Why we price per photograph and never per square metre
Because area does not predict the work. What sets a station count is how many places a camera has to stand before nothing is hidden, and that is a property of doors, corners and sightlines rather than of floor space. A 40 m² gallery with eight sightlines needs more positions than a 200 m² hall with two. We price the thing that takes the time, and the counts from our delivered tours are public so you can check that the two do not track each other.
What a square-metre rate quietly assumes
It assumes floor area and capture effort move together. In photography of buildings they do not, and the reason is geometric rather than commercial: a camera position covers everything within line of sight from one point. Add a partition and you have added a position without adding a square metre. Take a partition out and you have removed one. Area is the wrong variable because walls, not floors, are what block a view.
Buyers ask for the square-metre rate anyway, and they are right to ask — it is the unit almost every other trade that visits a building uses, and it makes a quote checkable. We would rather answer the question underneath it: what makes one job bigger than another, and can you count that yourself before you call. You can. It is positions.
The cleanest test we have
One client, one brief, one city, two premises. Delibros is an artisan bakery and coffee house with two branches in Tirana, both captured by us and both live. The look was agreed on the first job and the second was shot to match it, so the only variable left is the building.
| Building | What it is | Stations | Distinct connections |
|---|---|---|---|
| Delibros, Komuna e Parisit | Bakery and coffee house, Tirana | 7 | 14 |
| Delibros, Rruga e Kavajës | Second branch of the same business | 4 | 8 |
| Turist Shop, Lungomare | Seafront shop, Vlorë | 6 | 12 |
| Hostel Kapsul | Capsule hostel, Vlorë | 14 | 34 |
| Social Camp Jale | Coastal campsite, Jalë | 29 | 62 |
Stations and connections counted out of the delivered tour files, not estimated. All five tours are public and linked from the project pages.
The first branch runs from a street view through the entrance, the front desk, the coffee lounge, the dining area and a hall to the back of the room: seven positions before anything is hidden. The second is a frontage, two interior positions and the toilets: four. Same trade, same client, same expectations, a difference of nearly a factor of two — and it came from the shape of the rooms. The full comparison is in the same bakery, twice.
Small footprint, high count — and the reverse
Hostel Kapsul is a capsule hostel. It is small, and it took fourteen stations, because the entire proposition of a capsule is how much room you have once you are inside one, and that cannot be shown from the hallway. Turist Shop is a single seafront retail unit and took six. Social Camp Jale is a campsite walked from its entrance road down to the beach bar, and took twenty-nine — outdoors there are no walls to hide a station behind and no corridors to structure a route, so the connections have to be built deliberately rather than inherited from the architecture.
Now try to order those five by floor area in your head. Then order them by station count. The two lists are not the same list, and that is the whole argument on this page.
What actually sets the count
- Sightlines. How many places you can see all of a space from. One in a square room, two or three in an L, more in anything with columns.
- Doors and level changes. Every threshold is a decision about whether the visitor understands they have moved.
- What has to be readable. A counter display, a piece of lab equipment, a room number on a door. If it must be legible, the camera stands closer, and that adds positions.
- The approach. Street, entrance, car park, terrace. Frequently the part that sells the place, and frequently forgotten in a count made from a plan.
- What the tour is for. A tour that has to let a guest tell room 303 from room 507 needs both rooms. A tour that only has to establish the atmosphere of a restaurant does not need the kitchen.
What we cannot prove from this, and are not going to pretend we can
We did not measure the floor areas of these buildings. Nobody was there to take a professional measurement. No client asked us for dimensions, and nothing in a delivered tour establishes them. So we cannot publish a scatter of area against station count, and we are not going to reconstruct one from listings or from a plan we did not draw. What we can publish is the counts, which are read out of the tour files themselves, and the fact that the two branches of one bakery differ by three stations. Treat the rest as an argument rather than a measurement.
So how do you find out what yours is
Walk it and count positions, which takes about ten minutes and is set out step by step in what a 360° tour costs and how to work out your own. Or send us the address and what matters inside it through contact and we will set the count with you. Either way the count comes first and the price falls out of the rate card afterwards, never the other way round.
Questions people ask
- Can you quote per square metre if I ask you to?
- No. A square-metre rate would systematically overcharge large open spaces and undercharge small subdivided ones, and we would rather not have a price list that is unfair in a predictable direction. We quote per 360° photograph — €40 for each of the first ten and €30 for each one after — against a station count we agree with you before anything is booked.
- How many camera positions does a small shop need?
- A seafront retail unit we captured in Vlorë took six, and a bakery branch in Tirana took four. Neither number was set by the floor area; both were set by how many places the camera had to stand before nothing was hidden. Small premises typically land between four and seven, and four is our minimum job.
- Does a bigger building always cost more?
- It costs more in total, but less per photograph. The first ten photographs are €40 each and every one after the tenth is €30, so the effective rate falls as a tour grows and never steps back up. A larger building is therefore cheaper per camera position than a small one, which is the opposite of what most buyers expect. What it is not is cheaper per square metre, because square metres are not what we count.
- Why do two similar shops end up with different prices?
- Because they need different numbers of camera positions. Two premises of the same size can differ by several stations depending on partitions, corners, level changes and how much has to be readable inside them. The count is a property of the building rather than a sales lever, and we set it with you before quoting so there is nothing to argue about afterwards.
