You must log in or register to comment.
A 10 min ride home is not the same as a 3 hour wedding and 12 hours processing images and video.
That’s not what she was talking about though.
It kind of is, but she’s making her argument poorly.
If you want a professional photography shoot, there is a minimal expectation on equipment above whatever your phone can do. That equipment costs significant money to own.
There is also the money to pay for someone’s time for the shoot, which she argues for poorly. Even though photography is a hobby, selling services is a commitment of time to reach a certain minimum standard. That time is worth something.
If she’s even real (could be a troll account), we have no idea what she’s talking about. Quick half hour or shorter shoot for your family after getting a new baby? A wedding lasting hell, maybe 5-6 hours or more? 300 bucks is way too much for the first option (assuming she has a studio and can just shoot 1.5 families an hour and then do the editing later) and probably about a fifth of what the second option should cost.
Not to mention the skill of moving around a wedding in an unobtrusive manner so as to both capture great shots and not distract from the ceremony too much. A good wedding photographer is worth more than $100-300. But, people getting married should get what they can afford. Even if that’s a ride to the courthouse and your friend with the newest smartphone that has the better camera. Great photos are nice to have. Any photo from your wedding is going to bring back the memory.
By your logic you’re not paying for a 10 minute ride home. You’re paying for a 15 minute drive to your point of origin, a 10 minute ride home, a 15 minute ride elsewhere, in time, fuel, maintenance, insurance, car payment, interest on that payment and taxes.
Advertising yourself as:
-
Bad at internal budgeting
-
Full of yourself
… is a bold marketing strategy during an economic depression, for a freelance/contract worker.
Best of luck Nat.
This is really taking a pretty harmless comment too seriously. The point is shit is expensive and clients want everything cheap. Any freelancer can relate to this particular framing. I used to have people want $300 websites and they didn’t care that it would take potentially a week to build their site. Surely just abstractly we can all relate to shit being expensive though?
deleted by creator
… is a bold marketing strategy during an economic depression
Never undersell the possibility that this person is lying.
Or that this is a stock photo and the text is clickbait.
I mean she’s got a point. I used to do web design and the number of people who reckoned that it should cost the equivalent of $40 was ridiculous. I’d required at least 10 times that just as compensation from having to work with shopify.
One of the main reasons I got into hardware is because there’s an inherent bias that digital things have no intrinsic value.
Like, you might expect a calculator app to be free, but nobody expects a calculator to be free.
When doing websites. I always told people upfront, you can do it cheap, fast, or good. Pick two because all three doesn’t exist.
… did you market yourself as a stuck up prick who can’t budget well?
Or did you maybe save that for some stage of contract negotiations?
There are ways to dance the dance; hers seems to be the equivalent of loudly complain that no one is picking her to dance with because no one can afford her.
Just not a good strategy.
Well I certainly found it was a good idea to not keep the customer in the dark about my prices. If I’m going to be expensive I might as well tell them outright, it’s not like I’m going to get more customers if I led them on.
-
the camera doesnt matter. are your skills any good?
She wants her investment repaid in 2 or 3 gigs?
Photography has gotten out of control, my wife just got charged $1,500 for a house shoot and video for a real estate listing, same person charged less then a 1k a few months ago
Why doesn’t your wife learn how to do it, then?
I don’t really understand photography. Like it seems too broad of an art form. Like the guy who takes pictures of food is different from action photography is different from a wedding photographer. I feel like I don’t have the context to know she’s full of shit, but it kinda feels like it.
I don’t really understand photography.
Its just like drawing. The technique matters most.
With food youre working with colours and macro, mostly, while with action you are trying to position yourself so you can get the best shot. With weddings its a mix.
It dosent matter if you are really good at drawing underage incest furry porn if the dude wants you to make an oil painting of the Alps.
Its all based on their time involvement. Hourly wage basically. You cab shoot for an hour and then spend several hours editing the shots. Wedding photographers might commit 20-40 hours to a wedding. 3-5 day of, rest editing. Batch editing and croppjng isnt bad but touch ups are the worst.
She’s not really full of shit, but she is being kind of bitchy. Meanwhile, Xavier’s just a trolling asshole.
