Why do professional photographers charge so much?
modelmayhem.com
modelmayhem.com
Photography as a profession is currently bifurcated: there are a smallish number of high-end shooters (of whom it sounds like Bickley is one) and a very large number of Guys With Cameras (GWCs) on Craigslist, Model Mayhem, and elsewhere. The temptation is obvious: photography is fun, it's possible to product decent images with cheap gear these days, and a lot of people want to give professional shooting a go.
But the reality is a lot harder:
Let's say you want to make a living as a full-time photographer, and let's set a reasonable middle-class lifestyle at $45,000 a year (your number may be higher or lower). If you're trying to bill at $50, your take-home is probably closer to $25 an hour. To make $45,000, you'll have to bill at least 1,800 hours per year, or 35 hours per week, 52 weeks a year, paid. Adjust those numbers accordingly for vacations, illnesses, etc. (you don't get two weeks of paid vacation as an independent contractor).
Yet a lot of people are comparing real professions with GWCs who just got a D7000 and will shoot for $75 to "get experience." There is a demographically infinite number of these guys. So when average people see how much real professionals cost, they blanch, because they're often comparing pros to GWCs. Some GWCs can be reasonably good. Almost everyone charging over $100 an hour is really good. But there's little middle ground anymore.
One other note: Bickley might be shooting with an $8000 D4 or 1D-X, but by now many of their predecessors can be bought for $1000 – $2000. The OMFG AMAZING cameras of 2008 (Nikon D700, Canon 5D II, Sony's FF camera the name of which escapes me) that lots of pros shot with are $1000 - 1500, and for most purposes at base ISO they're still awesome and overkill. There are still reasons to buy $8000 in gear, but it's possible to produce equivalent work in many situations with much less.
edit: Also, the first $8000 camera one buys is absurdly expensive, but when a new model appears most people sell their old one and use the proceeds to buy the new one, while using the cost of the new one as a tax write-off. Almost no one buys a new $8000 camera from scratch every year.
Photography is a profession for those who either "picked their parents well" or can't stand not to do it, i.e. your life's passion.
Very true. I would bet that many budding wedding photographers will realize that they're in over their heads the first time they deal with a bridezilla, mob or mog (mother of bride/groom) on the day of the shoot.
Being a pro photographer requires you to be really good with people, especially the bad ones. It's not just enough to be good with a camera.
I've loved photography for my entire life, but I don't envy the people who shoot weddings for a living.
The "valuable skills" of a true professional photographer are only valuable if there is demand for it.
So for me, charge what ever you want to charge for the session, but for goodness sakes, give people their photos. That is what they are paying you for.
bradly's case, like darkarmani pointed out is a communication issue. His wife assumed that since she is paying for the shoot she would own the resultant work. The photographer probably though otherwise and had a contract to back this up. For a contract to be considered legal there must be a "meeting of the minds" and clearly it didn't happen here. I blame the photographer here, because they usually have their own contract templates that they know well. They should correct any asymmetric of information that may result. Having the client hire a lawyer to examine the photo contract would be more expensive than hiring a photographer in the first place.
TL;DR If photographers don't want lawyers fees cutting into their service fees, they should be upfront about what they are peddling.
Which I believe is what the parent was asking about.
I'd rather buy my own camera and learn to take photos properly than pay $25 per digital copy, it would be more fun.
Go buy your own camera and learn to take photos properly! I would encourage everyone to do that. The exact moment that you grasp mastery of photography will be the day that you understand why photographers don't give up their copyright or hand over digital files to you.
No, they give them up because that's _the entire point of hiring a freelancer_. It sounds absurd to pay someone to create something but not actually get that thing for yourself. That's what the money is in exchange for.
Not really. My clients are paying for results, and part of those results include a license to use the code I write forever.
But I never give up the copyright. I frequently re-use techniques, libraries, modules, etc across clients, and in fact would be stupid not to.
Taking photos for yourself is always fun.
