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A 10 min ride home is not the same as a 3 hour wedding and 12 hours processing images and video.
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.
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.
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.
Of course. The second ‘wedding’ leaves the customer’s lips, the price jumps 5x. Because fuck you pay me.
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.
$5k is also literally hobby money. I’ve spent way more than that snowboarding and hiking over the years. My lab setup at work is literally worth more than I will make in my entire career. Sit down bitch.
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
OH YEAH?!
I’m stealing this 😂
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 $10k.
But for easy jobs like anything in a high volume studio where the lighting is already known, and there aren’t any logistics involved, it should be much cheaper. It just all depends.
I did a gig for a while doing Photoshop clean up of wedding images and portraits.
Just that one step can be an exceptional amount of work.
Wedding images are challenging because venues, decor, wardrobe, etc., are chosen for real-world regular eyeball beauty. In darker settings (many churches, nighttime), or settings lit by bad lights for photography (fluorescent bulbs, LED bulbs without good wide spectrum light, random dance floor stuff), adds a lot of post processing work, and wedding clients tend to be very demanding clients (for good reason). It’s all real work, well beyond what can be seen in the day-of interaction between photographer and client.
I would also highlight the sheer volume.
Somebody wants a few senior pictures taken or their kid in front of some toys and trees and stuff, and you could be dealing with a relatively manageable number.
Weddings take hours, often have dozens of people, and with everything being digital these days you can take a fuckton of photos to make sure that you capture everything possible.
the sheer volume
Picking through hundreds or even thousands of shots and choosing about a few dozen good ones is, yeah, equally difficult.
That’s why it’s important to set expectations in advance. 50 images shot in the same setting and processed in bulk with maybe minor adjustments to each is something very different from 50 images that you have to touch up every single one.
And even if your pictures were good, more than 100$ per photo is overpriced asf, and with that you can recover your inversion and gain more.
Wedding photographer is an interesting job. With a lot of jobs, people buy the minimum viable equipment they need to get the job done.
But, people who get into wedding photography seem to generally be people who are really into photography. Rather than a $5000 camera being the requirement for the job. The $5000 camera is a present you can justify getting yourself if the wedding photography game is going well.
It’s not a tool that goes into the case and stays there until the next wedding. It’s something to be used for the kinds of pictures that don’t pay the bills but that you love taking: nature shots, architecture, abstract art, gritty realism, etc.
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…
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?
and if you do not pay taxes, and do account for software licenses, work going into post processing, and general admin work for your business as a start.
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.
???
Get some thicker skin, my guy. If you’re getting paid for the work, its going to be more than a hobby. Especially if you’re planning to work 50 separate gigs.
Ffs, if you can file taxes as a business, we’re well past the point of hobbying. That’s just a part time job
This isn’t about having thin skin, this is about you being unnecessarily combative. Don’t flatter yourself thinking I’m torn up about it.
If you’re getting paid for the work, its going to be more than a hobby. Especially if you’re planning to work 50 separate gigs.
Ffs, if you can file taxes as a business, we’re well past the point of hobbying. That’s just a part time job
Hence where the rest of my original comment comes in. I know you like cherrypicking excerpts devoid of context, but ffs everyone can see my whole fucking comment. It’s right there. And you’re acting like you’re actually making a point here? Go away.
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.
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.
Really depends though.
I do photography as a salaried employee with my personal $5k camera, so my paycheck is technically what I’m paid. But I do a lot more than just photos and videos.
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, lot more work to setup multiple times and try to match looks over long stretches of time.
But I base that on who I’m doing them for and how picky they’ll be about it.
I have worked with scheduling photographers by the hour, photo journalists, not your wedding/graduation people. I’ve booked shoots all over the US and it’s 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.
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
Is the weight of the $5000 camera how she got the permanent kink in her neck?
Partially, but it’s the £5000 camera in combination with the additional kit a £5000 camera owner carries around with them, like putting a tripod bag and a spare lenses bag on the same shoulder.
Looks like a Canon?
Canon RF lenses are outrageously priced, even amongst other outrageous ILC brands, because they lock out third parties. So yeah, this lady got ripped off.
Ehh, They’re more expensive, but most of them come with IS.
I’d still rather shoot Nikon.
The APS-C lenses are awful. And the FF ones with IS, especially the zooms, have outrageous barrel distortion that crops the sensor a ton… on $2K lenses.
This is the brand new 20-50mm F/4 for instance, and its not even the worst offender. It’s $1400:
The Thypoch 24-50 2.8, for comparison, which is like 1/3 the price on Sony E. This is $650, often less on sale:
I’m speaking as someone who mistakenly bought into Canon APS-C. I loathe it, as a hobbyist with a Canon SLR for years.