You may have bought an expensive camera, and spent a good amount of time honing your skills, that doesn’t mean I’m paying you $6000 for 3 days of work.
Really depends though.
I do photography/videography as a salaried employee with my personal $5k camera and singular 50mm lens, so my paycheck is technically what I’m paid.
I made my work buy 4 other specialty lenses and continuously growing inventory of accessories. So probably push that number up around $10k+. My services at my job equals like $50ish an hour. With my $10k+ worth of equipment. But I get health benefits… yay…
When I do side jobs, I don’t charge much. Corporate headshots for example are about $100 per person or $300 for a certain amount of time for everyone on the same day. So depends how much of a pain in the ass they’ll be.
I also have worked with scheduling external photographers by the hour, photo journalists, not your wedding/graduation people which she looks like based on her images style. Costs are regional and based on demand/completion in that area. So someone can cost $1,000 for 2-hours on-site in Boston and someone can cost $400 for 2-hours in middle nowhere Kansas.
So what I’m saying is equipment costs a lot obviously. Yes it’s fair to charge more than $300 a session, but you better be damn good to ask $1,000 for 2-hours of your time.
when i was shooting professionally, I had a flat hourly rate, with a price package for weddings/engagement photos.
wedding tax is across all fields and the engagement shots take a lot of planning and less actual shoot time. Other than those, I billed by he hour, like any skilled laborer
I shoot with a refurbished $600 Canon EOS Rebel T7. I use two lenses for the majority of my work: an 18-55mm, and a 75-300mm.
Fite me irl, Nat, my shit’s gorgeous and I know it.
how do you white balance your shots/ seems overly sepia
It’s a preference. I’m biased away from cool light as a person, and like my work to be a bit warmer.
I turn off QRedShift when I’m working, then I ultimately end up re-creating it by hand, cause I’m just like that.
Those are really nice! I especially like in the first one how you captured the city lights on the water and filled in that potential darker space on the left with the bridge span.
Of course, there’s scenic photography, which is basically having really good composition skills, knowing good locations, and timing, and then there’s people photography, which is… extra. I don’t blame photographers for charging more for that shit lol
‘I want our wedding photos to be the two of us on a cliff at the beach at sunset with really pretty clouds behind us!’ And you’re thinking, okay, drive time, waiting for a good colorful sunset instead of a cloudless or too cloudy or foggy one (always a fun game of roll-the-dice in Oregon at least), and they want their backs to the sunset, so that’s extra lighting (that you’ll have to carry to the location) and extra time in photoshop to be sure you can still see their faces clearly…
Yeah, I don’t do people cause they’re hard to look at, what with the brain damage and all, so scenery’s more of my thing. Scenery doesn’t stay put, but it’s a hell of a lot less wiggly than people.
And I mean, I’ve never seen the Oregon Coast look bad, you just have to take what it gives you when you show up, no expectations.
Fuuuuck, I think I’ve gotta go there this weekend, just to get out of town.
Yeah but for all we know she’s a wedding photographer, photographs wildlife or something uncooperative, unlike a bridge which tends to sit still most of the time.
Man, I wish bridges sat still. Shit bounces.
That said, wedding wildlife does sound notoriously uncooperative; trying to get a bridal veil on a rhino sounds, well, difficult.
Nice shots but if you’re wanting gorgeous candid shots of fast moving action (like weddings/events), you’re gonna struggle without the expensive glass/body.
I’ve got a nifty fifty which can open to 1.6, and that’s pretty good for getting as fast as 1/250th in dim light, and I got it for free! :D
Catch is, the zoom controls are at the bottom, on my feet.
Nobody cares what your camera costs, Nat. You can still take shitty pictures with a $5000 camera. Charge what you think your service is worth and work for clients who pay it.
I’ve met too many people who think the number they associate to a thing somehow makes them a better user of it.
Tons of people take amazing photos with tons of thought and skill involved in composition and everything, with a phone camera or shitty digital from 2010.
People who use the price of the equipment to justify expense instead of the quality of their work are usually bad at whatever it is they’re charging for.
You can shift the quality a lot with great equipment, but that requires you to know what you’re doing first. And it still depends on what you’re trying to shoot. Somebody trying to capture a great moment in high speed sports might need a better camera than a cat dad. But without knowing how to use it, it is worth nothing.
