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tbf I doubt many Uber drivers actually profit, especially the ones driving $40k cars
On the Uber and transport topic, I sometimes get to ride the light rail and I have to drive to the park n ride to leave my car and ride the rail.
The trip from my home to the park n ride is a quick 10 to 15 minutes by car. By bus it’s 1 to 2 hours. By foot it’s probably a few days.
The light rail takes me 30 minutes from north king county to Seattle downtown. If I drove there it would take an hour of mostly just sitting in traffic.
Progress is slow but if there was a light rail from bothell to Kenmore to the I-5 corridor, that would basically eliminate my need for a 40 to $90 Uber. We only pay that if we a traveling. That way we get a car from our house to the link and then easy 30 minutes to the airport.
The whole Uber thing is great unless there are only a few riders or a few drivers. Plus the cut that goes to Uber is probably stifling innovation. I recall that there’s an open-source Uber system called…
Not every gig is gonna earn you the cost of that camera. And it doesn’t need to.
I work in disability. The act of driving is not considered a skill. Photography is.
I don’t disagree with the notion, but phrased like this it’s kind of like trolling/clickbait - getting people to engage regardless of what they’re saying.
She wants her investment repaid in 2 or 3 gigs?
Taxes, assistant fee, mileage, you own more than one lens and one cam body…no lol not even close. We haven’t even talked about post processing, delivery, rights, etc.
She should’ve mentioned that instead of just listing a single piece of equipment
It’s probably fake. Don’t take image macros/memes too seriously ;)
You’re right, but it’s not the argument she’s presenting.
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.
Good photographers are actually pretty rare and - in my experience - treat the field of capturing visual information as a science, but since the advent of consumer DSLR and mirrorless systems, modern-day digital cameras with nearly instant automatically-focusing lenses that utilize a grid array and intelligence models to smartly maintain clarity on what is most likely a subject as it moves in 3D space, have made it so much harder to fuck things up that it essentially has opened the floodgates of photography so that there’s an endless sea of morons thinking that buying a $5000 Canon with a full-frame sensor and a lens the size of a Stanley thermos makes them Ansel Adams.
It’s the same with any field where the bar to entry gets suddenly lowered. The market becomes immediately flooded with new “experts” because the tools evolve to the point that they become nearly idiot-proof. Think Claude vibe coders calling themselves programmers / software engineers, Gemini prompters calling themselves visual designers, and people on SoundCloud uploading jingles they farted out on SUNO calling themselves musicians.
To me, the difference between a person who takes pictures and a photographer is that Ansel Adams might spend a week waiting for exactly the right lighting conditions before taking a single picture of a setting. There’s a whole lot of planning we don’t see.
She’s not really full of shit, but she is being kind of bitchy. Meanwhile, Xavier’s just a trolling asshole.
Right, like the uber driver is getting ripped off too! The existence of multiple jobs not getting paid enough doesn’t justify any of them not paying enough.
I’m not so sure.
I guess you could argue that the rideshare driver doesn’t own a car solely for rideshare, but the same argument could be made about the camera.
I’d argue that the rideshare driver is putting more wear and tear on the vehicle than the photographer is per shoot.
OOP maybe doesn’t realize it, but her post is perhaps an argument for spending less on the camera.
The photographer even at these rates that she percieves to be low, is going to pay off her camera before the rideshare driver pays off the car.
Driving is not as skilled as photography. High end photography requires a lot of technical understanding of light and the camera settings.
Even if that were true (most of the time I get a rideshare it’s in a place you couldn’t pay me to drive in)…
Driving is way more risky than photography, unless you’re shooting in a war zone.
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.
Don’t forget - the “difficult” client who wants you to make additional specific time-consuming changes AFTER reviewing them a first time.
When driving someone, they don’t usually have the ability now to ask you to drive them to additional locations after you both agreed on an original destination and fee.
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.
And it all depends on what kinda.professional she is.
the camera doesnt matter. are your skills any good?
A good photographer with a shitty lens will not make a good commercial product lol come on guys.
“A poor workman blames his tools”
Not in a technical field. You shoot with a Barbie camera and I’ll use a hasselblad. Which will be better? “The best camera is the one you have” is bullshit.
sure, but if I want the color sensitivity data for the photosites you either need a camera with that information already known or to measure it yourself.
A 10 min ride home is not the same as a 3 hour wedding and 12 hours processing images and video.
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.
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.
selling services is a commitment of time to reach a certain minimum standard.
Ok, but i want a wedding photo, not a Van Gogh.
Then get your friends/family to take pics with their phones, and don’t hire a wedding photographer. No one is forcing you to. Just don’t then go on to complain if the specific moments you want are missed/blurry/composition sucks.
Like, maybe this is a controversial opinion, but of all the people trying to rip you off in the world, photographers are pretty low on the list.
Just have your wedding event near a flock camera and invite the local police chief. Ask if he can download the pics for you after a few drinks.
Nah, phones make too noisy images. While the people with the gear often edit too much.
I wish I could get a Van Gogh for only a few thousand.
I will sell you an nft of one for $2000
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.
This comment section sucks lol I don’t even know where to begin.
Advertising yourself as:
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Bad at internal budgeting
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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?
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… 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.
Price transparency != Marketing strategy.
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this is fine, in that first glance, and then you think about it for a moment…
so much more going on in the maths, in what’s presented, and beyond,
utterly confounding the point it sets out to make.
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?
A pro is not a hobbyist. That make all the difference. It take years to handle photography
The difference between a pro and a hobbyist is the money, not the experience.
Nonsense. Of course you have more experience when it’s your full-time job. If not, you’re just bad. Only a few hobbyists will have your level of knowledge and mastery. And everything is not about the money.
When you’re doing higher end listings it’s frowned upon, makes you seem cheap.
Then it sounds like the $1,500 is justified as your wife isn’t being cheap.
What do you mean charged? You negotiate rate beforehand. No one wants to shoot your real estate shit, so you pay more. If it’s too high, hire someone that has no experience that won’t survive on their rates. Good lord, people.
She’s probably mad AI can take a shitty photo I took myself with my phone and make it look professional and I no longer need her
I wouldn’t mind paying someone like her if it was reasonable. It’s not reasonable, so I don’t hire her. I still need photos though. AI can do it for free? OK.
Teleobjectctive for photoshoot?
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.
You are not the target client for that rate then.