I’m selling out, as soon as I see with what Fuji/Panasonic/Sony cook up within the year.
Yes, rf did take a nosedive
How great that there is still EF. I just got myself an r10 since Sony dosent currently have a current aps-c (want that because I throw up from the laggy ones like the 6400 had when I tried it) for around the 600-800€ range.
Also with tamron and others canon also confirmed that they are already licensing third parties.
But if you look at half recent ones like the Canon 70-300 is II USM or even a canon 18-55 is II (or Tamron 17-70 f/2.8, which I currently run, they’re perfectly OK for what I’m using them for at least.
It’s not the IS that makes them expensive, it’s the locked out ecosystem and the monopoly they have. I’m not saying they’re not good - they are (from what I’ve seen), but healthy competition, if it existed, would’ve driven the prices down a bit.
As for IS itself, since the move to IBIS, it makes sense that some lenses drop the IS and only rely on the body’s. IMO it used to matter in the DSLR days when IBIS was not really a thing. Nowadays it’s sensible to only put it into the longer lenses that physically need it (the longer the lens, the more physical movement required to compensate and so on).
Yeah and that Uber driver can’t afford rent. Photographers often have less business in the winter, too, and they have a ton of extra equipment to lug around. I know a wedding photographer and it’s a lot of work day of and post work to make sure it’s all nice.
the camera doesnt matter. are your skills any good?
I good photographer with a shitty lens will not make a good commercial product lol come on guys.
What do you think photoshop is for?
“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.
the prices they charge and the inability to give me the damn RAWs is why I just got a camera instead.
For the price of one shoot, you can buy someone’s lightly used $5,000 kit on ebay. I’ve had a Canon I bought a decade ago that’s still works great. Maybe got it for $250 or so IIRC.
I found a guy willing to chuck me RAWs for a lower price, still felt a bit ripped off. He shot 90% of the day on a walkabout zoom and the photos were nothing special.
The audacity to ask for the raw, unprocessed photos for a lower price, and then complain that they look boring.
You wanted the raws. Process them yourself.
I mean this comment makes total sense if we pretend that all photos are equally valuable and that the color balance is the only issue but not if we actually address the part where the photographer ostensibly took a bunch of poorly framed candids and failed to capture the energy of the moment
The audacity to ask for the raw, unprocessed photos for a lower price, and then complain that they look boring.
That has the same energy as going to a restaurant and asking for the raw ingredients.
The craft I’m paying for is in the taking of the photos, processing is subjective and isn’t going to transform a shitty photo into a gorgeous one. Your restaurant comparison is shitty, it would only make sense if I was asking to just plate the food myself.
Processing won’t do shit to a shitty shot, with terrible composition and lighting.
Our wedding photographer gave us both RAWs and processed JPEGs
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Asked mine to give it to me RAW and it turned into a huge misunderstanding.
Ohhhh this pisses me off soooooo much. I decided to do family photos and specifically asked for the raws before I went into the shoot. They still gave me a hard time after the shoot to get the raws. They gave me a stripped down .dng without any camera settings. Ohhhh that pisses me off so much.
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.
You’re right, but it’s not the argument she’s presenting.
She’s a stock image
She should’ve mentioned that instead of just listing a single piece of equipment
Its easy to say something like “my camera for this shoot costs $5k, you could rent it for $300 a day and do it yourself” but people dont really care about art or skill. If youre shooting a wedding, for example, there are hundreds of little candid moments that your friend John the Designated Driver wouldn’t catch that Natalie GirlWhoDoesThisForALiving would.
Not to mention there aren’t enough weddings a day to sustain someone for $300 per, and youre competing with others, and blah blah blah.
I tend to follow my instinct of “your art is worth whatever you say it is”. If i like your art and i like your price, ill pay it, no haggling. If i dont like one or either, i apologize for wasting your time.
In my experience, items are only worth what someone is actually willing to pay. Because if it is priced so high that no one in your target demographic is actually willing to pay that much, it is just unrealized gains. And for most people, an unrealized gain is equivalent to 0.
I see this a lot in the MTG community. People will say a card is worth $200 because that is what they list for on eBay. I ask if they’ve ever had an offer for that much - and the answer is almost exclusively no. I tell them that the ones listed on eBay are the ones that aren’t selling. The real value is less because no one actually buying them for $200, that is the cutoff where people stopped buying the card and so the listings stay up.
