A Million Pageviews, Thousands of Dollars Poorer, and Still Countlessly Richer

I would say that there are 2 kinds of "work" involved in wedding photography:

1. The physical stuff like scouting out the locations way before the day of the actual wedding, attending wedding rehearsals to understand how the actual ceremony would go like on the day itself, the actual shooting for the wedding ceremony as well as the reception, and the days after spent sorting through the shots and editing them. This is definitely a lot more physically taxing compared what a recreational photographer (which I'm assuming the author is) is normally used to. I still remember how my legs just gave up after I came home from spending the whole day running around trying to get all the shots while lugging around a couple of kgs of gears.

2. The mental stuff like how stressful it is to know that you only have one chance to get things right on your client's special day, and if let's say you screw up the bride-walking-down-the-aisle shot, you can't just get the couple to rewind the whole ceremony just so you can get the shot right. On top of that, sometimes if you're unlucky enough you may even face lawsuits from dissatisfied couple asking for a refund AND for you to compensate for their wedding costs and pay for a new ceremony so that they can have those "memories" be immortalised in photos. Don't forget that like in all creative professions, you have to deal with clients who insist that you charge too much cause their 16 year old nephew with a DSLR can do the job for free.

So yeah, wedding photography may be for some people but personally I wouldn't want to make a living out of it, probably because I don't think it suits my more laid back personality.

I believe the point is that wedding photography is really hard work compared to taking casual photos (or a more part time photo-journalist style).

It sounds like the author already has a career doing something else, so perhaps even at $3k a pop, weddings are too much work to be very enjoyable. I've also shot a friend's wedding (partially as a favor, partially just to see what it was like) and I can safely say I don't ever want to give up software development for wedding photography.

I believe there is a fair bit of stress photographing a wedding (it's a once-off event that if you screw up you stand a chance of losing future business), made worse because unlike many other shoots, the photographer doesn't have as much control over the proceedings (although the last wedding I was at seemed more like a photo shoot than a wedding in some ways, with the proceedings waiting for the photographers!).

He's probably talking about the other headaches that come along with any business, not so much the actual service.

Yes...you're exactly right. $3,000 to $5,000 sounds about reasonable for me, since I live in NYC and have a higher cost of living. However, my pro colleagues in northern California charged that much for weddings, so I imagine I would not be able to charge that high.

As another commenter noted, it's not about the amount of work, but just the type of work. The cat herding ("OK, find all the grandparents. Now let's do a shot with just the uncles and nephews. Now let's do their med school class with her mom, etc. etc.") is pretty tiring. I also really don't feel confident enough with lighting systems to consistently get the "money" shots (i.e. the kiss at the altar in a darkly lit church).

> but the world is saturated in good photographs.

I'm guessing it also depends on the kind of pictures you take, TFAA takes pictures of "human events", which you can expect many to save. Others (e.g. Myrmecos's Alex Wild) perform their craft in much more constrained and specialized environment, likely yielding much rarer pictures.

Although even then, I'm not sure Myrmecos makes enough of his post-takes to live (I don't think I've ever seen a breakdown from him)

Also scroll down to check out the photos on the bottom of the page, awesome!

Thanks for the adroit summary...Since I've only done photography in the digital age, the idea that a photo alone is worth something seems strange to me. However, a photo produced during an assignment in which a photographer has to schlep a half-day to get is most definitely worth hundreds or thousands.

Someone who cares about preserving the memory of their wedding will recognize the value of paying someone $3,000-$10,000 to capture it, over some uncle who just bought a massive DSLR system to toy with. Same with publications and important news events. In the latter case, the problem is that there are just far fewer wealthy publications that still exist.

Yep, and I didn't really argue otherwise.

However, the dilemma facing photogs who do want to make a living is that to "be with it" is to be on some kind of service that allows for easy sharing of their work. But this sometimes (which, in most photogs' eyes, is too often) leads to photos being reused without proper payment.

And then you get into the discussion of, "Well they wouldn't have paid any money for your photo even if you did have it under lock-and-key"

In other words, even if I didn't have CC on my photos, I would still make a negligible amount of money. They aren't good/specific-to-a-buyer's-needs to make money in their digital existence. I could conceivably make money by selling prints and really marketing myself, but I foresee that ultimately making me less money than if I spent that time focused on my actual job.

Now I'm also curious. At first I thought 1,000,000 is a huge number of views, but at 3,100 photos that's just 322/photo. I can't access Flickr from work but I think I have about 45 photos and 18,500 views, averaging 411/photo, and that's just from a couple of up votes on reddit/itookapicture (seldom more than 5-10). Obviously the actual distribution of views will vary quite a bit, but it's a useful starting point.

That being said, this guy seems to have quite an ability to take interesting photos of ordinary situations whereas I tend to save the camera for special moments so I doubt I'll ever hit 3,100 photos. Unfortunately it looks like the Flickr Stats API is per-user, and private, with no global statistics available (nor in a Flickr blog post), so we can't know what's "normal" and what's not.

I took a quick look through your photostream...one other factor to consider: You have a higher proportion of personal/friend/family photos in your photos (I post my friend/family photos only on FB), whereas I have mostly general interest New York photos.

Photos from New York (a snowball fight in Minneapolis would not likely draw much attention) are typically more in demand so it seems that I should actually should have much higher traffic than you, assuming most random browsers are more interested in New York than a photog's friends/family. So my milestone seems even less noteworthy (and/or, of course, your general interest photos are particularly interesting).

You reminded me that I had wanted to mention my observations about pageviews, so I added them to the post: http://danwin.com/2012/01/a-million-pageviews-thousands-of-d...

The answer: I don't know. Besides frequently uploading to Flickr, I don't take advantage of many of the social features...I notice I get very few comments on even my highly trafficked photos. I'm guessing this is because a good portion of traffic comes from social sites like Reddit...and most of those users aren't likely to create a Flickr account to comment. Also, Flickr's "interestingness" algorithm does not seem to place much importance on high traffic, if that traffic comes from a single outside source.

And also, I've never drawn much traffic from Google or other search engines.

A photograph doesn't grab 3 minutes of attention like a video. Or, more specifically, you can't ask someone to watch a 15 second ad just to see a picture.

He didn't mention the costs of his computer either, so he must've stolen that too?

But srsly, I think we can be sure that he has a legal copy of Photoshop. From the bio on his employer's website [1]:

"Dan Nguyen is a news application developer at ProPublica. [...] Previously, Dan worked as a reporter, Web developer and multimedia producer for the Sacramento Bee and sacbee.com. His work on multimedia projects won awards from Editor and Publisher and the National Council on Crime and Delinquency."

[1] http://www.propublica.org/site/author/dan_nguyen

Article doesn't mention Photoshop, so for all you know he might be using a free alternative.