[jackfraser]

> Or alternatively offering something like $100 for four hours to do lifestyle street shoots.

I personally think that's not a terrible offer. $25/hour to stand around clicking pictures? It's a lot easier than most work people do for minimum wage, first, and secondly it's not like you have massive film costs or need a ton of technical knowledge anymore. 99% of the shots people want can be accomplished with stock or relatively cheap lenses, too; you don't have to be a gear-head who spends all their profits on their kit for no appreciable difference in how much people are willing to pay.

Most of us don't have $500-1000 to pay a photographer so we simply don't bother and rely on friends and family for it. I might consider getting professional pictures of my family if it didn't cost the obscene amount that it does. There's probably a market on the volume, low-cost side that simply isn't being tapped because photographers are often such dilettantes.

For someone who wants to break into photography, finding a steady supply of low-paid jobs to build up the portfolio and their name recognition for word-of-mouth marketing is probably the best way to go. You wouldn't want to be running at these wage levels for more than a year, but to start, well, there's certainly worse paths.

[ghaff]

>$25/hour to stand around clicking pictures?

I'm going to assume good intent but that's an incredibly condescending remark. Just so you know.

How about if I offer a trained developer $25/hour to write me some software? It's just sitting and typing.

[bryondowd]

Depends where you are. Pretty sure I've made under $25/hr most of my development career. And that was just fine, in the Atlantic City, NJ area, because the cost of living was pretty low and I had no interest in moving or commuting to a big city.

EDIT: Although I guess it might've been a bit more if you include the value of health insurance and such.

[mediocrejoker]

Why do you assume that the parent was talking about your photography ability, and not their own?

[dwaltrip]

They were talking about the act in general.

[literallycancer]

It's almost never a good idea to start by charging less. The people who don't want to pay your rates are just looking for the easiest excuse and weren't going to become customers anyway.

The bulk of commercial photographers' work are weddings. A run-of-the-mill wedding probably costs about 50k, so to have nice pictures from it you'll spend maybe 10% (?) on a photographer. So 5k for a day and a half of work? This puts a lower bound on other photo shoots as well, since there is never going to be a shortage of weddings.

[lacey]

I'm not sure exactly how to interpret "the bulk of commercial photographers' work are weddings".

Do you mean by total revenue, or for a given photographer?

I ask because in general people who do weddings tend to focus on those almost exclusively for their income (the same is true for some of the other categories I mention below).

The way I think of it is that there are perhaps only a few sources of steady income that pays a livable salary with photography:

- weddings

- headshots

- real-estate

- advertising / marketing

In many cases either photographers are being asked to do more these days (e.g. write the editorial that the photographs go with) or people who wouldn't traditionally have photography as part of their job are being asked to do the photographic work on top of their existing responsibilities (e.g. journalists who are asked to bring a camera along and snap some shots for a story).

[EDIT: I am not sure where the day and a half of work figure comes from, either. It is typical for something like an edited/touched-up photo album to be delivered a few weeks after a wedding shoot, with the photographer doing a few shoots in between and then sitting down and editing several in a batch over the course of a week or two until they are happy with the results.]