Taking photos for other people for money is not nearly as fun as you think it is, especially if your customers don't respect what you do and think that they could do your job by buying a camera.
I'm not a pro photographer, but I've definitely had my share of customers who'd constantly complain about how much we were charging them because they thought that by reading a manual, they could do what we do.
You can have a contract where they pass the copyright over to you, but most photographers wouldn't sign that contract without raising the price significantly.
I don't see how this matters. If you wanted to lie and discredit the photographer, you could just take your own photo, do the same exact thing, and claim the photographer took it.
I do understand the economic incentive for the photographer to keep the digital copies, of course.
They might think they've done a nice thing but they haven't. I've also seen wedding pictures show up in newspaper ads because it was the best picture that the person had of themselves.
Hoomans don't understand or respect copyright, in general. When it's a big corporation it's one thing. When it's a guy/gal carrying forty pounds of gear around in their 15 year old car trying to make your memories last forever when they've got 1/500th of a second to get it right for ~$40/hr the copyright belongs to them. People should understand it.
Edited for gender neutrality.
That's only by custom. Legally the photographer holds the copyright as soon as they take the photo, but they could just as easily assign full copyright to the person hiring them as a matter of course.
Most photos of people at weddings, family portraits, etc have little commercial value, except to the people who are in the photos. So you can see how this feels like double/triple/n-times charging, as it has suddenly become a monopoly backed by federal copyright law.
I'd go over the contract term-by-term with a client before they signed, and I never had anyone request to cross it out.
* paraphrasing, of course.
This is inane. What photographer would give you the priviledge of publicly showing "defaced" work as theirs? Can't you do this anyway be mis-attributing?
Absolutely! This is a communication issue. There would be no confusion if every single photographer / studio spelled this out explicitly to you before hand. The reason they don't spell it out explicitly is that once they take the photos, you have no choice but to pay them for the photos. After you are burned by this, you realize it is always this bait and switch.
Every single person in the universe is hiring people to take pictures so they can have the pictures. They don't hire photographers, so the photographers can build up a library of prints to sell back to them.
That being said, I negotiated heavily with my wedding photographer for the rights to my photos. This was an incredibly hard process and I almost dumped my expensive photographer. It wasn't the money issue, but they could not grok giving up or sharing the copyright (sublicensing). Eventually, they gave me a full sub-license, with equivalent full rights after 5 years (i could do anything except sell them for a profit until 5 years later). As if i wanted to try and make professional quality prints to sell to all of my guests.
My argument was that those images are priceless to me -- even in 30 years, but they might move on in 30 years or lose the images. Without an ability to reprint them, I would be limited to decaying physical prints.
Just charge for your time and maybe a reasonable amount for digital copies and be done with it.
If you give a customer digital copies and they "retouch" them or crop them and present it as YOUR work, that's a huge frustration.
Say you shoot portraits of a family and give them the originals. They do a lousy crop of the kids, chopping off the parents' heads and send that out to their friends/family saying that they got the pictures done at Smith & Sons and look at the kids!
Some people will look at that picture and say "Wow, Smith & Sons did an absolutely terrible job, why would they cut off the parents' heads?"
That kind of mis-representation.
It's not like they were doing individual editing of the shots. They had some pre-made filters set up which we could choose to apply to the photos of our liking.
As a photographer, I wasn't particularly impressed with the digital files I received. They didn't seem to be as high quality as the camera they were using should be producing. And the sharpening/NR wasn't custom to the pictures.
So whenever I do shoots for people, I sit them down mid-shoot to see what the shots look like, and maybe even attempt to fully edit their favorite shot on the spot to show them the expertise that I put into the post-processing. I let them rate all the photos themselves so that I know what they like, and then I give them exactly what they asked for.
It's common, but not the only option. There are plenty of skilled photographers who will just charge you for the time spent on the shoot and hand over the digital copies. You just need to search them out and realize that you may or may not get the same caliber of artist as one who can dictate their own terms.
