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by literallycancer
2635 days ago
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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. |
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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.]