All the money in the world can’t buy talent
All the talent in the world can’t perform brain surgery with a chainsaw
Exactly.
There is real skill involved in photography, and it takes real time even after being skilled. A 1-hour shoot in a new location still requires probably an hour of planning, maybe an hour or two of logistics, and maybe 2-3 hours of work after the fact to get the photos processed and distributed. And it’s basically the opportunity cost that will eat up the entire day, because you can’t double book the same sunset or other lighting conditions or whatever. There’s seasonality, too, if you want specific seasonal conditions in the shot, if you want to book the Saturday that other clients want, etc.
That’s before expenses like insurance, the amortized cost of the software and hardware (including the cameras and lenses and computer), web services for distribution of the files, etc.
It’s fair to charge a full day’s fair pay for a job like that, and that might mean wanting to charge something like $1000 for an experienced photographer, maybe $500 of which actually represents “profit” for the sole proprietor. But that only happens at that price if there are clients willing to pay that price.
For bigger jobs like parties or weddings, it gets a bit more involved, which is why a 2- or 3-shooter wedding job can cost several thousand, or even above $10k.
But for easy jobs like anything in a high volume studio where the lighting is already known, and there aren’t any logistics involved, it should be much cheaper. It just all depends.
I did a gig for a while doing Photoshop clean up of wedding images and portraits.
Just that one step can be an exceptional amount of work.
Wedding images are challenging because venues, decor, wardrobe, etc., are chosen for real-world regular eyeball beauty. In darker settings (many churches, nighttime), or settings lit by bad lights for photography (fluorescent bulbs, LED bulbs without good wide spectrum light, random dance floor stuff), adds a lot of post processing work, and wedding clients tend to be very demanding clients (for good reason). It’s all real work, well beyond what can be seen in the day-of interaction between photographer and client.
I would also highlight the sheer volume.
Somebody wants a few senior pictures taken or their kid in front of some toys and trees and stuff, and you could be dealing with a relatively manageable number.
Weddings take hours, often have dozens of people, and with everything being digital these days you can take a fuckton of photos to make sure that you capture everything possible.
Nobody cares what your camera costs
It’s certainly a curiosity. Like, what’s the value-add of a $5k camera relative to a cheaper model? What’s the step-up or step-down in price? What features are you prizing? What brand are you favoring? What are your clients looking for that someone else can’t necessarily bring with a cheaper device?
Whole books have been written about the industry, the technology around the industry, and the kinds of people who pursue it.
Charge what you think your service is worth and work for clients who pay it.
Finding clients who pay well is half the work of any freelance job.
On the flip side, Uber is basically a hobby. Do these people buy their cars just to drive for Uber, or do they drive for Uber to make some extra cash with the car they already have/need?
The math has been done and the wear on your car isn’t worth the pay, either, so it’s a net loss that desperate people are using in an economy where jobs are harder to come by. So uber is taking advantage of people and subsidizing their wages by taking advantage of the impoverished, similar to how the biggest company with the most people on welfare is Walmart. It’s not a hobby, it’s a blight on our society because rich people created a broken system that they then use to further increase profits.
No one decides uber is a fun hobby, if someone says they do it for fun, they’re lying or insane, I’ve done uber, it’s dangerous and a third of the riders are drunk and scary as shit. I’m a big dude, but crazy and drunk is unpredictable, and vomit is impossible to get out of your carpet.
At $100 per shoot she can pay off her camera in one year doing one shoot a week. That’s if it’s a hobby.
But since it’s not a hobby for her, as she points out, that means she can do 3-5 shoots per week. If she charges $300 per shoot, and averages let’s say 4 shoots per week, that’s over $60k per year. A small salary, but people get by for less.
If she wants to make more, that’s fine. But she has to convince people that she’s worth a higher price by doing quality work and demonstrating consistency, professionalism, building a network of returning clients and recommendations if she wants to be fully booked each week. Not by telling them how expensive her equipment is…
Just playing devils advocate here, there should be more involved than simply taking pictures. There will be editing, and putting together an album that makes sense to the customer as well; therefore she could charge more for her time and upcharge for album features such as hard copy decorative stuff.
