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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
$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.
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 isnāt worth the pay, either, so itās 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. Itās not a hobby, itās 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, theyāre lying or insane, Iāve done uber, itās dangerous and a third of the riders are drunk and scary as shit. Iām a big dude, but crazy and drunk is unpredictable, and vomit is impossible to get out of your carpet.
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?
But yeah I'd only be real like that after I got to know them more during the initial introduction. If someone was just telling me what I was going to do without having a discussion about it, being an asshole or control freak. I'd eliminate the cheap for them and throw a high estimate because I just didn't want to deal with them for less.
At that point I realized whatever I was going to estimate they were going to go way way out of scope on and easier if I just assumed that financially ahead or just didn't get the job.
Overall I hated dealing with clients and the "marketing guru" jerk offs. So now I have a boring slower job with nice pay and if I do anything on the side, I got to be somewhat interested in it myself. The luxury is I can just hang up on those people now.
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.
... 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.
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.
If my photographer can get me the picture I need with the $300 camera, Iām hiring them first. Not everyone needs their pictures on a billboard or TV ad.
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.
you don't zoom with your feet. that is how you change perspective, and it is not the same as zooming. serious hobby photographer should understand the difference.
Alternatively: drat, you got me, Iām not a hobby photographer, Iām just a lesbian with a camera.
Alternatively: drat, you got me, am I still approved by the board youāre on to take pictures of cool things, or should I turn my kit in?
Alternatively and truly: what is the point of the tone youāre using in the last sentence? Youāre not aiming to shame me out of taking and making photographs, are you? Even if you donāt want to call them art, Iām still using a camera to capture visuals that I enjoy to a file, and adjusting them to my heartās content. And what if I donāt really understand your definition of perspective vs. zoom? English is a second language for me!
Alternative and deeply truly, in my bones: who the fuck are you? Letās see some of your damn portfolio.
(And yes, I downvoted myself to save you the damn click, cause letās be real, youāre not gonna reply, youāre gonna downvote and move on.)
Alternative and deeply truly, in my bones: who the fuck are you? Letās see some of your damn portfolio.
i am someone pointing your attention to the fact that you don't zoom with your feet. i assume you did not know that, because why would you say that otherwise, so now you know something you didn't before and you can think about how to apply that knowledge to your pictures of cool things. i don't really need to present my portfolio for that.
And yes, I downvoted myself to save you the damn click,
you seem to have forgotten to do that. what is the point of making such bizarre performative claim when you don't even follow through?
if simple comment sends you into such tailspin, maybe public discussion is not for you...
Zooming with your feet (and switching primes) is part and parcel to events photography. If I see a zoom lens at a wedding I will judge the photographer.
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.
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, thereās scenic photography, which is basically having really good composition skills, knowing good locations, and timing, and then thereās people photography, which isā¦ extra. I donāt blame photographers for charging more for that shit lol
āI want our wedding photos to be the two of us on a cliff at the beach at sunset with really pretty clouds behind us!ā And youāre 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 thatās extra lighting (that youāll have to carry to the location) and extra time in photoshop to be sure you can still see their faces clearlyā¦
Yeah, I donāt do people cause theyāre hard to look at, what with the brain damage and all, so sceneryās more of my thing. Scenery doesnāt stay put, but itās a hell of a lot less wiggly than people.
And I mean, Iāve 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 Iāve gotta go there this weekend, just to get out of town.
Iām out here with my legal name up front, making art that I like, and being really, really proud of it.
I, uh, donāt have a website though, just a Pixelfed account that I update with new work fairly often.
Iām gonna start posting more work, not just because I like the work I post, but now with an added layer of spite! (Nothing functionally will change except my spirits will continue to be undampened, despite their recent attempts at doing so.)
Too late...I used to get covers and was all city. Saw my work in the paper and every news stand. Didn't matter... I gave up on it a long time ago. Most slobs just want porn, piggy slop and you know what I don't care anymore. Shoot your own damn photos, fix your own $8000 bicycle and fix your own damn car. Fucking twats I hope this slob ass nation is nuked into oblivion. and I mean that. Their little meaningless lives and their own self perception blinds them into thinking they are somehow important. What good is a doctor if no one can afford it. What good is a lawyer if no one can afford it. Don't get me started on these marketurds and office chimps. I kinda enjoyed when all the middle manager gen X'ers lost their jobs to AI. The great equaliser. šļø. More layoffs to come. These assholes will be wiped out.
PS the paper I worked for the owner thought I wasn't worth making full time. He got caught selling drugs went to jail and the paper went belly up. He never showed his face around town after that... then after jail worked at a hotel at the desk after thatš humbled you could say. Fuck everybody and this whole gawd damn world. All these little piggies. OINK OINK OINK Fuck these boomers.
All the "successful" photographers I knew were boomers about to retire and scam artist. Fuck the arts forever I just pray for nukes. Support small business bla bla bla capitalism gonna capitalise on you damn ass real soon if it hasn't already.
I just shoot the art that I wanna shoot. I like my works, Iām real damn proud of them. I wanna show them to as many people as I can, to get in galleries, to have my work be seen, to make my mark on this world.
Iām not a laborer with my camera. I donāt shoot food for packaging, I donāt get ninety seconds with an NBA star, Iām not on NatGeo.
Iāve made a grand total of $300 from this gig cause I sold a canvas and a few prints, and I sold a shit ton of magic cards to get the camera to begin with.
I guess what Iām saying is, Iām not gonna be some jaded old hack like the dude I replied to up there. I do this simply for the love.
And for what itās worth, your words have a good weight. :)
Hey, you might want to reset the password on your account, someone used it to post something absolutely idiotic under your username. Just letting you know, so that you get this sorted out.
Actually no, I'm preserving the text of what you said here so you can't do a dirty delete: @darntootin@lemmy.world said "Hey man, I support your hobby, but uh, this is embarrassing to boast about. Be humble, youāre an amateur and thatās okay."
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...
a quick 10 to 15 minutes by car. [ā¦] By foot it's probably a few days.
Just as a raw ballpark estimate. By car could be 50km/h on average, with a walking speed of roughly 5km/h, that's 10x the time it takes by car, i.e. 2-3 hours.
A few days usually takes you trough a few adjacent townships. Do you have to take a humongous detour on foot?
Or they are so weak they can only walk 30 minutes per day and had to rest until the next day
5km/h is also faster than average walk that is probably not a pace you'd maintain for hours? After considering you also need to stop on intersection you may be getting the average down to less than 4, but then if it's actually a 10 minute ride you'd probably also spend enough time in stop lights and your average speed would also be way lower than 50km/h
5km/h is on the low end of the "average" walking speed but waiting at intersections and lights will murder that speed. You could easily be on the upper end of six and then have to wait 5+ minutes at an intersection, bringing you back below a 5.
Tops. Waiting at intersections, slowing down for other traffic situations and driving on roads with a lower speed limit drags down that average, as others have mentioned with regards to walking.
just hypothesizing but: the part of the burbs they're traversing doesn't have much in the way of sidewalks along the highways, forcing detours along the local trails like the burke gilman.
At my house there are no buses. There are no light rails. There are no sidewalks, no bike lanes. You can walk in the easement of people's front yards but it's mostly a ditch, full of water when it's raining. I live inside the loop highway that runs around my 2+ million population city. Cars are the only option, even most of the homeless have cars here.
Taxes, assistant fee, mileage, you own more than one lens and one cam bodyā¦no lol not even close. We havenāt even talked about post processing, delivery, rights, etc.
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?
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 ā 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.)
I think eventually, you're saying the same thing. If you want to shoot professionally, it makes sense to get equipment to save time and have a manner of control over reproducibility. That's also why the local metal shop gets the $200 carbide endmills vs. grinding HSS blanks by hand. I did state that already.
I'll still disagree with two things. You absolutely did say "art is expensive", and stock photography will not produce a lot of art. It can be shot artfully, sure, but that's more of a word choice and eventually rather equates to craftsmanship. I'm sure there is at least one stock photographer out there, producing art all the time. Same with any amazing shot that happens to get uploaded to a stock library not becoming any less meaningful. But that's not common and simply not how the process works, claiming anything else would be disingenuous. I'm not out to disparage the craft or the skill of anyone involved, that's a completely different topic.
Finally, I was actually absolutely thinking of the Contax 1. Now, don't adjust for inflation. Why would you do that? This camera auctions for around $200, $250 today. Did something happen in the past 86 years that now makes it impossible to shoot the same, great pictures with that camera? I don't think so. Yes, shooting has become a lot more convenient, a lot more consistent (some people would argue that's a bad thing), but surely it's not the tool then that enabled these photographs. That was my angle.
(Please let's not get hung up on the particular camera model, availability of film etc., it's an example to make a point)
Did something happen in the past 86 years that now makes it impossible to shoot the same, great pictures with that camera?