I had to spell out explicitly to the photographer that I hired that only I would own the copyrights to the photos and they she could not use them on her website, etc.
This was a few years ago. I think it's more common today for people to include the digital copies in the price or sell them to you for an additional fee.
Edit: HA! Looks like I found one in this very thread! Use that downvote button, bitter dinosaur!
They'll give you the digital copies but not the rights. It might not be a problem until you hit a store that won't make prints for you.
I'd be willing to bet that just about every professional photographer retouches each photograph in some way before printing or otherwise delivering them to the client.
Retouching takes time. If they gave away digital copies before retouching that work wouldn't be up to their standards and their reputation—and ability to gain new clients—could be harmed.
Though, if the photographer holds copyright they can still charge per digital copy (per use?) of the same photo.
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You're missing the point. Unless they retouch the photo before every subsequent digital "reprint", there's no reason to charge per digital copy of the same photo.
The OP is saying "charge what you're going to charge, but don't keep charging for each subsequent copy".
Some labs wouldn't print photos that look "pro" but this is less of a problem now.
Being a professional glamour photographer (www.topmodelphotography.com) I can say that is not how all photographers work. I always give all the RAW photos immediately after the shoot.
Some photographers want to pick out the good ones, retouch them, and only give those out. This ensures that there is nothing out there that would reflect badly upon them. Personally, I'm not as concerned with this and I'd rather have less friction with clients.
I care about the talent of the photographer, because I'd like one or two good photos, but we recommend her to our friends due to her behavior, accomodation of two unruly and not-always-cooperative kids, as well as her ability to find the good shots.
We don't expect perfect pictures. Our facebook friends will not know who the photographer is, and live across the country anyway, so there's no risk of them ever being a customer of hers even if they did know. We don't plan to sell them, etc.
The answer, of course, is to find a photographer who is willing to negotiate a good price on the service of taking excellent pictures as well as on access to the data.
I do think that not giving the majority of the acceptable files is silly though. Most photographers often seem to greatly overvalue their work. Not that good ones don't exist, but craigslist is overwhelmed with talentless photogs who overspent on gear and put obnoxious watermarks on everything.
I remember an article that was posted here a few months back where a photographer complained about this exact same thing. That people did not want to pay for high quality images done by a professional. He was criticized for not "getting with the times", that anyone can take a picture so he better drop his prices!
I guess this article is written much better and has hard numbers to describe how little most photographers are making. But I wonder if the developers who complain about people lowballing them for their knowledge/experience are the same ones who tell photographers that they need to charge lower prices.
If you hand an unskilled photographer a good camera, they could accidentally shoot a few damn fine photos, where as with paints, you almost guaranteed you will not accidentally paint a great painting, or as a developer, accidentally code a great project. This cheapens photography as an art form.
Having dealt with many clients with poor photography, I will say, not enough people are willing to shell out for good photography and good digital dark room skills.
The problem is really with the customer's perception of the value of a professional's time and the work that they do.
It doesn't help when Canon produces ads for an entry level DSLR that ends with the bold statement "This ad was shot with this camera!". It ignores the fact that the ad was likely shot by an expensive professional with additional expensive lighting equipment and a staff of assistants. When a customer starts to think "All I need is a nice camera, and I can do that too!", you've got an uphill battle when it comes to educating customers about the value of a professional.
On HN, I'd bet that many of us have probably encountered people who have read or seen books with titles like "Learn HTML in 2 hours" or "Learn iOS programming in 7 days" and think that spectacular apps and sites can be created with little to no effort.
Actually I think it's the opposite. It has to do with the photographer's overvalued opinion of their work. How many family budgets can justify $500 for a set of family portraits? How may budgets can justify $1500 for a set of family portraits?
There are a lot more Hampton Inns than Ritz Carltons for a reason. Every photographer thinks they are the Ritz Carlton.
Not many, I guess, but the reality is that $500 will buy you an "average" photographer (i.e., a Hampton Inn). The really good ones cost way more than that.
