originally taken from: www.kellymuncephotography.blogspot.com (with minor tweaking in some areas suited to what I do)
Why Do Professional Photographers Seem Expensive?
In this digital age where everyone has digital cameras, scanners and home “photo printers”, when people take their camera cards to a local printing store and pick them up a few hours later, we hear this all the time – How in the world do Professional Photographers charge $60 for an 8×10 when they cost just $1.50 at the store?
Here’s why.
(This is my version on what happens ‘Behind the Scenes’. All Photographers are a little different in how long they take to edit, I on the other hand take longer then most, as I like to give you a variety of Photoshop styles, including lots of awesome art works.)
Simply put, you’re not just paying for the actual photograph or piece of paper; you’re paying for time and expertise. First, let’s look at the actual time involved. If you don’t read this entire page, at least read this first part.
For a 2 hour portrait session:
* 30 minutes to 1 hour of travel to and from the session
* 2 hours of shooting
* 30 minutes of set up, preparation, talking to the client etc.
* 1 hour + to load the photos onto a computer (2 - 4 Gb of data)
* 30 minutes to back up the files on an external drive
* 2-3 days (sometimes longer) of Photoshop time including cropping, contrast, colour, art works; including textures, overlays, cloning of unwanted distractions, airbrushing, sharpening, saving a copy for print and a copy for the Internet and backing up the edited photographs, printing the proofs for viewing, make slideshow for viewing, make and print your little ‘extras’ that you don’t know, until the viewing session etc. The list can go on and on.
* 1 or so hours talking/emailing clients at viewing/ordering session, answer questions, receive their order and payment, order their prints, receive and verify prints, package prints and purchasing packaging materials, bags, boxes etc.
* 30 mins – 1 hour of scheduled appointment for pickup of photos or delivering or postage.
You can see how one 2 hour session easily turns into more than 4 days of work from start to finish. So when you see a Photographer charging a $200 session fee for a two hour photo shoot, you are not paying them $100 / hour and the paper professional photographers use costs a lot more then $1.50 to have printed.
And i haven’t even mentioned all the other Office work of running a business that happens on a daily basis.
For an eight hour wedding:
* I won’t go into all the details, but an eight hour wedding typically amounts to at least 2 to 3 full 40 hour work weeks worth of time. Again, if they are charging you $4,000 for an eight hour wedding, you are not paying them $500 / hour.
Now for the expertise.
In my case, shooting professional photography is a skill, acquired through a natural talent of seeing the light, an artistic eye, and many many many hours & dollars of learning how to use software, constant upgrades, finding the best quality of products to offer you etc. Even though a quality camera now costs under $2,000 taking professional portraits involves much more than a nice camera.
Most Professional Photographers take years to go from buying their first decent camera to making money with their photography. In addition to learning how to use the camera itself, there is a mountain of other equipment involved, as well as numerous software programs used to edit and print photographs, run a website, having insurance etc. To give you an idea between the difference of your little ‘ desktop printer’ and the professional printers, your desktop printer usually has only 4 inks, the professional printers have 12 + inks. We also have to calibrate our monitors regularly to make sure what we see on our screen is exactly what gets printed, no unwanted colours.
And let’s not forget that you actually have to have people skills, be able to communicate, make people comfortable in front of the camera – and posing people to make them look their best in a photograph is a skill all by itself.
Think of it this way – the next time you pay $X to have your nails done, those nails may only cost $1.50, But you gladly pay a lot more to hire a Professional to apply them.
What about the cheap studios at the Shopping Centre?
Please don’t compare us to the chain store studios. But if you must, consider all of the time and work that we put into our photographs, compared to what they do. Good luck getting a friendly and personable two hour photo shoot at a chain store. There you are in snap snap and out again! Not to mention they won’t come to the beach! And of course, look at our work compared to theirs. You get what you pay for.
I could go on and on with why Professional Photographers charge so much, but you get the idea, we are a service to please you, to give you something that you will have a lifetime of enjoyment and wonderful memories from.
Conclusion
We hope that those who have taken the time to read this page will have a better understanding of why professional photographs cost so much more than the photos you can do or print yourself at a local chain store.
Thank you for taking the time to read this.
Taken from extracts of the original writings from: Shawn Richter
www.caughtonfilmphoto.com/costofphotography.html