Well, yes? The massive infrastructure built to support film photography disappeared. It's an incredibly expensive and fairly niche medium now, and one that does not have anything like a robust market to support a professional on. It's little more than a gimmick at this point - one that could produce great art absolutely, but one with a microscopically niche appeal and that would see you starved on the street if you tried to support yourself with it.
Anyways, yes I said art is expensive - twice, in fact - what I never said is that art requires expensive tools (which it doesn't). At the bare minimum art requires a vast investiture of that most precious resource, time, even if we're to set aside all the concerns with other expenses. Doing art professionally though, that needs the high quality tools to deliver the consistent and rapid results.
Being totally honest here though, I am incredibly skeptical of anyone who acts like they can decide what is and is not art. It's difficult to take their philosophical outlook seriously when they're comfortable passing judgment on that.
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.
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.
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.
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
Oops, sorry, I forgot you already decided that the photographer must have been the good guy so that means Iām wrong
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.
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.
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.
Right, like the uber driver is getting ripped off too! The existence of multiple jobs not getting paid enough doesnāt justify any of them not paying enough.
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.
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.
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.
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.
A good photographer also knows their tools that they would recognize when the shitty lens won't work, but they also would recognize which budget options can get the job done.
No, but a good used lens and an older camera body is plenty sufficient for good photos especially if you can edit worth a shit. You don't need some new mirrorless body and some crazy lens that lets you take aperture down to f/2 that is brand new to, for example, .
I'm confident that with my old canon EOS 5D Mark 2 I can outshoot any hobbymom who spent 5k on Amazon today for something new, and anything the camera can't do is accomplishable in Darktable.
Not in a technical field. You shoot with a Barbie camera and Iāll use a hasselblad. Which will be better? āThe best camera is the one you haveā is bullshit.
Well, the expression does come from an age where it was more commonplace that the artisan, the workman, the technician, would be making their own tools. Takes on new poetic meaning, in this age and economy.
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.
Using the price of the equipment as a reason was not a great decision š Sure, the deprecation of your equipment is part of what the customers pay for, but any sane person would value their time much higher than that (unless the equipment is something ridiculous like an oil tanker).
And living with a photographer has taught me that it takes a lot of time! Just picking out which of the 800+ images from an event you want to show to the client for final choice is quite a job. And thatās before you even start to look at editing, which is always needed.
And then there is expertise. My SO knows what to do and how to do it because of her experience. You pay for that as well, and it should be worth quite a bit if you care about the quality of what youāre purchasing.
They are just following the drug manufacturing logic.
"We paid a ton of money for this research and equipment so were gonna charge thousands for a single pill even though it costs pennies to manufacture now that were making 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.
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
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.
But you only have to hit their taste of photography. Ask IT people how hard it is to hit the taste of someone who mainly is able to click on iPhone apps and now starts to tell you what db/infra/server structure he/she wants.
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. āWeāll pay anything; just come in and fix them,ā 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, āThe presses will now work correctly.ā 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 :)
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!
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.
Then get your friends/family to take pics with their phones, and donāt hire a wedding photographer. No one is forcing you to. Just donāt 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.
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.
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 thatās 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.
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.
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).
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, 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.
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 600-800ā¬ 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.
I don't like EF-S on my R50V, same sensor as your R10.
I mean, I have what are supposed to be some great ones. The Tamron 10-20 VC, the sigma 30mm 1.4, the Canon 50-250, the 18-55. They're great on old bodies, they haven't changed, but on modern ILCs the optics, VC, autofocus and weight does not hold it up at all...
And they're all too loud for video.
A Viltrox Air will run circles around them, for less money. Basically any mirrorless lens will. Honestly I'd rather have an old Sony body + a modern Viltrox or Sirui lens now.
(want that because I throw up from the laggy ones like the 6400 had when I tried it)
With Sony bodies, I believe you can change the display refresh rate in the settings, so it doesn't feel so sluggish. The R50/R10 can as well, but I believe the default is just higher.
I'm not trying to simp for Sony or anything though, the prices on their bodies are outrageous. But at least they have an open lens ecosystem.
I think it's kinda high, but I'm the kinda guy who wants a courthouse wedding, with two attendees for legal requirements, for $75 instead of a day-long event for five-figures.
I'm also fine with taking my own pictures and 'here hold this and press the button in 3 seconds', so I'm not trying to compete with the Mona Lisa. I just don't get the appeal at all.
Partially, but it's the Ā£5000 camera in combination with the additional kit a Ā£5000 camera owner carries around with them, like putting a tripod bag and a spare lenses bag on the same shoulder.
I mean duhhh! It's a business, I spend $5,000 on the camera that means I deserve $6,000 for one picture. This isn't a hobby, it's a business I must turn a profit. It's not rocket surgery guys.
Just cause you wasted money on unnecessarily expensive equipment doesn't mean anyone owes you fucking anything lol
It is a hobby
Get over yourself
Unless you are paying your bills with your fucking pictures
I absolutely consider photography an art form!
However the amount of "photographersā who are in love with smell of their own farts is unfathomable.
They'll take shitty black and white pictures of like... a fucking chair on their porch, and act like it belongs in The Lourve. It's absurd.
Dear "photographers:"
You're not special for picking the easiest way to make art, blowing a shitload of money on the camera and then whining no one wants to help subsidize your "passion"
You're just some prick who spent too much money on a camera
If people just want the uber price for pictures, hire the uber to pick you up and ask him to take a picture of you with your cellphone. Then you'll have a $12 picture that you can do whatever you want with.
Twelve bucks? That's ... Probably not a livable wage with cost of operating a vehicle. Let's assume you do four of those in an hour for 8 hours, that's 32 jobs a day, grossing 8 hours a day for $384/day and just under 100k/y... But you have overhead. You have to pay for the vehicle and it's operating and insurance costs, and your own operating costs and insurance. If you live in any sort of American wider metro, 100k alone isn't cutting it.
So let's say you drive 6 miles per $12 on average. Operating a new car for a business is about $0.76/mile, so you subtract $4.56 of your $12 right off the bat, leaving you with $7.44/job.
That doesn't include accidents or your tax, either. Let's assume you get in one medium accident a year and you have minimal insurance. You pay out of pocket for your own repairs glhf.
Now you also pay 15.3% tax on your earnings because you aren't an employee and Uber says to go fuck yourself. So on your 100k a year, you pay another $15,275 in tax.
That leaves you $46,625/year, driving full time.
If you bought the car on a loan, you make negative money.
If you get in an accident, you make negative money.
For full time.
Enjoy.
Good luck eating or paying 36k a year for an apartment.
Okay, I'll try to do this an easier calculation using $20/job instead of $12/job
$20/7miles (include in-between jobs distance, 7mi is average total real per-job) = $2.86/mi(gross) - $0.76/mi (operating) = $2.10/mile (subtotal), subtracting another 15.8% of gross from subtotal ($0.44/mi) = $1.66/mi (net)
So if you drive (7miles x 4 jobs) = 28 miles hourly, you make 28 x $1.66 = $48.48/hour, which is significantly better. But keep in mind, you're still fucking your vehicle driving 28mi/h and so another 58k miles a year commercially with thousands of people fucking up your shit.
That's $96,678.40net/year with a $40,000 every ~ 4 years (250k mi sell point) (you might make an extra 10k on the sale!) (let's call it $30k every 4 years, so -$7,500/year, assuming you have no payments and bought outright), and an accelerated degradation and depreciation of your vehicle, assuming you drive 40hrs/w and are basically nonstop driving jobs.
In short, ($12 -> $20)/7miles makes a big difference at scale. Takes it from making peanuts and scraping by if you aren't too unlucky, to actually looking like you can save if you don't get superfucked by something.
However, if you were saying $15-20 per hour TOTAL revenue, that's a very different equation.
Honestly, 97k/year is probably top end. Ah I just realized I didn't include tips. I don't know how tips work in that company, but I seem to remember some of those companies just stealing them.
I'll be honest, if you couldn't tell, I'm pretty biased against that whole delivery/courier/driver industry and cautious about people thinking it's viable. That stuff is always a trap. Otherwise, Uber would just make people actually employees and absorb costs rather than passing it to the employee worker. Taxis had it figured out, and even then it wasn't great. And semi trucking can be viable, but that's a WHOOOLLLE different series and scale and severity of traps. Super predatory stuff.
Lets look at if from another angle. Uber/Lyft have deals with rental agencies that rent the cars to people just to drive in their area. They turn enough profit doing that that they find it worthwhile (retirees I've had) and they put 0 wear and tear on their own car.
My camera cost nowhere near $5000, and I'd gladly take $100-300 per shoot with it. Hell, I'll even develop the film for you since it ain't a digital camera.
I've also taken courses on photography to know how to shoot a good looking photo. It's also where I learned how to develop film. These classes cost me nothing, I might add.