Then again, there is that saying “starving artist” and all…
Sure, but I factored that in by considering 5 shoots per week “fully booked.” That gives you an average of 8 hours per shoot for everything from transport, set up, shooting, take-down, editing, archiving, billing, etc.
Not unreasonable, especially considering that’s a 40 hour week. Overtime exists if she needs longer, and should be billed accordingly. $1500 in one week is more than a lot of people make, even working over 40 hours.
Is the $100-$300 she mentions a flat rate or an hourly rate? Even as a flat rate that would be decent for one day’s work. If it’s hourly, that’s pretty lucrative and leaves no room to complain, especially not about all the extra stuff that’s involved.
Physical copies would of course be charged a la carte or as a bundle or whatever; it’s pretty standard for those to be add-on costs, unless a certain number of items were already part of the negotiated contract. But with print-on-demand services these days, that adds very little additional work or overhead expense for the photographer.
But yeah if she wants to charge more than $300 for one shoot, then she needs to spend time building her reputation, not complaining about the cost of her equipment and acting like her cheapskate customers are to blame.
You can build a reputation with a $400 mirrorless camera, if you’re a good photographer. Then invest in professional equipment when you can afford it.
At $100 per shoot she can pay off her camera in one year doing one shoot a week.
Assuming you don’t value your time, sure. Pro-photographers charge a lot more than that. Also, who wants to give up a year’s worth of weekends for a fancy camera?
Let’s look at the rest of that paragraph you selectively quoted:
At $100 per shoot she can pay off her camera in one year doing one shoot a week. That’s if it’s a hobby.
[emphasis added]
What a bad faith attempt to stir shit up over nothing.
And even if your pictures were good, more than 100$ per photo is overpriced asf, and with that you can recover your inversion and gain more.
If my photographer can get me the picture I need with the $300 camera, I’m hiring them first. Not everyone needs their pictures on a billboard or TV ad.
Photography is harder than most people think. You need to get to the places where you are doing your job, there is tons of communication involved, then there is editing and proper archival stuff you need to do, accounting is also completely different from that of an uber driver’s, and it’s not just the camera that costs more than 5K (looking at you BRIESE and any basic lens set – telephoto, normal, wide angle, zoom, low light will quickly exceed the 15K mark if you care about professional standards). It’s really a whole thing.
And then there’s lights. A decent portrait setup will run you thousands easily, and if you want to do anything even slightly abnormal (colored lights, say) it can be astronomically high. Art is expensive.
It’s absolutely not. You can take perfectly fine, artsy photographs with a bunch of cheap gels and Chinese import lights.
You’ll be shocked to learn that people took fantastic pictures before an $8.6k M.ZUIKO lens came into existence.
Go ahead and tell me what a setup the likes of what Evans or Miller had at the time would cost today and stop putting art behind a paywall. Stock photography and repeatable product pictures are expensive, but that’s not art.
Professional photographers have expensive equipment because it makes certain shots commercially feasible, not because it’s impossible to create art without money.
… Walker Evans famously shot with a Zeiss Contax (among many other cameras) - which retailed for an inflation-adjusted ~$2,700.
I’m gonna stick with “art is expensive”. Yes, good equipment isn’t required to make art (a claim I didn’t make) - but the reason to have good equipment is because you don’t have to fight your tools to get the results you want. Sure, I could fuck around with gels and can lights to get the cool effects I want - but unless I have a stack of ~2.2 million gels, a Westcott RGB point-light is going to be both more capable and critically less time consuming so more of my time is spent doing art than it is futzing around while my model (usually myself) slowly wilts. Similarly, you can produce incredible paintings with a stick and chewed berries - but the time spent going out to pick a bushel of pokeweed, then process that into a usable format, then wait for each stroke to dry, can’t be excluded just because it’s a more authentic process.
(And don’t be an elitist about what constitutes art, either - stock photography is absolutely an art form even if you sneer at it.)
This is true, it’s the need for consistency that drives up costs.
deleted by creator
My house cost 300 grand and you want me to look after your kids for 60 quid a day?
Hire whoever took the picture of her.
They’re obviously better.
The old barbershop conundrum
But Doctor! I am Nataliacci!
