Photography: The price of art.

Photographers can charge two or three times more to take pictures for an ad campaign than they do for editorial work. How do they pull that one off?

If an advertiser wants to spend money on a big-name photographer, then it's quite possible to shell out pounds 15,000 a day or more. That's a lot of fish-and-chip dinners. It's highly unlikely that the same photographer will demand that sort of money for a magazine shoot. So why charge top dollar for one and not the other?

'If it's a shot of a product that's going to sell and people are going to make money out of that product, then there's a knock-on effect,' Andy Clarke, the head of art at Saatchi & Saatchi, says. Take a multimarket campaign, where one image can get exposure (and hopefully bring in sales) across a continent, even across the world. So the photographer is going to charge accordingly.

At J. Walter Thompson's boutique agency, Label, the creative director, Robin Harvey, used to work as an art director at the publishing house Conde Nast. 'There's a huge difference between editorial and advertising costs,' he says. Fashion photographers will do high-profile work for top magazines for very …