I would argue that having a professional portrait is a bit of a "luxury" purchase. If you don't want to pay $500 for a set of family portraits, then you can always find someone you know with a camera to take a photo of your family for free.
What I find interesting though, this question rarely comes up with manual labor, or any kind of job that's considered "dirty" or physically hard. Nobody questions their plumber's bill, for example.
With purely "intellectual" or creative jobs though, a true professional makes things look easy. Which inevitably leads to "but it only took you 15 minutes to fix my computer!".
Creatives have it even worse.
People put up with it because of historical inertia, but it's not going to get any better for most photogs.
Like any profession you have the cost of doing business and the prices that you set. If someone can't afford your prices then you simply don't take them on as a client. If your work can't bring in clients at the price you feel is fair, the you should re-think you prices, approach to work, marketing to attract the clients that can pay, or find a new profession.
The problem is that many photographers do vanity work for amateur models who for many reasons (age, location etc...) will never make a career as a professional model. Professional models don't pay for their own photo shoots. They're working enough contracts to not have to fill their portfolio with spec work, or are represented by an agency who will cover the costs of a shoot.
Many photographers who shoot fashion style portraits and make a bit of money doing it, consider themselves professional fashion photographers and expect to be paid as one. The problem is that they'll never command the same prices by doing portfolio work as they would doing work in the industry for brands.
At first, I charged a low per-session fee and tried to make money selling prints and digital rights on a per-image basis. But really, I don't like that model at all (neither did my customers) so now I charge a higher session fee and personal use rights to the images are included, in full resolution.
Most people don't realize how much time is spent in post-production. I spend hours re-touching. Not to mention, the time it takes to learn things like off-camera lighting and the cost of the gear associated. But, I'm not complaining, it's fun to learn.
I don't really profit from photography but it does cover some of the cost of my gear and it's just plain fun to do. Trying to make a living with photography would be extremely difficult, but clearly some people are able to pull it off.
People with a fresh perspective will compare it with other, less "storied" professions and it will feel (perhaps rightly so) like a scam.
Do some research and negotiate up front. If you make an unexpected demand at the end thats quite different than the usual, you'll make the photographer feel as if they are the one who's being scammed. If they know up front that this shoot is going to be different than "the norm", they will often be surprisingly willing to think differently.
Please just set a price for your services and then give me the files. Printing used to be a value-added activity. It's not anymore, unless you're doing something unusual.
Not so, at least in the US!
To be a "work for hire", one of two things must be true.
1. It is a work prepared by an employee within the scope of his or her employment. The key word here is "employee". A contractor is generally NOT an employee for purposes of copyright law. Whether or not one is an employee is determined by looking at a bunch of factors, including who provides the tools for the work, the duration of the work, whether the hiring party has the right to assign additional work, the hired party's role in hiring assistants, benefits provides, and many others.
2. The parties expressly agree in a written, signed, instrument that the work shall be considered a work for hire AND it is a work specially ordered or commissioned for use as a contribution to a collective work, as a part of a motion picture or other audiovisual work, as a translation, as a supplementary work, as a compilation, as an instructional text, as a test, as answer material for a test, or as an atlas.
Things like wedding photographs probably cannot be construed as falling into any of those types of works listed in #2, and so cannot be works for hire, no matter what you say in the contract. Copyright will belong to the contractor (unless you manage to somehow actually end up with an employer/employee relationship under #1, which is hard). If you want copyright, write the contract so that you are buying the copyrights from the photographer.
The photographer is paying for studio rental, time spent post processing, the CD/thumb drive for digital copies. The rest is divided into varying percentages for employee salaries, rent, food, and miscellaneous but necessary costs such as gas, medical/business/car insurance, clothing and entertainment. Don't forget, Uncle Sam wants a cut so a photographer must set aside money from each session and every sale for taxes every year.
Printed copies may appear outrageously expensive but, the photographer has to purchase the paper, ink and maintain the machine. They may send out images to be printed and have to pay for such services.
