like $100 for each 100 imagess. In the old days, you'd shoot a job drop the film at the lab, go have dinner, come back, look at your snips, go home, go to the lab, pick up with film, edit it, sleeve it, deliver it. Now you have no excuse to take time out for dinner or sleeping. You're spending hours editing, converting, organiztion, building review pages, burning to CDs & DVDs to deliver to the client and/or archive, so that's what the digital processing fee covers. How much is up to you, but some guys charge $100/job, some $100 per 100 images (probebly depending on how much work they put into the review images). In the end, it should work out to about the same as if you were still shooting film. When/if the the client balks, remind them that not only are you archiving the images for their protection, and that the storage is easier, but they don't have to pay for scans anymore. If you want to build this into your shoot fee thats up to you, but most pros break it out seperately. Some actually have a lab do that work (the same labs that did film, and now using super fast computers to process RAW images and make proof sheets overnnite).
Regards,
Andy Pearlman
Andy Pearlman Studio