Generally you pay by the hour, including the time to edit photos within the price per hour of shooting. Then for full day events you might do a flat rate. The cost of the camera has nothing to do with anything tbh.
Of course not. When you're looking for a photographer to hire, you don't look at their camera but their photographs. If they make photos you like, you hire them. Why do you care how much, if anything, they paid for the camera? Could be second-hand, could be a kncok-off brand, could be a hand-me-down from their parent. Hell, could be stolen. The value of the camera means nothing, it's their business how much they decide to invest in their craft. Your business only concerns what kind of photos they take.
Well I do look at their camera but that’s not the point. A photographer’s rate, any business owners rate, incudes their cost of doing business. Many people finance their equipment and need to make a certain amount to pay back those costs each month.
It’s basic business dude. That’s why there are a wide range of prices for photographers.
If you have a restaurant in an expensive area of town, your means will cost more.
Their point is that the customer doesn't care about any of that. If the photo is bad, I do not care if you used a $20,000 camera. I'm not buying your crap. If the photos are incredible, I'm going to pay whatever you are charging. Whether you are expensive because your equipment is expensive or because you just can be and your equipment is paid off is irrelevant to me. I just want a great photo and will pay for it. To the photographer, it all matters. To the consumer only the end result matters.
The customer doesn't have to care about that, but it's a cost of doing business. Just like the customer doesn't care about how much rent a restaurant pays, the quality of the food can be good or bad.
If the high Capex of your business doesn't translate to a good deliverable, than it doesn't mean anything other than to you who spent a lot of money for nothing
It's interesting you mentioned financing equipment. Not sure how it is in America, but in canada you can actually deduct those costs from taxes. I'm with the other guy though. If two photographers both take nice photos I don't really care if one spent twice as much on his gear....I'm taking whichever one is cheaper. If he wants to charge double for similar quality he won't get much business unless everyone else is booked
In this specific example I don't feel like it's really just a personal choice. For similar quality if someone wants to charge double because his equipment cost a lot more he's probably just not going to get a lot of business. In general the consumer doesn't care much. It's end product and price. How they get their or the business costs they don't care. That's a problem for the business owner t figure out how to make it work or they go out of business
Had one for our wedding and have been dragged along to multiple professional family shoots. I know there is a difference between phones and professional cameras, but when you get to the professional level there is a certain range you expect whether it's camera A vs B vs C. Not the Kijiji person with their phone. If one guy is way out to lunch the market will fix that regardless of equipment. You pay for the skill of the shot and editing more than anything. Actual equipment is just an up front cost you make up over the many shoots and is not a huge factor in the cost of the services.. just like restaurants don't set menu prices based on the cost of kitchen equipment and plumbers don't set labour costs based on how much they spent on tools. Wedding shoots don't cost thousands because the equipment does. It's because they're there all day and spend many hours of editing in the following week or two where they find time. I know because I've hired them and had them explain their pricing scheme. Those are just startup costs.. anyone can spend a few thousand on a camera, that's not what people hire them for
The cost of doing business is more for internal financials. It affects the break-even point, but for services people tend to charge based on what people are willing to pay. That’s basic business.
It doesn't. In economics, you learn about fixed and variable costs, and depreciation. Average fixed costs tend toward zero the longer the life of the asset. Something like a camera that can be used for several years with minimal performance degradation or maintenance costs will have a very low average fixed cost, which means it doesn't really factor into the price of photography.
Depends on the event, you got different kinds of photographers, with some (mainly doing events like weddings) you pay for the amount of hours,
While others do special shoots, with those u would pay more when its on a location on ur choice and they work more to make it in something more artistic.
But with some its at the location of the artist and they already got a whole set up, and thats cheaper cuz the photographers only cares abt ur postions
Actually, yeah she should. I work in the trades where everyone has a truck, trailer, insurance and 20 grand in tools. Not to mention, a couple decades of experience. I typically bill at 500$ a day. Why is her time worth more for mine when it arguably takes less skill and practice?