A car is needed for all in the USA. A Camera is not. The uber driver has two jobs while the photographer also has two jobs. My mind is blown. Couples please share your shots so I can take dumps. Maybe you like dumps. It is what it is. Enjoy your slop you little piggies.
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
Next time, see what a local camera shop would charge to rent some equipment so you can do the shoot yourself. It'll probably be less than $75 to rent the gear for a day. It takes a lot of experience to be a good photographer, so you're paying for their time and expertise, not their equipment. Modern cameras do a lot of the work for you, so you might be happy doing it yourself. On the other hand, for something like a wedding I would hire a pro if there's room in the budget.
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.
What do you mean charged? You negotiate rate beforehand. No one wants to shoot your real estate shit, so you pay more. If itās too high, hire someone that has no experience that wonāt survive on their rates. Good lord, people.
I don't disagree with the photographer's notion, but phrased like this it's kind of like trolling/clickbait - getting people to engage regardless of what they're saying.
Edit: ... and obviously Pakalu Papito / Xavier is trolling even more, so maybe wrong place/wrong time to begin with.
I think we paid like 2500 for our wedding photographer. Worth it I guess they were pretty good photos, and because she was one of the well known ones we were local celebrities for the day.
I'm factoring in the cost of her helicopter seat aswell. Overall we spent 10k including the cottage we stayed at for the week. I'm still paying it off š¤£
we flew to a tiny little island off the coast far away from anyone and anything. One that doesn't even have a name but is just included in a group of rocky islands. The backdrop puts Hawaii to shame. We did the ceremony there with waves breaking in the background on another island, legit looked like they were a hundred feet high. We then flew to a Jurassic park lookin waterfall and legit had a JP moment landing on this tiny bit of gravel with the tail over the water. We got some amazing photos.
I mean if I did that, I could justify it as a business expense, meaning I pay 40k for the 40k car instead of paying 80k for it (income tax + social security contribution + other small payroll taxes on both employee and employer side + VAT). Provided Uber (or Bolt realistically) pays my company not myself, which is an option.
Uber: know how to drive, own a car, insurance, use a cell phone to tell you where to make $12, drive from A-B-C-A, and pay 9 of it back to car maintenance over time.
Photographer: Own camera, insurance, lights, lenses, backdrops, computer, software licenses, photodelivery platform costs, know how to use them. Pack up gear into car, drive to shoot, lug all the gear, setup, shoot, position, pose, pack up all the gear, drive back, stow all the gear, transfer images to computer, Lightroom, cull, Photoshop, color/image/wrinkles/clothing fixes, blinks, smirks, stray hairs, put it into a gallery,
The Uber driver spent 30 minutes
The photographer spent 6-8 hours.
If the photographer is gatekeeping you, hire the Uber driver to take your picture for $12.
You can have all the hobbies you want. But undercharging for hobby work does fuck over the actual photographers.
Everyone is looking for an amazing hobbiest to shoot their wedding and beating the fuck out of the professionals doing it for a living because they want a couple of grand for a solid week of work.
Seriously, just ask the people attending the wedding to send pictures to you, people would love to help.
My wife has been doing professional work for years, over the past decade or so, drastically more clients browbeat her mercilessly to the point that she has to fire them. What do you mean you need $200 to come to my house and do headshots, it's only worth $25.
If you have offers for $25 you should take them. Her stuff is really good, they know they don't want the $25 they're just not willing to pay a living wage to get it.
I think the bigger issue causing that is cameras on phones have devalued photographs in general. Many people really don't understand what goes into the good photographs and think it's as easy as their selfies. And it's bullshit that people treat your wife that way.
Many people really donāt understand what goes into the good photographs
most people have no idea what good photograph is. they share blurry shit with terrible composition on instagram and think that is good photograph, because their 10 friends told them so (and they returned the favor and everyone is happy how amazing photographers they all are)
Consumer digital, in general, closed off a large portion of the pro market. In the before times, you would hire a photographer because you needed something better than a Polaroid and couldn't trust some rando with a cheap film camera to get everything right. Once you could see what you were getting instantly, you had good enough pictures for anything not selling something or hanging on your wall meant to evoke emotion.
Not only phone cameras, but AI post-processing. The real raw images on those itty-bitty sensors are still pretty bad, but they do a great job of correction now. And the stuff from the past 4-5 years, with erasing things and generating smart fill, is freaking awesome.
I don't see what's wrong with $100-300 I know about five 30 year old women with $5,000 cameras that would jump at the gig as long as it wasn't a full wedding commitment.
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.
268 Comments
gigastasio@sh.itjust.works · 281 pts · 15d
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.
exasperation@lemmy.dbzer0.com · 52 pts · 15d
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.
a_non_monotonic_function@lemmy.world · 24 pts · 15d
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.
exasperation@lemmy.dbzer0.com · 9 pts · 15d
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.
a_non_monotonic_function@lemmy.world · 5 pts · 15d
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.
lechekaflan@lemmy.world · 2 pts · 14d
Picking through hundreds or even thousands of shots and choosing about a few dozen good ones is, yeah, equally difficult.
a_non_monotonic_function@lemmy.world · 1 pts · 14d
It sucks a lot! XD
kamen@lemmy.world · 3 pts · 14d
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.
EggInDisguise@lemmy.blahaj.zone · 26 pts · 15d
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.
SeductiveTortoise@piefed.social · 10 pts · 15d
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.
EggInDisguise@lemmy.blahaj.zone · 16 pts · 15d
All the money in the world can't buy talent
All the talent in the world can't perform brain surgery with a chainsaw
SeductiveTortoise@piefed.social · 2 pts · 15d
OH YEAH?!
I'm stealing this š
wonderingwanderer@sopuli.xyz · 10 pts · 15d
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...
Soulphite@reddthat.com · 19 pts · 15d
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...
wonderingwanderer@sopuli.xyz · 5 pts · 15d
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.
UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world · 0 pts · 15d
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?
ajikeshi@lemmy.world · 2 pts · 14d
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.
wonderingwanderer@sopuli.xyz · 1 pts · 15d
Let's look at the rest of that paragraph you selectively quoted:
[emphasis added]
What a bad faith attempt to stir shit up over nothing.
UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world · -2 pts · 15d
???
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
wonderingwanderer@sopuli.xyz · 4 pts · 15d
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.
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.
merc@sh.itjust.works · 5 pts · 14d
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.
UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world · 4 pts · 15d
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.
Finding clients who pay well is half the work of any freelance job.
socsa@piefed.social · 2 pts · 14d
$5k is also literally hobby money. I've spent way more than that snowboarding and hiking over the years. My lab setup at work is literally worth more than I will make in my entire career. Sit down bitch.
Kangae_Hishiryo@scribe.disroot.org · 1 pts · 15d
And even if your pictures were good, more than 100$ per photo is overpriced asf, and with that you can recover your inversion and gain more.
GreyEyedGhost@piefed.ca · 1 pts · 15d
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?
BooBees@fedinsfw.app · 7 pts · 15d
The math has been done and the wear on your car isnāt worth the pay, either, so itās 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. Itās not a hobby, itās 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, theyāre lying or insane, Iāve done uber, itās dangerous and a third of the riders are drunk and scary as shit. Iām a big dude, but crazy and drunk is unpredictable, and vomit is impossible to get out of your carpet.
GreyEyedGhost@piefed.ca · 1 pts · 15d
Yeah, I don't think many people call it fun, but like you said it also isn't a great way to make money.
sp3ctr4l@lemmy.dbzer0.com · 92 pts · 15d
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.
UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world · 31 pts · 15d
Never undersell the possibility that this person is lying.
Or that this is a stock photo and the text is clickbait.
Aqarius@lemmy.world · 6 pts · 14d
It is. Last time I saw thisnpost, the photographer was different.
starman2112@sh.itjust.works · -4 pts · 14d
Apparently her name is actually Kortney. But reality doesn't matter when a bunch of redditors get together to hate a woman
TrickDacy@lemmy.world · 16 pts · 15d
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?
MeatPilot@sh.itjust.works · 1 pts · 15d
TrickDacy@lemmy.world · 2 pts · 14d
Why did you delete this? It's true. No idea why someone downvoted this true but deleted comment.
MeatPilot@sh.itjust.works · 1 pts · 14d
I initially thought I attached it to the wrong thread and reposted.
https://vger.to/sh.itjust.works/comment/26999091
But yeah I'd only be real like that after I got to know them more during the initial introduction. If someone was just telling me what I was going to do without having a discussion about it, being an asshole or control freak. I'd eliminate the cheap for them and throw a high estimate because I just didn't want to deal with them for less.
At that point I realized whatever I was going to estimate they were going to go way way out of scope on and easier if I just assumed that financially ahead or just didn't get the job.
