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.

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.

Wedding photographer is an interesting job. With a lot of jobs, people buy the minimum viable equipment they need to get the job done.

But, people who get into wedding photography seem to generally be people who are really into photography. Rather than a $5000 camera being the requirement for the job. The $5000 camera is a present you can justify getting yourself if the wedding photography game is going well.

It's not a tool that goes into the case and stays there until the next wedding. It's something to be used for the kinds of pictures that don't pay the bills but that you love taking: nature shots, architecture, abstract art, gritty realism, etc.

Nobody cares what your camera costs

It's certainly a curiosity. Like, what's the value-add of a $5k camera relative to a cheaper model? What's the step-up or step-down in price? What features are you prizing? What brand are you favoring? What are your clients looking for that someone else can't necessarily bring with a cheaper device?

Whole books have been written about the industry, the technology around the industry, and the kinds of people who pursue it.

Charge what you think your service is worth and work for clients who pay it.

Finding clients who pay well is half the work of any freelance job.

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...

$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?

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.

Our wedding photographer gave us both RAWs and processed JPEGs

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

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.

Does he make up content to react to? Is that his thing?

There are loads of us ! At least two.

Post a photo so we know you're legit

Bro... Shooting your friends and family is messed up.... Whether someone pays you to or not...

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.

I don't really understand photography.

Its just like drawing. The technique matters most.

With food youre working with colours and macro, mostly, while with action you are trying to position yourself so you can get the best shot. With weddings its a mix.

It dosent matter if you are really good at drawing underage incest furry porn if the dude wants you to make an oil painting of the Alps.

And it all depends on what kinda.professional she is.

Good photographers are actually pretty rare and - in my experience - treat the field of capturing visual information as a science, but since the advent of consumer DSLR and mirrorless systems, modern-day digital cameras with nearly instant automatically-focusing lenses that utilize a grid array and intelligence models to smartly maintain clarity on what is most likely a subject as it moves in 3D space, have made it so much harder to fuck things up that it essentially has opened the floodgates of photography so that there's an endless sea of morons thinking that buying a $5000 Canon with a full-frame sensor and a lens the size of a Stanley thermos makes them Ansel Adams.

It's the same with any field where the bar to entry gets suddenly lowered. The market becomes immediately flooded with new "experts" because the tools evolve to the point that they become nearly idiot-proof. Think Claude vibe coders calling themselves programmers / software engineers, Gemini prompters calling themselves visual designers, and people on SoundCloud uploading jingles they farted out on SUNO calling themselves musicians.

She’s not really full of shit, but she is being kind of bitchy. Meanwhile, Xavier’s just a trolling asshole.

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.

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, there’s scenic photography, which is basically having really good composition skills, knowing good locations, and timing, and then there’s people photography, which is… extra. I don’t blame photographers for charging more for that shit lol

‘I want our wedding photos to be the two of us on a cliff at the beach at sunset with really pretty clouds behind us!’ And you’re 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 that’s extra lighting (that you’ll have to carry to the location) and extra time in photoshop to be sure you can still see their faces clearly…

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.

how do you white balance your shots/ seems overly sepia

Hey man, I support your hobby, but uh, this is embarrassing to boast about. Be humble, you’re an amateur and that’s okay.