Why do you cost so much? What makes me any different from my friend who just bought such and such camera a week ago? I get these kinds of questions often. Well my friends, you get a lot for the amount of money that you pay. You are paying for more than a photograph or a print. You are paying for the time and expertise of the photographer. Let’s look at the time required when you book an appointment. We’ll look at a regular portrait session, which typically runs 2 hours:
So let’s look at the time required for a 2 hour shoot:
- 30 minutes to an hour of travel time to the session
- 15 to 20 minutes of set up time
- 2 hours of actual shooting the subject(s)
- 15 to 20 minutes to break down gear
- 30 minutes to an hour of travel time from the session
- 1 hour or more to load photos onto the computer
- 2-5 hours of editing the photos down to the ones that the client will see.
- 2-3 hours of correcting the chosen photos to make sure that every photo is as good as possible.
- Finally your photos are loaded to an online gallery for your to view
As you can see your 2 hour shoot easily turns into a weeks worth of work for the photographer. You can also see that you are no longer paying them $ dollars an hour but much less for taking your pictures to the next level.
With the price of a quality camera coming in at under $2000 dollars, any body can acquire a nice camera and take a decent snapshot. But when you hire a professional photographer, you are hiring not just the time of the photographer to produce your images, but also the time the photographer learned to develop his skills. It takes a substantial amount of time, sometimes years from buying a decent camera to charging money for your services. That is a great deal of learning the ends and outs of the camera, lighting, software and other equipment that is used to produce an image that can be displayed on both a computer screen and in your living room wall. At the end of the day the difference between a professional photographer and your friend with a camera is that a professional simply has to deliver. They have to get the shot that the client wants, no matter what the location, weather or time of day.