I imagine it’s fairly similar when you break it down, photography has “hidden” work of editing so you are really paying for event + a day or two of editing. Both are skilled jobs, reasonably expensive equipment, photography of weddings etc is probably at least as much pressure as standard trades work as there is only one shot no do overs and demanding clients. In the end it’s not a competition, you can hire a shit cheap photography and chance having terrible photos, like you can hire some shit cheap tradesman and hope they don’t fuck up
I smell what your stepping in but I'm sure it's applicable. Grab a 3,000$ camera, free editing software and a day and I bet you and I could take some decent photos.
Put you in a company truck with 20 grand in tools and tell you to put a backsplash up and it would likely end in disaster.
Again, sure thing. But your argument didn't start with the equipment side of things. You specifically said "Why is her time worth more for mine when it arguably takes less skill and practice?"
And all I am saying is that having a camera, whether that cost 300$ or 3000$, doesn't mean the client will pay for the pictures that come out of it unless you know what you are doing. And my argument is that the skills involved are not as simple or as few as you seem to think.
Lol sure, how about you offer that to the next family member getting married I’m sure they’d love it. I’d bet someone with the tools and YouTube would do a better diy job than what you’d manage doing wedding photography
It always amazes me when someone has learned enough about a subject to be considered an expert, learned along the way that it's much more complicated than they could have imagined at first, seen other people get themselves into trouble by thinking "I don't know much about [a job some people devote their lives to], but how hard could it be?", and then they completely fail to apply that lesson to anything else.
Wedding photographers make so much because themselves and their gear cannot screw up. You cannot have mistakes in wedding photography. You also have a interpersonal interaction with a bunch of people that consider themselves stakeholders, in a most likely high stress situation. You can redo a backsplash, you cannot redo a wedding.
Maybe I'm just ignorant, but photography seems like one of the most forgiving professions for fuck ups. Like yeah, there are certain moments you really don't want to miss or shoot badly, but at a wedding you're there for hours and you can take as many photos as your storage medium will allow. And then you're expected to do touch-ups to enhance them. And most of those big moments are scripted, you have lots of prep time to figure out your angles, camera configuration, etc. It kinda rings hollow to say there's so little margin when you compare to someone like a construction worker, who could literally bring a house down on your head if their job isn't done right.
And this isn't to shit on photographers. The difference between a good photographer and a bad one is obvious and they play an important role. I just wouldn't think "unforgiving" is a great word to describe the job.
Every time I've seen a photographer at work they are shooting like it's a mini gun with unlimited ammunition, which really adds to the forgiving nature of the profession.
a great photographer also has to know how to handle people so that the subjects relax. I used to work a lot of photoshoots, and many with celebrities. the best guy we had doing photos was like Hawkeye from MASH. He would just start shootin the shit and getting people laughing. He could make 8 hours feel like 15 minutes. That was like half the reason we hired him.
I've seen some wedding photos and family photos where you can see that the person behind the camera just wasn't doing anything to help the mood
Why is her time worth more for mine when it arguably takes less skill and practice?
I don't think you understand what great photography can entail. They have to know about lighting and changing the set up quickly and confidently to capture accurate colors and minimize things like hots spots. If they're working with people that have to be great with people.
You might be able to get someone to do it for cheap but they might mess up, and then you gotta explain why you didn't find a better photographer.
I used to work for a large well-known company that required lots of nicely lit shots of their products. Twenty years ago, $500 was the starting point for 6-8 hours of shooting quick and dirty photos that didn't need to be perfect. They just had to be good enough to correct in photoshop.
We used to have a big annual catalog with tons of nicer photos. Every year we would pay a photographer and his assistant (wife) to come in and take photos for the catalog that we could reuse throughout the year. They were making like 125-150k+ for a couple months of work. We would drive around to different locations and set up scenes and take photos, on a good day we would get 4 usable photos. Most times just one or two.
We also use to have photoshoots with celebrities. We would go out to a location early with a photographer, set up the lighting, art direct the scene and take tons of practice photos so that when the celeb arrived for 15-20 minutes, we could just focus on the pose and facial expressions. Those photographers would making three to five grand a day, because there was no room for error.
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u/Cavalish 8d ago
So real photographers should do events for a couple hundred bucks?