I remember eBay used to let you view items that have actually sold that way you could see the actual price an item moves at. Haven’t used it in a while but if that’s still there I would show them what price the card has sold for in the recent past
so you are equally unhappy about your favourite restaurant not stating what percentage paid for a meal goes into admin, and into repairs/replacement equipment and admin work?
It’s probably fake. Don’t take image macros/memes too seriously ;)
Only 5k? Sound like a hobby, because most professional photographers have a body that is already 5k by itself, plus several lenses ranging between 2 and 20k. I mean, I’m a hobby photographer and my gear already exceeds at least 8k. So stop bitching Karen.
All of your silly little lives are hobbies. Peasants… fuck your wedding hahahaha. Stupid idiots don’t get it. You eventually will. I Quit… Here’s Why the Technician Shortage Is Getting Worse
Nobody is going to watch your youtube video, just type the relevant info.
Thats nearly as obnoxious as dumping AI slop into a discussion.
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.
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.
Supply and demand. Lots of people willing to take that risk. Not as many want to learn about the physics of light.
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.
Yeah I figured a photographer would have an hourly rate, an that rate would depend on a lot of variables.
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.
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.
yeah, and Adams was dealing with enormous negatives that required chemical processing, which then got printed onto enormous prints and were very very very much edited! one example you can see here with the artist, they’re quite distinct! But this is analog editing, overexposing some areas (burning) and underexposing the image in other areas (dodging), using lights and mattes to select areas.
https://jtunney.com/the-art-of-dodge-burn/
there’s a tremendous amount of intent that goes into finding the location, then the weather, and time, and waiting for magic - that part in the clouds or just as light filters past a ridge - and then with analog photography, you shoot and hope lol, there’s no instant feedback, just trust the process and be meticulous.
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.
No, “AI” can’t “take a shitty photo I took myself with my phone and make it look professional”. It can maybe make it look less shit, to an untrained eye.
Getting decent shots taken by someone who knows what they’re doing (regardless of gear, even) is absolutely not the same thing. And that’s before you get to all the environmental and ethics issues around it, so it certainly isn’t “free”.
I mean, you do you, and if auto-tweaked snapshots serve your purpose, more power to you. But don’t think for a second that you’ve made a photographer superfluous. You weren’t her (or any photographer’s) target group to begin with.
It can
I don’t run a nature magazine, AI will do just fine for my Azure profile picture
Uber effectively corner a market and have drivers working for very little.
Uber and Lyft are terrible to their workers, but you can still call a cab.
If this photographer can reduce her time spent to the same level as a 10 minute Uber journey, then yes - she should not be charging more than $12
They want to do a shoot for a 100 - 300 bucks bucks, which would be 1 - 3 hours or so of her time at a comparable rate.
1-3 hours working directly with the client, and then 3-6 hours spent editing (or more, depending on the type of shoot). Even if they don’t have a studio to pay rent on, $100 for an on-location shoot in a park is still ridiculously low for the amount of work involved. Art is expensive for a reason, good art more so!
As an IT guy, i feel the opposite. I fixed it in ten minutes because I have ten years of experience. My hourly rate goes up because I spend so little time fixing the problem, if I charged any less, I couldn’t earn a living.
True, but a photographer has to work with people, which you know damn well is the worst part.
IT also has to work with people
Only if they manage to get past my labyrinth of cunning traps and ticketing system auto-emails…
Some of us have to answer calls
There's a solution for that:
but a photographer has to work with people
Easiest way to tell me you’ve never worked IT
The story goes:
The huge printing presses of a major Chicago newspaper began malfunctioning on the Saturday before Christmas, putting all the revenue for advertising that was to appear in the Sunday paper in jeopardy. None of the technicians could track down the problem. Finally, a frantic call was made to the retired printer who had worked with these presses for over 40 years. “We’ll pay anything; just come in and fix them,” he was told.
When he arrived, he walked around for a few minutes, surveying the presses; then he approached one of the control panels and opened it. He removed a dime from his pocket, turned a screw 1/4 of a turn, and said, “The presses will now work correctly.” After being profusely thanked, he was told to submit a bill for his work.
The bill arrived a few days later, for $10,000.00! Not wanting to pay such a huge amount for so little work, the printer was told to please itemize his charges, with the hope that he would reduce the amount once he had to identify his services. The revised bill arrived: $1.00 for turning the screw; $9,999.00 for knowing which screw to turn.
Wasn’t that Charles Proteus Steinmetz fixing a generator at one of Fords factories? “1 $ for the piece of chalk, 9,999 $ for knowing where to put the mark”.
Search for “Ford” on the linked page to see the story as given there :)