Photographers most often want to print their own images to ensure proper color/saturation handling - this speaks much about the quality of the image. Printable copies may be made available to the client and the photographer stands to lose much on the little profit they gain from prints when the client takes home high res images; this will show in a larger outright cost for the CD with printable images. The photographer will(should) state how long they will retain a copy of the images in their records so you may return for more prints within that specified time limit, or purchase the printable images when you are able to do so.
My problem is not necessarily with the price, but the way prices are structured. People balk at paying $25 per print because they know it's a ridiculous price for a print. Even the highest end online printers are in the $2-3 range for 8x10. But we as consumers also know that you can get very good quality 8x10 prints for half that. So they rightfully question why they are paying $25 for something they know costs the producer 1/10th the price. In a world of $1 apps, $25 prints are bound to get some push back.
I understand the photographer needs to make money, so don't whine about all of the burdensome costs. Give me a bottom line and let me decide if you are worth it or not.
Last comment ... if the photographer is complaining about time spent retouching and post-processing, then they need to either improve their photoshop skills or improve their photo skills. If it's your job, you'd better get shots right out of the camera that need very little editing or touch ups.
So your preferred development environment is cat(1), then?
My basic concept was that at some price photographers would give away all the digitals, customers should be able to "use" them (but not sell them) as they wished, and that people should choose photographers almost exclusively on the quality of their work. The business would be a marketplace fee for arranging the transaction.
I ultimately gave up due to personal priorities (children / day job) and a complicated legal mountain to climb (who owns copyright? Do you force everyone into a contract?).
If anyone wants to pick it up I'd be happy to share the code.
Because of this, I would not under any circumstances sign a work-for-hire contract as a photographer. No good photographer I know would do that.
Something else to consider... for many photographers, the editing process is inseparable from the photo. The in-camera raw image is only an intermediate step. I don't know how many times I've been asked for a complete set of raw images by models or performers (I mostly shoot dance performance), and they've reacted with surprise to my flat NO answer. I'm not willing to let someone else make aesthetic decisions on my raw images, except perhaps in cases where I consider the person an artistic peer and treat it as a co-project.
Besides, art is WHY many of us take up photography! When you just whore out your work for money, it's demoralizing. You think less of yourself as an artist, and as a person.
And it's only demoralizing if you subscribe to the notion that "art" is more important than "work" or that "work" is less important than "art". These are largely conceits that are forced on us by our culture, so you'd basically be letting other people's values make you a depressed mess.
A lot of newbie photographers do indeed cater to this segment of the business. Those photographers suck and do not wind up making very much money. It is the typical race to the bottom.
Photographers who are successful are creating experiences, and high-end presentations of their work are part of that experience.
If all you want is digital copies, then hire your Uncle Bob with a case of beer. Chances are he has the same high-end equipment a good pro does, and probably knows how to use it, too.
This same issue is true for a lot of professionals, not just photographer. The digital revolution has greatly lowered the barrier of entry, and that's a good thing, but it also means a lot of the photographers you are dealing with in the marketplace just aren't any good.
We are living in an economy where technology is enabling a variety of self-service options to professional services.
These self service options are often dramatically cheaper than retaining a person with professional experience. For example paying $10 for a site building application vs $1000 to hire a web designer.
The answer of course is to sell the benefits of professional skill to your client. The trouble of course is that often clients themselves have terrible taste and are bad at distinguishing good work from bad. The website they built with yellow text on pink background may "look amazing!" to them so the difficult part is making the case to them that many of their customers will be put off by this in a way that may cost them sales.
In my experience, shooting the photo is the easiest part. Being "there", as in, the right place to shoot the photo, is even more critical. Is your child getting married? Do you really want to experience their wedding vows with a 10-pound camera held in front of your face?
If your photoshoot is non-documentary...i.e. you want to photog to help create a scene...well, now you're not paying for just a photographer, but a creative director.