Overall I hated dealing with clients and the "marketing guru" jerk offs. So now I have a boring slower job with nice pay and if I do anything on the side, I got to be somewhat interested in it myself. The luxury is I can just hang up on those people now.
echodot@feddit.uk · 14 pts · 15d
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.
ch00f@lemmy.world · 18 pts · 15d
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.
MeatPilot@sh.itjust.works · 5 pts · 15d
When doing websites. I always told people upfront, you can do it cheap, fast, or good. Pick two because all three doesn't exist.
TehWorld@lemmy.world · 6 pts · 14d
Iāve stopped asking people this. They ALWAYS pick cheap and good because fast is an unknown variable to them.
UnequalExchange@lemmy.world · 2 pts · 15d
Well technically you can have all three be met at the same time.
The omly question you have to ask yourself is 'Are you as happy of the idea of slavery as most other capitalists are?'
jumping_redditor@sh.itjust.works · 1 pts · 14d
as long as it's at least an ocean away it fineā¢
UnequalExchange@lemmy.world · 2 pts · 14d
Offshoring and Unequal Exchange 101Ā©Ā®ā¢ šš ā ļøššæ
jumping_redditor@sh.itjust.works · 1 pts · 14d
SaaS (slavery as a service)
sp3ctr4l@lemmy.dbzer0.com · 2 pts · 15d
... 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.
echodot@feddit.uk · 4 pts · 15d
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.
sp3ctr4l@lemmy.dbzer0.com · -1 pts · 15d
Price transparency != Marketing strategy.
tea_n_typewriters@lemmy.world · 2 pts · 15d
Donāt you dare question Nat of āInsert Last Name Photographyā of being bad at marketing.
otacon239@lemmy.world · 53 pts · 15d
If my photographer can get me the picture I need with the $300 camera, Iām hiring them first. Not everyone needs their pictures on a billboard or TV ad.
tanisnikana@lemmy.world · 50 pts · 15d
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 shitās gorgeous and I know it.
FellowEnt@sh.itjust.works · 14 pts · 15d
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.
tanisnikana@lemmy.world · 4 pts · 15d
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.
14th_cylon@lemmy.zip · 1 pts · 12d
you don't zoom with your feet. that is how you change perspective, and it is not the same as zooming. serious hobby photographer should understand the difference.
tanisnikana@lemmy.world · 1 pts · 12d
tanisnikana@lemmy.world · -3 pts · 12d
Lemme use my cute euphemisms.
Alternatively: drat, you got me, Iām not a hobby photographer, Iām just a lesbian with a camera.
Alternatively: drat, you got me, am I still approved by the board youāre on to take pictures of cool things, or should I turn my kit in?
Alternatively and truly: what is the point of the tone youāre using in the last sentence? Youāre not aiming to shame me out of taking and making photographs, are you? Even if you donāt want to call them art, Iām still using a camera to capture visuals that I enjoy to a file, and adjusting them to my heartās content. And what if I donāt really understand your definition of perspective vs. zoom? English is a second language for me!
Alternative and deeply truly, in my bones: who the fuck are you? Letās see some of your damn portfolio.
(And yes, I downvoted myself to save you the damn click, cause letās be real, youāre not gonna reply, youāre gonna downvote and move on.)
14th_cylon@lemmy.zip · 3 pts · 12d
i am someone pointing your attention to the fact that you don't zoom with your feet. i assume you did not know that, because why would you say that otherwise, so now you know something you didn't before and you can think about how to apply that knowledge to your pictures of cool things. i don't really need to present my portfolio for that.
you seem to have forgotten to do that. what is the point of making such bizarre performative claim when you don't even follow through?
if simple comment sends you into such tailspin, maybe public discussion is not for you...
tanisnikana@lemmy.world · -2 pts · 12d
Fair. Sorry for being an asshole.
FellowEnt@sh.itjust.works · 1 pts · 14d
Zooming with your feet (and switching primes) is part and parcel to events photography. If I see a zoom lens at a wedding I will judge the photographer.
echodot@feddit.uk · 9 pts · 15d
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.
tanisnikana@lemmy.world · 14 pts · 15d
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.
Seleni@lemmy.world · 7 pts · 15d
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, thereās scenic photography, which is basically having really good composition skills, knowing good locations, and timing, and then thereās people photography, which isā¦ extra. I donāt blame photographers for charging more for that shit lol
āI want our wedding photos to be the two of us on a cliff at the beach at sunset with really pretty clouds behind us!ā And youāre 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 thatās extra lighting (that youāll have to carry to the location) and extra time in photoshop to be sure you can still see their faces clearlyā¦
tanisnikana@lemmy.world · 3 pts · 15d
Yeah, I donāt do people cause theyāre hard to look at, what with the brain damage and all, so sceneryās more of my thing. Scenery doesnāt stay put, but itās a hell of a lot less wiggly than people.
And I mean, Iāve 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 Iāve gotta go there this weekend, just to get out of town.
neuromorph@lemmy.world · 3 pts · 15d
how do you white balance your shots/ seems overly sepia
tanisnikana@lemmy.world · 6 pts · 15d
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.
darntootin@lemmy.world · -4 pts · 15d
Hey man, I support your hobby, but uh, this is embarrassing to boast about. Be humble, youāre an amateur and thatās okay.
wreckedcarzz@lemmy.world · 4 pts · 14d
Where's your portfolio?
tanisnikana@lemmy.world · 2 pts · 14d
Theyāre not even out here identifiably.
Iām out here with my legal name up front, making art that I like, and being really, really proud of it.
I, uh, donāt have a website though, just a Pixelfed account that I update with new work fairly often.
Iām gonna start posting more work, not just because I like the work I post, but now with an added layer of spite! (Nothing functionally will change except my spirits will continue to be undampened, despite their recent attempts at doing so.)
tanisnikana@lemmy.world · 0 pts · 15d
Seriously, I don't care if you're Gregory fucking Crewdson, you do not say that shit to aspiring artists.
Cultivate us goddammit.
DO NOT DEMORALIZE PEOPLE OUT OF THIS FIELD.
honesthenery@thelemmy.club · 0 pts · 13d
Too late...I used to get covers and was all city. Saw my work in the paper and every news stand. Didn't matter... I gave up on it a long time ago. Most slobs just want porn, piggy slop and you know what I don't care anymore. Shoot your own damn photos, fix your own $8000 bicycle and fix your own damn car. Fucking twats I hope this slob ass nation is nuked into oblivion. and I mean that. Their little meaningless lives and their own self perception blinds them into thinking they are somehow important. What good is a doctor if no one can afford it. What good is a lawyer if no one can afford it. Don't get me started on these marketurds and office chimps. I kinda enjoyed when all the middle manager gen X'ers lost their jobs to AI. The great equaliser. šļø. More layoffs to come. These assholes will be wiped out.
PS the paper I worked for the owner thought I wasn't worth making full time. He got caught selling drugs went to jail and the paper went belly up. He never showed his face around town after that... then after jail worked at a hotel at the desk after thatš humbled you could say. Fuck everybody and this whole gawd damn world. All these little piggies. OINK OINK OINK Fuck these boomers.
All the "successful" photographers I knew were boomers about to retire and scam artist. Fuck the arts forever I just pray for nukes. Support small business bla bla bla capitalism gonna capitalise on you damn ass real soon if it hasn't already.
tanisnikana@lemmy.world · 1 pts · 13d
I just shoot the art that I wanna shoot. I like my works, Iām real damn proud of them. I wanna show them to as many people as I can, to get in galleries, to have my work be seen, to make my mark on this world.
Iām not a laborer with my camera. I donāt shoot food for packaging, I donāt get ninety seconds with an NBA star, Iām not on NatGeo.
Iāve made a grand total of $300 from this gig cause I sold a canvas and a few prints, and I sold a shit ton of magic cards to get the camera to begin with.
I guess what Iām saying is, Iām not gonna be some jaded old hack like the dude I replied to up there. I do this simply for the love.
And for what itās worth, your words have a good weight. :)
tanisnikana@lemmy.world · -4 pts · 15d
Hey, you might want to reset the password on your account, someone used it to post something absolutely idiotic under your username. Just letting you know, so that you get this sorted out.
Actually no, I'm preserving the text of what you said here so you can't do a dirty delete: @darntootin@lemmy.world said "Hey man, I support your hobby, but uh, this is embarrassing to boast about. Be humble, youāre an amateur and thatās okay."
snowdriftissue@lemmy.world · 41 pts · 15d
tbf I doubt many Uber drivers actually profit, especially the ones driving $40k cars
altphoto@lemmy.today · 6 pts · 15d
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...
https://libretaxi.org/
Hupf@feddit.org · 15 pts · 15d
Just as a raw ballpark estimate. By car could be 50km/h on average, with a walking speed of roughly 5km/h, that's 10x the time it takes by car, i.e. 2-3 hours.
