So this blog I am going to vent a little about my frustration with some people. I constantly look on craigslist and other services for people needing photographers and I am constantly amazed at what people think photography is worth. "I need a wedding photographer for 4-6 hours but I don't want to pay more than $400" and "oh yeah I want a disk of the images so do with as I please" Are you kidding me? Providing this person only needs you for four hours that is $100 an hour. Pretty good you may say. Here is the kicker those pictures are not going to burn themselves on the disk they want, and 85% of the time they won't come straight out of the camera on to that disk either. So that means since my camera which is not a cheap model either can't burn cd's yet, (I am sure it is coming) that means there has to be a middle program to do this for you. Sure windows 7 can burn files to a disk pretty easily but you want to hand the RAW files over to someone and let then "do as they please." Don't know what a Raw file is?? Well maybe you will photograph a wedding for $100 bucks an hour then. Sure you can shoot JPEG and let the camera do all the work and process the image for you but it only does what it is programmed to do. Remember it is a computer too. Then you just transfer your images to the computer and then to a disk and you are done right? OK if you are happy then you won't survive in this business and I won't have to worry about you as competition in 6 months anyway. Thanks. Any wedding photographer worth anything will edit pics to make sure unsightly things are not present in photographs. Tags on wedding dress? How would you like 500 pics of you or your wife in her dress and the tag is out on every one? I have seen this and I have spent the time to edit every one of the tags out of 200 plus pictures. Not a hard thing to do but time consuming. So since I spent this time my time has now gone past the 4 hours and now I am down to less per hour. I haven't even burned the images yet. Now there is the little thing of advertising so create two files of each picture one with a watermark for the web and one without a watermark to be printed. Kind of scary how much work goes into this. So after this has been done and the pictures are burned now delivery time. I personally won't send someone's wedding photo's through the mail as I want them to come see them so I know they are happy. Add some more time please and reduce monies per hour. So as you can see it is way more than just the time spent at the wedding shooting or any other event for that matter it is work that entails a lot of time if you want it done right.
Please don't call me and tell me that the reception hall was expensive, the church was expensive and your dress was $5,000 dollars so you want me to photograph your wedding for $200. Sorry not worth my time as my time is more valuable than that. I don't do this as a hobby this is my life!
In this world everyone is buying these expensive cameras and thinking they are photographers. Like one of my teachers said "throw a rock in Portland you will hit a wanna be photographer and it will bounce off and hit someone that thinks they are a model!"
Just because someone buys a expensive camera does not make them a photographer. In fact most people will tell you the most important thing in a good camera is mega pixels. Mega-pixels is something that camera companies use to sell cameras. Give a photographer great glass (lenses) an 8 MP camera and proper lighting and they can shoot just as well if not better than the 25MP camera. The trouble is people don't understand this and therefore undervalue the art. Take the time to learn what it takes to produce spectacular images and then you will understand why we as professional photographers charge what we do.Here is a little thing to think about Photography is light and those little flashes on your camera are not enough, especially when not used properly.
Just remember there is way more than what you all see at the event or wedding to get to the final product that you expect.