And of course, a good camera is just a part...sometimes a very small part, of a good photo. Lighting equipment matters much more...and while you may have a great $1000 prosumer camera, you probably don't have $1000 to $10000 in lighting equipment (or the assistants needed to operate it).
And finally, the least fun part of all: editing and organizing the photos. I've heard that editing video takes about 10 hours per minute of usable video...the ratio isn't as drastic for photography, but even photogs with a good workflow (such as a Lightroom setup), can spend hours editing down to the best dozen photos out of a thousand.
To reiterate the point: shooting a photo with a camera is the fun and easy part. The rest of what it takes to make a great photo is what you're paying the big money for.
As with most things in life there is an external view which cannot see the nuances, and an internal view which sees all or most of these challenges.
Trying to evaluate the 'value' of something without internalizing the challenge of providing that something doesn't work.
But your comments remind me of Picasso...it's fair to say that some of his work could be physically done by an amateur. But Picasso was prolific at drawing, including realistic figures. One of the best exhibits I've seen showed how he started with drawing realistic objects and then, in later drafts, deconstructing them to the surreal, deceptively simple forms that they eventually take in the final product.
But I think the illusion of parity is especially strong (and deceptive) in photography. Because you can literally know nothing about a camera except how to push the shutter and you can still produce a fantastic photo...whereas with drawing/painting...the physical act of just doing them is a barrier, nevermind actually making something.
If you don't have a computer best-guessing exposure for you and you don't understand exposure yourself, you're screwed. If you understand exposure, you don't NEED the computer to make guesses for you. My expensive DSLR is set to manual, so I don't have the computer "guess" the wrong thing.
Few people ask a web developer "what kind of computer did you use to make that site?" whereas many photographers get asked "what kind of camera did you use to get that shot?" Many people assume the camera does most of the work involved with a great shot.
This is a problem, and frankly, I think the camera makers are contributing to this big time. I get annoyed every time I see a camera commercial on TV where at the end of the commercial, they brag that it was shot with the camera being featured in the ad (I think I've seen Canon and Nikon ads that do this). What isn't visible is all the extra overhead related to the shoot: a director, a writer, one or more camerapeople, expensive lighting and sound gear, assistants, editors, etc.
"shooting a photo with a camera is the fun and easy part"
To which I will add that everyone wants to be the one to wash the suds off the car with the hose.
One of the trueisms about photography that I found when I did it was that there were so many cases of where you thought you shot and developed the perfect photo, and all anyone cared about (imagine this!) is what they looked like in the photo. So to your point there is actually much involved in satisfying the various stakeholders.
The best gig I've ever gotten was for a client who flew me to Lake Como, Italy for a week. But you had to envy the view while you were shooting all day :)
The other thing that bothers me with all the rest of the photographers I contacted for the job was that they all want to sell you their overpriced albums, prints etc on top of the photographer's price. The guy that got the job in the end explicitly told me, he doesn't arrange for prints, but if we want them he can recommend and arrange it for us but we get to pay the printer directly and not him.
It never upset me that the models didn't understand the business or that I had to explain what was going on. Of course they don't know what are common contract terms for photographers, they aren't doing the photographer's job and they've never done the photographer's job.
It's no different in software contracting. Of course my clients don't have a flipping clue what it takes to make software; that's the entire point of them hiring me.
And keeping exclusive copyright--while I know is completely common--is straight up ridiculous. Sure, if you're David LaChapelle, you probably will be making money off of the images themselves at some point, rather than just the session fee. Of course, if you're David LaChapelle, you're also not taking gigs from the subject of the pictures, you're getting hired by magazines who are also hiring the models for you, and the magazine will demand the copyright.
But the vast majority of your garden variety wedding photographers and "Glamor ShotZ!" photographers aren't going to do jack with the photos. Who the hell is going to want to buy photos of YOUR wedding other than YOU? At most, they're going to stick them in their portfolio and use them as advertising. The exclusive copyright of those images is so completely valueless that the only reason the photographer could possibly want them is to gouge the customer for prints. It's disingenuous rent-seeking.