A few days usually takes you trough a few adjacent townships. Do you have to take a humongous detour on foot?
bountygiver@lemmy.ml · 5 pts · 15d
Or they are so weak they can only walk 30 minutes per day and had to rest until the next day
5km/h is also faster than average walk that is probably not a pace you'd maintain for hours? After considering you also need to stop on intersection you may be getting the average down to less than 4, but then if it's actually a 10 minute ride you'd probably also spend enough time in stop lights and your average speed would also be way lower than 50km/h
BigPotato@lemmy.world · 4 pts · 14d
5km/h is on the low end of the "average" walking speed but waiting at intersections and lights will murder that speed. You could easily be on the upper end of six and then have to wait 5+ minutes at an intersection, bringing you back below a 5.
Hupf@feddit.org · 1 pts · 14d
This is after all the human superpower.
jumping_redditor@sh.itjust.works · 0 pts · 14d
don't cars usually go at least 65mph?
Hupf@feddit.org · 2 pts · 14d
Tops. Waiting at intersections, slowing down for other traffic situations and driving on roads with a lower speed limit drags down that average, as others have mentioned with regards to walking.
mojofrododojo@lemmy.world · 0 pts · 14d
just hypothesizing but: the part of the burbs they're traversing doesn't have much in the way of sidewalks along the highways, forcing detours along the local trails like the burke gilman.
doingthestuff@lemy.lol · 8 pts · 14d
At my house there are no buses. There are no light rails. There are no sidewalks, no bike lanes. You can walk in the easement of people's front yards but it's mostly a ditch, full of water when it's raining. I live inside the loop highway that runs around my 2+ million population city. Cars are the only option, even most of the homeless have cars here.
mojofrododojo@lemmy.world · 3 pts · 14d
sounds like a real shithole. texas?
nonfuinoncuro@lemmy.zip · 1 pts · 14d
could be anywhere, usa
mojofrododojo@lemmy.world · 1 pts · 14d
nah. lots of places have decent infrastructure, and many even have transit.
LuminousLuddite@lemmy.today · 3 pts · 15d
altphoto@lemmy.today · 2 pts · 14d
https://enatega.com/
mojofrododojo@lemmy.world · 0 pts · 14d
that'll be st12? 15? lol.
after the excavate under the mountain of queen anne to connect ballard....
honestly the real solution is to move out of the sticks, or stop working in downtown.
InFerNo@lemmy.ml · 37 pts · 15d
She wants her investment repaid in 2 or 3 gigs?
darntootin@lemmy.world · 24 pts · 15d
Taxes, assistant fee, mileage, you own more than one lens and one cam bodyā¦no lol not even close. We havenāt even talked about post processing, delivery, rights, etc.
Cosmonauticus@lemmy.world · 26 pts · 15d
She should've mentioned that instead of just listing a single piece of equipment
darntootin@lemmy.world · 16 pts · 15d
Itās probably fake. Donāt take image macros/memes too seriously ;)
Funkt4st1c@lemmy.world · 3 pts · 14d
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.
DaleGribble88@programming.dev · 4 pts · 14d
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.
LikeableLime@lemmy.world · 3 pts · 14d
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
ajikeshi@lemmy.world · 0 pts · 14d
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?
Michal@programming.dev · 7 pts · 15d
You're right, but it's not the argument she's presenting.
ohulancutash@feddit.uk · 5 pts · 14d
Sheās a stock image
OldChicoAle@lemmy.world · 33 pts · 14d
My education cost 200,000. You think I made all that back in one paycheck? Cry me a river, Natalie.
Tollana1234567@lemmy.today · 2 pts · 14d
shes probably rich or well off, of course she afford to this.
distal@lemmy.ml · 32 pts · 15d
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 ā 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.
Warl0k3@lemmy.world · 11 pts · 15d
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.
scrion@lemmy.world · 17 pts · 15d
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.
Warl0k3@lemmy.world · 9 pts · 15d
... 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.)
scrion@lemmy.world · 2 pts · 14d
I think eventually, you're saying the same thing. If you want to shoot professionally, it makes sense to get equipment to save time and have a manner of control over reproducibility. That's also why the local metal shop gets the $200 carbide endmills vs. grinding HSS blanks by hand. I did state that already.
I'll still disagree with two things. You absolutely did say "art is expensive", and stock photography will not produce a lot of art. It can be shot artfully, sure, but that's more of a word choice and eventually rather equates to craftsmanship. I'm sure there is at least one stock photographer out there, producing art all the time. Same with any amazing shot that happens to get uploaded to a stock library not becoming any less meaningful. But that's not common and simply not how the process works, claiming anything else would be disingenuous. I'm not out to disparage the craft or the skill of anyone involved, that's a completely different topic.
Finally, I was actually absolutely thinking of the Contax 1. Now, don't adjust for inflation. Why would you do that? This camera auctions for around $200, $250 today. Did something happen in the past 86 years that now makes it impossible to shoot the same, great pictures with that camera? I don't think so. Yes, shooting has become a lot more convenient, a lot more consistent (some people would argue that's a bad thing), but surely it's not the tool then that enabled these photographs. That was my angle.
(Please let's not get hung up on the particular camera model, availability of film etc., it's an example to make a point)
Warl0k3@lemmy.world · 1 pts · 14d
Well, yes? The massive infrastructure built to support film photography disappeared. It's an incredibly expensive and fairly niche medium now, and one that does not have anything like a robust market to support a professional on. It's little more than a gimmick at this point - one that could produce great art absolutely, but one with a microscopically niche appeal and that would see you starved on the street if you tried to support yourself with it.
Anyways, yes I said art is expensive - twice, in fact - what I never said is that art requires expensive tools (which it doesn't). At the bare minimum art requires a vast investiture of that most precious resource, time, even if we're to set aside all the concerns with other expenses. Doing art professionally though, that needs the high quality tools to deliver the consistent and rapid results.
Being totally honest here though, I am incredibly skeptical of anyone who acts like they can decide what is and is not art. It's difficult to take their philosophical outlook seriously when they're comfortable passing judgment on that.
distal@lemmy.ml · 5 pts · 15d
This is true, it's the need for consistency that drives up costs.
TigerAce@lemmy.dbzer0.com · 30 pts · 14d
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.
honesthenery@thelemmy.club · -5 pts · 13d
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
Alcoholicorn@mander.xyz · 5 pts · 13d
Nobody is going to watch your youtube video, just type the relevant info.
Thats nearly as obnoxious as dumping AI slop into a discussion.
jumping_redditor@sh.itjust.works · 29 pts · 14d
the prices they charge and the inability to give me the damn RAWs is why I just got a camera instead.
spudsrus@aussie.zone · 9 pts · 14d
Our wedding photographer gave us both RAWs and processed JPEGs
ĀÆ\_(ć)_/ĀÆ
betterdeadthanreddit@lemmy.world · 5 pts · 14d
Asked mine to give it to me RAW and it turned into a huge misunderstanding.
jaschen306@sh.itjust.works · 7 pts · 14d
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.
hansolo@lemmy.today · 7 pts · 14d
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.
FellowEnt@sh.itjust.works · 5 pts · 14d
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.
chewypoops@lemmy.world · 3 pts · 14d
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.
SkunkWorkz@lemmy.world · 5 pts · 14d
Processing wonāt do shit to a shitty shot, with terrible composition and lighting.
Jtotheb@lemmy.world · 4 pts · 14d
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
Oops, sorry, I forgot you already decided that the photographer must have been the good guy so that means Iām wrong
FellowEnt@sh.itjust.works · 1 pts · 7d
They were boring because of the lens choice and lack of effort/skill of the photographer. Processing isn't going to do anything to change that.
kamen@lemmy.world · -2 pts · 14d
That has the same energy as going to a restaurant and asking for the raw ingredients.
FellowEnt@sh.itjust.works · 0 pts · 7d
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.
FatherPeanut@pawb.social · 24 pts · 14d
Okay real talk here, how tf is this Xavier guy basically everywhere? Did he go to meme school?
fyzzlefry@retrolemmy.com · 5 pts · 14d
Does he make up content to react to? Is that his thing?
xav@programming.dev · 2 pts · 13d
There are loads of us ! At least two.
WaitingToHappen@lemmy.world · 2 pts · 14d
Etterra@discuss.online · 24 pts · 14d
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.
SatansMaggotyCumFart@piefed.world · 23 pts · 14d
When I used to film pornography I got sloppy seconds.
It was the definition of win/win.
wreckedcarzz@lemmy.world · 6 pts · 14d
A man after my own heart. Plus, dinner and a show.
Paddzr@lemmy.world · 2 pts · 14d
Ah, so that's why you're known as the cum farter, you were the sloppy seconds.
jaschen306@sh.itjust.works · 21 pts · 14d
Pppffffssshhhh.... 5k?!?that is hobby level money. I'm over 15k into just my lenses and I do this as a hobby and shoot friends and family for free.
absentbird@lemmy.world · 7 pts · 14d
Post a photo so we know you're legit
fyzzlefry@retrolemmy.com · 4 pts · 14d
We demand man ass
SoloPhoenyx@lemmy.world · 1 pts · 13d
Free the weenie!
