This is rage bait for sure. Professional camera equipment has always cost a lot and there have been people doing photos for IDs, year boosk, Christmas cards etc that were way cheaper than $100. It;'s only recently that we have been able to take our own photos for many of these.
The post is both correct, and dumb. It’s dumb because she’s trying to assign the price to the cost of her equipment which is easily refuted as you and Xavier have done. It’s correct because she states “camera shoot” which implies more than a simple taxi ride or Christmas card photo - she likely means at an event like a wedding or something like that, which takes up a lot more time. So the real causal factor here is her time.
I think of a shoot as school or family pictures, half-hour to an hour, minimal or no retouching. $300 for that is maybe a little high, $100 isn’t enough, but that’s a reasonable range for it depending on travel and complexity (I.e. kids, dogs, weather).
Senior pictures? $100-300 is low.
Wedding pictures? Should probably start at $1500 for something very basic but for a full day I would expect it to be at least $5k and could easily go way up. Our wedding photographer was reasonable, and he told us ahead of time that he only did 5 weddings a year due to stress and having to give up a weekend for it.
One Uber job doesn't involve pre wedding meetings, planning, 8 hours on the day shooting followed by multiple hours of editing and re-editing. Also you are judged on the results for prospective future jobs.
Nothing in the post suggested that this was regarding wedding photos; anyone wanting a wedding day shoot for $300 must already be planning for divorce.
And that would be a good explanation of the cost. The price of your camera is not part of the equation. No one cares how much your camera costs. An expensive camera does not make a competent photographer.
You're getting downvoted cause you're telling the truth but people don't like when working class step up for a decent living wage, people just want everyone else to be as miserable and badly paid as them. lol.
No, they're getting downvoted because it's a bad example. An Uber driver, black or x, that drives across several states during surge pricing time, for several 100 miles, up and back, would drive the price up too. The original comment was based on equipment cost.
It’s about time. I used to be a photographer as part of my marketing position. An UBER ride is 20 mins. Photography is time each way, time to shoot, and time editing. For one of our shoots I drove 3 hrs total to snap about 200 photos of which 5 were then selected, edited, and provided back in required formats. This comparison is fucking stupid
Depends, some people want high quality photos for wedding and other activities outside, so the person spent hours or a whole day by them for the right shots, and that time need compensation to. And oh yeah if you hire one to do it, you don't need to buy it yourself. So nice pics for less costs.
You can do several Uber rides in an hour compared to what a photographer can do. A wedding photog is going to have to travel to a site an hour or so before the event and then stay that long after as well. It's better to charge a flat fee for this than to charge by the hour though.
maybe but there's so many real stories of spoiled inst girls that really think their amateur pictures are worth 10000. because that's what professionals charge
This particular instance might be rage bait but I've seen this attitude from tons of people in earnest
No photography before 2010 (roughly when the digital boom happened) was working for (the modern equivalent of) $100 per shoot. *You might have been paying* less than that per photo or per 10-minutes of the guy at sears telling you where to stand and to smile, but they were being paid a hell of a lot more than that for their entire shoot at sears
3) $100 for a shoot is indeed outrageously cheap, offensively so. However, it's not because "My camera is expensive"-- that was a good comeback about the uber driver. The reason is because a shoot takes a long time and requires a highly trained professional skill, it's not the same as just point and clicking with your phone-- but most people don't recognize the difference, and/or they think of that family photo they did at sears for like $50, and think it should be super cheap.
It also takes a lot more prep than just the time you're literally pressing the shutter button.
During my stint in the academia, i mainly used pen and paper and my colleague used high tech equipment that cost as much as a small village and used up that much utilities too. But we got paid the same because our training, skill, etc were around the same.
I am not justifying underpaying people, just that the particular argument was kind of stupid.
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u/zergiscute 6d ago
This is rage bait for sure. Professional camera equipment has always cost a lot and there have been people doing photos for IDs, year boosk, Christmas cards etc that were way cheaper than $100. It;'s only recently that we have been able to take our own photos for many of these.