Larry@lemmy.world · 7 pts · 14d
Bro... Shooting your friends and family is messed up.... Whether someone pays you to or not...
TrippingBalls@lemmy.world · 5 pts · 13d
I kill people for money.. But you are my friend.. So I will kill you for free
greedytacothief@lemmy.dbzer0.com · 21 pts · 15d
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.
ClownStatue@piefed.social · 13 pts · 15d
Sheās not really full of shit, but she is being kind of bitchy. Meanwhile, Xavierās just a trolling asshole.
kestrel7_7@lemmy.world · 6 pts · 15d
Right, like the uber driver is getting ripped off too! The existence of multiple jobs not getting paid enough doesnāt justify any of them not paying enough.
14th_cylon@lemmy.zip · 1 pts · 12d
on top of that, the uber driver's job was done in 10 minutes, which is little less than typical wedding...
OpenPassageways@programming.dev · 0 pts · 15d
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.
cantstopthesignal@sh.itjust.works · 1 pts · 15d
Driving is not as skilled as photography. High end photography requires a lot of technical understanding of light and the camera settings.
OpenPassageways@programming.dev · 1 pts · 15d
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.
cantstopthesignal@sh.itjust.works · 1 pts · 14d
Supply and demand. Lots of people willing to take that risk. Not as many want to learn about the physics of light.
JDPoZ@lemmy.world · 13 pts · 15d
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.
FauxPseudo@lemmy.world · 5 pts · 15d
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.
mojofrododojo@lemmy.world · 3 pts · 14d
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.
Typotyper@sh.itjust.works · 10 pts · 15d
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.
JDPoZ@lemmy.world · 8 pts · 15d
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.
greedytacothief@lemmy.dbzer0.com · 2 pts · 14d
Yeah I figured a photographer would have an hourly rate, an that rate would depend on a lot of variables.
Luffy879@lemmy.ml · 5 pts · 15d
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.
Diddlydee@feddit.uk · 19 pts · 15d
My house cost 300 grand and you want me to look after your kids for 60 quid a day?
neuromorph@lemmy.world · 15 pts · 15d
the camera doesnt matter. are your skills any good?
darntootin@lemmy.world · -4 pts · 15d
A good photographer with a shitty lens will not make a good commercial product lol come on guys.
bountygiver@lemmy.ml · 1 pts · 15d
A good photographer also knows their tools that they would recognize when the shitty lens won't work, but they also would recognize which budget options can get the job done.
dream_weasel@sh.itjust.works · 1 pts · 14d
No, but a good used lens and an older camera body is plenty sufficient for good photos especially if you can edit worth a shit. You don't need some new mirrorless body and some crazy lens that lets you take aperture down to f/2 that is brand new to, for example, .
I'm confident that with my old canon EOS 5D Mark 2 I can outshoot any hobbymom who spent 5k on Amazon today for something new, and anything the camera can't do is accomplishable in Darktable.
Digit@lemmy.today · 1 pts · 15d
"A poor workman blames his tools"
darntootin@lemmy.world · 2 pts · 15d
Not in a technical field. You shoot with a Barbie camera and Iāll use a hasselblad. Which will be better? āThe best camera is the one you haveā is bullshit.
bugbear@lemmy.sdf.org · 1 pts · 14d
Yes, a Barbie camera won't have great pictures. You know very well "the best camera is the one you have" isn't talking about Barbie cameras, though.
Digit@lemmy.today · 1 pts · 14d
Well, the expression does come from an age where it was more commonplace that the artisan, the workman, the technician, would be making their own tools. Takes on new poetic meaning, in this age and economy.
jumping_redditor@sh.itjust.works · 0 pts · 15d
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.
neuromorph@lemmy.world · 0 pts · 15d
What do you think photoshop is for?
f314@lemmy.world · 14 pts · 15d
Using the price of the equipment as a reason was not a great decision š Sure, the deprecation of your equipment is part of what the customers pay for, but any sane person would value their time much higher than that (unless the equipment is something ridiculous like an oil tanker).
And living with a photographer has taught me that it takes a lot of time! Just picking out which of the 800+ images from an event you want to show to the client for final choice is quite a job. And thatās before you even start to look at editing, which is always needed.
And then there is expertise. My SO knows what to do and how to do it because of her experience. You pay for that as well, and it should be worth quite a bit if you care about the quality of what youāre purchasing.
ThePantser@sh.itjust.works · 5 pts · 15d
They are just following the drug manufacturing logic.
"We paid a ton of money for this research and equipment so were gonna charge thousands for a single pill even though it costs pennies to manufacture now that were making it."
Zwiebel@feddit.org · 2 pts · 15d
I think even for big ships the biggest cost is the fuel not the ship itself
resipsaloquitur@lemmy.cafe · 12 pts · 15d
Hire whoever took the picture of her.
Theyāre obviously better.
yermaw@sh.itjust.works · 7 pts · 15d
The old barbershop conundrum
exasperation@lemmy.dbzer0.com · 4 pts · 15d
But Doctor! I am Nataliacci!
custom_username@reddthat.com · 12 pts · 15d
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.
darntootin@lemmy.world · 2 pts · 15d
You are not the target client for that rate then.
MeatPilot@sh.itjust.works · 12 pts · 15d
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.
neuromorph@lemmy.world · 3 pts · 15d
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
robomuffin79@lemmy.world · 11 pts · 15d
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
Dookieman12@piefed.social · 53 pts · 15d
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.
Phil_in_here@lemmy.ca · 9 pts · 15d
True, but a photographer has to work with people, which you know damn well is the worst part.
Amnesigenic@lemmy.ml · 7 pts · 15d
IT also has to work with people
Warl0k3@lemmy.world · 5 pts · 15d
Only if they manage to get past my labyrinth of cunning traps and ticketing system auto-emails...
Amnesigenic@lemmy.ml · 0 pts · 15d
Some of us have to answer calls
Warl0k3@lemmy.world · 3 pts · 15d
::: spoiler There's a solution for that:
:::
chunk6235@piefed.social · 3 pts · 15d
Easiest way to tell me you've never worked IT
Samsy@lemmy.ml · 1 pts · 15d
But you only have to hit their taste of photography. Ask IT people how hard it is to hit the taste of someone who mainly is able to click on iPhone apps and now starts to tell you what db/infra/server structure he/she wants.
Bixcut@lemmy.world · 5 pts · 15d
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. āWeāll pay anything; just come in and fix them,ā 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, āThe presses will now work correctly.ā 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.
thebestaquaman@lemmy.world · 2 pts · 15d
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 :)
Bixcut@lemmy.world · 1 pts · 14d
The first time I heard it was a VCR repairman turning a screw for $100.
snooggums@piefed.world · 9 pts · 15d
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.
Warl0k3@lemmy.world · 5 pts · 15d
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!
Master@sh.itjust.works · 11 pts · 15d
A 10 min ride home is not the same as a 3 hour wedding and 12 hours processing images and video.
Imgonnatrythis@sh.itjust.works · 10 pts · 15d
That's not what she was talking about though.
HobbitFoot@thelemmy.club · 8 pts · 15d
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.
MonkderVierte@lemmy.zip · 4 pts · 15d
Ok, but i want a wedding photo, not a Van Gogh.
kestrel7_7@lemmy.world · 14 pts · 15d
Then get your friends/family to take pics with their phones, and donāt hire a wedding photographer. No one is forcing you to. Just donāt 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.
Imgonnatrythis@sh.itjust.works · 6 pts · 15d
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.
MonkderVierte@lemmy.zip · 1 pts · 15d
Nah, phones make too noisy images. While the people with the gear often edit too much.
HobbitFoot@thelemmy.club · 2 pts · 15d
I wish I could get a Van Gogh for only a few thousand.
Imgonnatrythis@sh.itjust.works · 5 pts · 15d
I will sell you an nft of one for $2000
boonhet@lemmy.zip · 3 pts · 15d
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.
captain_aggravated@sh.itjust.works · 8 pts · 15d
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.
ClownStatue@piefed.social · 5 pts · 15d
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 thatās 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.
wreckedcarzz@lemmy.world · 3 pts · 14d
Of course. The second 'wedding' leaves the customer's lips, the price jumps 5x. Because fuck you pay me.
brucethemoose@lemmy.world · 10 pts · 14d
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.
rumba@lemmy.zip · 5 pts · 14d
Ehh, They're more expensive, but most of them come with IS.
I'd still rather shoot Nikon.
kamen@lemmy.world · 5 pts · 14d
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).
brucethemoose@lemmy.world · 3 pts · 14d
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, 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.
Luffy879@lemmy.ml · 1 pts · 14d
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 600-800ā¬ 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.
brucethemoose@lemmy.world · 1 pts · 14d
I don't like EF-S on my R50V, same sensor as your R10.
I mean, I have what are supposed to be some great ones. The Tamron 10-20 VC, the sigma 30mm 1.4, the Canon 50-250, the 18-55. They're great on old bodies, they haven't changed, but on modern ILCs the optics, VC, autofocus and weight does not hold it up at all...
And they're all too loud for video.
A Viltrox Air will run circles around them, for less money. Basically any mirrorless lens will. Honestly I'd rather have an old Sony body + a modern Viltrox or Sirui lens now.
With Sony bodies, I believe you can change the display refresh rate in the settings, so it doesn't feel so sluggish. The R50/R10 can as well, but I believe the default is just higher.
I'm not trying to simp for Sony or anything though, the prices on their bodies are outrageous. But at least they have an open lens ecosystem.
honesthenery@thelemmy.club · 1 pts · 13d
spontaneoushumancombustion@lemmy.world · 9 pts · 15d
Not every gig is gonna earn you the cost of that camera. And it doesn't need to.
KokusnussRitter@discuss.tchncs.de · 8 pts · 15d
Isn't 100-300 pretty costly/ a good value for a photographer? Am I out of touch?
wreckedcarzz@lemmy.world · 1 pts · 14d
I think it's kinda high, but I'm the kinda guy who wants a courthouse wedding, with two attendees for legal requirements, for $75 instead of a day-long event for five-figures.
I'm also fine with taking my own pictures and 'here hold this and press the button in 3 seconds', so I'm not trying to compete with the Mona Lisa. I just don't get the appeal at all.
FluidBeef@quokk.au · 8 pts · 14d
Is the weight of the $5000 camera how she got the permanent kink in her neck?
fakeman_pretendname@feddit.uk · 6 pts · 14d
Partially, but it's the Ā£5000 camera in combination with the additional kit a Ā£5000 camera owner carries around with them, like putting a tripod bag and a spare lenses bag on the same shoulder.
Asafum@lemmy.world · 7 pts · 15d
I mean duhhh! It's a business, I spend $5,000 on the camera that means I deserve $6,000 for one picture. This isn't a hobby, it's a business I must turn a profit. It's not rocket surgery guys.
KokusnussRitter@discuss.tchncs.de · 4 pts · 15d
Aww :( wiggles out of surgical gown dissapointedly
I am keeping the medical screwdriver tho.
content_educator_94@thelemmy.club · 7 pts · 15d
Just cause you wasted money on unnecessarily expensive equipment doesn't mean anyone owes you fucking anything lol
It is a hobby
Get over yourself
Unless you are paying your bills with your fucking pictures
I absolutely consider photography an art form!
However the amount of "photographersā who are in love with smell of their own farts is unfathomable.
They'll take shitty black and white pictures of like... a fucking chair on their porch, and act like it belongs in The Lourve. It's absurd.
Dear "photographers:"
You're not special for picking the easiest way to make art, blowing a shitload of money on the camera and then whining no one wants to help subsidize your "passion"
You're just some prick who spent too much money on a camera
rumba@lemmy.zip · 7 pts · 14d
If people just want the uber price for pictures, hire the uber to pick you up and ask him to take a picture of you with your cellphone. Then you'll have a $12 picture that you can do whatever you want with.
MrSulu@lemmy.ml · 7 pts · 14d
Uber effectively corner a market and have drivers working for very little.
JcbAzPx@lemmy.world · 2 pts · 14d
Uber and Lyft are terrible to their workers, but you can still call a cab.
SCmSTR@lemmy.blahaj.zone · 6 pts · 15d
Twelve bucks? That's ... Probably not a livable wage with cost of operating a vehicle. Let's assume you do four of those in an hour for 8 hours, that's 32 jobs a day, grossing 8 hours a day for $384/day and just under 100k/y... But you have overhead. You have to pay for the vehicle and it's operating and insurance costs, and your own operating costs and insurance. If you live in any sort of American wider metro, 100k alone isn't cutting it.
So let's say you drive 6 miles per $12 on average. Operating a new car for a business is about $0.76/mile, so you subtract $4.56 of your $12 right off the bat, leaving you with $7.44/job.
That doesn't include accidents or your tax, either. Let's assume you get in one medium accident a year and you have minimal insurance. You pay out of pocket for your own repairs glhf.
Now you also pay 15.3% tax on your earnings because you aren't an employee and Uber says to go fuck yourself. So on your 100k a year, you pay another $15,275 in tax.
That leaves you $46,625/year, driving full time.
If you bought the car on a loan, you make negative money.
If you get in an accident, you make negative money.
For full time.
Enjoy.
Good luck eating or paying 36k a year for an apartment.
deft@lemmy.wtf · 2 pts · 15d
Those numbers aren't accurate. Used to have to Uber to a job 10 minutes up the road and after talking to a few guys they made about $20 off me.
From my understanding Uber is basically 15-20 an hour in my area at least. That's a pretty typical wage. Can't speak for everywhere though.
SCmSTR@lemmy.blahaj.zone · 1 pts · 14d
Okay, I'll try to do this an easier calculation using $20/job instead of $12/job
$20/7miles (include in-between jobs distance, 7mi is average total real per-job) = $2.86/mi(gross) - $0.76/mi (operating) = $2.10/mile (subtotal), subtracting another 15.8% of gross from subtotal ($0.44/mi) = $1.66/mi (net)
So if you drive (7miles x 4 jobs) = 28 miles hourly, you make 28 x $1.66 = $48.48/hour, which is significantly better. But keep in mind, you're still fucking your vehicle driving 28mi/h and so another 58k miles a year commercially with thousands of people fucking up your shit.
That's $96,678.40net/year with a $40,000 every ~ 4 years (250k mi sell point) (you might make an extra 10k on the sale!) (let's call it $30k every 4 years, so -$7,500/year, assuming you have no payments and bought outright), and an accelerated degradation and depreciation of your vehicle, assuming you drive 40hrs/w and are basically nonstop driving jobs.
In short, ($12 -> $20)/7miles makes a big difference at scale. Takes it from making peanuts and scraping by if you aren't too unlucky, to actually looking like you can save if you don't get superfucked by something.
However, if you were saying $15-20 per hour TOTAL revenue, that's a very different equation.
Honestly, 97k/year is probably top end. Ah I just realized I didn't include tips. I don't know how tips work in that company, but I seem to remember some of those companies just stealing them.
I'll be honest, if you couldn't tell, I'm pretty biased against that whole delivery/courier/driver industry and cautious about people thinking it's viable. That stuff is always a trap. Otherwise, Uber would just make people actually employees and absorb costs rather than passing it to the
employeeworker. Taxis had it figured out, and even then it wasn't great. And semi trucking can be viable, but that's a WHOOOLLLE different series and scale and severity of traps. Super predatory stuff.LifeInMultipleChoice@lemmy.world · 2 pts · 14d
Lets look at if from another angle. Uber/Lyft have deals with rental agencies that rent the cars to people just to drive in their area. They turn enough profit doing that that they find it worthwhile (retirees I've had) and they put 0 wear and tear on their own car.
Paddzr@lemmy.world · 1 pts · 14d
It cpuld be 3 mile journey for all you know. Fares are calculated by the distance.
BarneyPiccolo@lemmy.today · 1 pts · 14d
Uber drivers I take to tell me that even if you make money driving, you lose it all in the wear and tear on your vehicle when you sell it.
jumping_redditor@sh.itjust.works · 1 pts · 14d
if you buy a vehicle in bad condition for really cheap you can sell it in worse condition for as much
Tikiporch@lemmy.world · 0 pts · 14d
We all lose money in the wear and tear in our vehicle we we sell it, though.
Kolanaki@pawb.social · 4 pts · 14d
My camera cost nowhere near $5000, and I'd gladly take $100-300 per shoot with it. Hell, I'll even develop the film for you since it ain't a digital camera.
Etterra@discuss.online · 1 pts · 14d
But are you a professional photographer who makes a living off it?
Kolanaki@pawb.social · 3 pts · 14d
I could be if enough people paid me for it.
I've also taken courses on photography to know how to shoot a good looking photo. It's also where I learned how to develop film. These classes cost me nothing, I might add.
darntootin@lemmy.world · 3 pts · 15d
This comment section sucks lol I donāt even know where to begin.
OldChicoAle@lemmy.world · -1 pts · 14d
This place is getting more Reddity every day.
honesthenery@thelemmy.club · 3 pts · 13d
A car is needed for all in the USA. A Camera is not. The uber driver has two jobs while the photographer also has two jobs. My mind is blown. Couples please share your shots so I can take dumps. Maybe you like dumps. It is what it is. Enjoy your slop you little piggies.
Polisheocket@lemmy.zip · 3 pts · 15d
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
Ajen@sh.itjust.works · 2 pts · 15d
Next time, see what a local camera shop would charge to rent some equipment so you can do the shoot yourself. It'll probably be less than $75 to rent the gear for a day. It takes a lot of experience to be a good photographer, so you're paying for their time and expertise, not their equipment. Modern cameras do a lot of the work for you, so you might be happy doing it yourself. On the other hand, for something like a wedding I would hire a pro if there's room in the budget.
HobbitFoot@thelemmy.club · 1 pts · 15d
Why doesn't your wife learn how to do it, then?
richardwallass@sh.itjust.works · 1 pts · 15d
A pro is not a hobbyist. That make all the difference. It take years to handle photography
HobbitFoot@thelemmy.club · 5 pts · 15d
The difference between a pro and a hobbyist is the money, not the experience.
richardwallass@sh.itjust.works · -1 pts · 15d
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.
Polisheocket@lemmy.zip · -1 pts · 15d
When youāre doing higher end listings itās frowned upon, makes you seem cheap.
HobbitFoot@thelemmy.club · 4 pts · 15d
Then it sounds like the $1,500 is justified as your wife isn't being cheap.
darntootin@lemmy.world · -1 pts · 15d
What do you mean charged? You negotiate rate beforehand. No one wants to shoot your real estate shit, so you pay more. If itās too high, hire someone that has no experience that wonāt survive on their rates. Good lord, people.
Sam_Bass@lemmy.world · 2 pts · 14d
skill isnt bought
chunk6235@piefed.social · 2 pts · 15d
Boo fucking hoo, that camera is paid for after 17-50 jobs depending on cost. Get fucked Nat, hope you drop it while whining about job prices .
snoons@lemmy.ca · 1 pts · 15d
Natalie is dumb because you can just rent the expensive camera for $100 to $300 dollars a day while not being a conceited, capitalist pos.
Actually it's prolly cheaper than that.
Gates9@sh.itjust.works · 1 pts · 15d
MonkderVierte@lemmy.zip · 1 pts · 15d
Teleobjectctive for photoshoot?
doenietzomoeilijk@discuss.tchncs.de · 3 pts · 14d
A not too long one, for portraits, say 86 to 135mm, and a fast one at that? Absolutely.
anugeshtu@lemmy.world · 1 pts · 13d
My landlord's house complex costs several million dollars, yet I can rent one of his appartements for some tenths of dollars per day!
coolguy11@lemmy.world · 1 pts · 14d
š
Digit@lemmy.today · 1 pts · 15d
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.
kamen@lemmy.world · 0 pts · 15d
I don't disagree with the photographer's notion, but phrased like this it's kind of like trolling/clickbait - getting people to engage regardless of what they're saying.
Edit: ... and obviously Pakalu Papito / Xavier is trolling even more, so maybe wrong place/wrong time to begin with.
SethDove@lemmy.world · -1 pts · 15d
I work in disability. The act of driving is not considered a skill. Photography is.
HertzDentalBar@lemmy.blahaj.zone · -1 pts · 15d
I think we paid like 2500 for our wedding photographer. Worth it I guess they were pretty good photos, and because she was one of the well known ones we were local celebrities for the day.
HerbGrower@slrpnk.net · 3 pts · 15d
I have known people have entire weddings for less than that
HertzDentalBar@lemmy.blahaj.zone · 2 pts · 14d
I'm factoring in the cost of her helicopter seat aswell. Overall we spent 10k including the cottage we stayed at for the week. I'm still paying it off š¤£
we flew to a tiny little island off the coast far away from anyone and anything. One that doesn't even have a name but is just included in a group of rocky islands. The backdrop puts Hawaii to shame. We did the ceremony there with waves breaking in the background on another island, legit looked like they were a hundred feet high. We then flew to a Jurassic park lookin waterfall and legit had a JP moment landing on this tiny bit of gravel with the tail over the water. We got some amazing photos.
honesthenery@thelemmy.club · -2 pts · 13d
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
Lemming_Kravitz@lemmy.world · -3 pts · 14d
Cars nowadays are made such they break down. They break down unlike cars before. They break down like a hoax.
Mountainaire@lemmy.world · 2 pts · 14d
Someone didn't buy a Toyota!
MutantTailThing@lemmy.world · -4 pts · 15d
If you can afford a 40k car why tf would you be driving for uber though?
ThePantser@sh.itjust.works · 8 pts · 15d
Idk ask the guys driving teslas for uber.
boonhet@sopuli.xyz · 1 pts · 15d
I mean if I did that, I could justify it as a business expense, meaning I pay 40k for the 40k car instead of paying 80k for it (income tax + social security contribution + other small payroll taxes on both employee and employer side + VAT). Provided Uber (or Bolt realistically) pays my company not myself, which is an option.
JimVanDeventer@lemmy.world · -7 pts · 14d
Lemmy: donāt use AI; pay artists!
Also Lemmy: this uppity bitch should work for exposure.
JigglySackles@lemmy.world · 7 pts · 14d
I think it's more about the gatekeeping.
rumba@lemmy.zip · 1 pts · 14d
Uber: know how to drive, own a car, insurance, use a cell phone to tell you where to make $12, drive from A-B-C-A, and pay 9 of it back to car maintenance over time.
Photographer: Own camera, insurance, lights, lenses, backdrops, computer, software licenses, photodelivery platform costs, know how to use them. Pack up gear into car, drive to shoot, lug all the gear, setup, shoot, position, pose, pack up all the gear, drive back, stow all the gear, transfer images to computer, Lightroom, cull, Photoshop, color/image/wrinkles/clothing fixes, blinks, smirks, stray hairs, put it into a gallery,
The Uber driver spent 30 minutes
The photographer spent 6-8 hours.
If the photographer is gatekeeping you, hire the Uber driver to take your picture for $12.
JigglySackles@lemmy.world · 0 pts · 13d
Just because it's not an exact comparison doesn't mean the analogy fails.
Edit: I think there is confusion based on her word choices. I mention it in another comment.
https://lemmy.world/comment/25419707
rumba@lemmy.zip · 2 pts · 13d
You can have all the hobbies you want. But undercharging for hobby work does fuck over the actual photographers.
Everyone is looking for an amazing hobbiest to shoot their wedding and beating the fuck out of the professionals doing it for a living because they want a couple of grand for a solid week of work.
Seriously, just ask the people attending the wedding to send pictures to you, people would love to help.
My wife has been doing professional work for years, over the past decade or so, drastically more clients browbeat her mercilessly to the point that she has to fire them. What do you mean you need $200 to come to my house and do headshots, it's only worth $25.
If you have offers for $25 you should take them. Her stuff is really good, they know they don't want the $25 they're just not willing to pay a living wage to get it.
JigglySackles@lemmy.world · 2 pts · 13d
I think the bigger issue causing that is cameras on phones have devalued photographs in general. Many people really don't understand what goes into the good photographs and think it's as easy as their selfies. And it's bullshit that people treat your wife that way.
14th_cylon@lemmy.zip · 2 pts · 12d
most people have no idea what good photograph is. they share blurry shit with terrible composition on instagram and think that is good photograph, because their 10 friends told them so (and they returned the favor and everyone is happy how amazing photographers they all are)
rumba@lemmy.zip · 1 pts · 13d
Consumer digital, in general, closed off a large portion of the pro market. In the before times, you would hire a photographer because you needed something better than a Polaroid and couldn't trust some rando with a cheap film camera to get everything right. Once you could see what you were getting instantly, you had good enough pictures for anything not selling something or hanging on your wall meant to evoke emotion.
Not only phone cameras, but AI post-processing. The real raw images on those itty-bitty sensors are still pretty bad, but they do a great job of correction now. And the stuff from the past 4-5 years, with erasing things and generating smart fill, is freaking awesome.
JimVanDeventer@lemmy.world · 1 pts · 14d
I wouldnāt call his reply gatekeeping. Heās kind of just promoting a race to the bottom mentality.
JigglySackles@lemmy.world · 1 pts · 13d
I read hers as gatekeeping and his as holding a mirror to that gatekeeping.
Her phrasing of "you want to shoot for x money" is gatekeeping. You can't have a hobby because I paid more money to do it professionally.
If she's talking about people wanting to low ball her she would've said "a shoot" instead of "to shoot". It's also perfectly likely she just misspoke.
Corkyskog@sh.itjust.works · 6 pts · 14d
I don't see what's wrong with $100-300 I know about five 30 year old women with $5,000 cameras that would jump at the gig as long as it wasn't a full wedding commitment.
betterdeadthanreddit@lemmy.world · 1 pts · 14d
A good photographer should know what to do with exposure though.
VelvetPinkOtter123@lemmy.world · -10 pts · 15d
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.
doenietzomoeilijk@discuss.tchncs.de · 0 pts · 14d
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.
VelvetPinkOtter123@lemmy.world · 0 pts · 14d
It can
I don't run a nature magazine, AI will do just fine for my Azure profile picture