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Okay real talk here, how tf is this Xavier guy basically everywhere? Did he go to meme school?
Does he make up content to react to? Is that his thing?
If people just want the uber price for pictures, hire the uber to pick you up and ask him to take a picture of you with your cellphone. Then you’ll have a $12 picture that you can do whatever you want with.
Pppffffssshhhh… 5k?!?that is hobby level money. I’m over 15k into just my lenses and I do this as a hobby and shoot friends and family for free.
Post a photo so we know you’re legit
We demand man ass
Looks like a Canon?
Canon RF lenses are outrageously priced, even amongst other outrageous ILC brands, because they lock out third parties. So yeah, this lady got ripped off.
Ehh, They’re more expensive, but most of them come with IS.
I’d still rather shoot Nikon.
It’s not the IS that makes them expensive, it’s the locked out ecosystem and the monopoly they have. I’m not saying they’re not good - they are (from what I’ve seen), but healthy competition, if it existed, would’ve driven the prices down a bit.
As for IS itself, since the move to IBIS, it makes sense that some lenses drop the IS and only rely on the body’s. IMO it used to matter in the DSLR days when IBIS was not really a thing. Nowadays it’s sensible to only put it into the longer lenses that physically need it (the longer the lens, the more physical movement required to compensate and so on).
The APS-C lenses are awful. And the FF ones with IS, especially the zooms, have outrageous barrel distortion that crops the sensor a ton… on $2K lenses.
This is the brand new 20-50mm F/4 for instance, and its not even the worst offender. It’s $1400:
The Thypoch 24-50 2.8, for comparison, which is like 1/3 the price on Sony E. This is $650, often less on sale:
I’m speaking as someone who mistakenly bought into Canon APS-C. I loathe it, as a hobbyist with a Canon SLR for years.
I’m selling out, as soon as I see with what Fuji/Panasonic/Sony cook up within the year.
Only 5k? Sound like a hobby, because most professional photographers have a body that is already 5k by itself, plus several lenses ranging between 2 and 20k. I mean, I’m a hobby photographer and my gear already exceeds at least 8k. So stop bitching Karen.
Cars nowadays are made such they break down. They break down unlike cars before. They break down like a hoax.
Someone didn’t buy a Toyota!
Lemmy: don’t use AI; pay artists!
Also Lemmy: this uppity bitch should work for exposure.I don’t see what’s wrong with $100-300 I know about five 30 year old women with $5,000 cameras that would jump at the gig as long as it wasn’t a full wedding commitment.
I think it’s more about the gatekeeping.
Uber: know how to drive, own a car, insurance, use a cell phone to tell you where to make $12, drive from A-B-C-A, and pay 9 of it back to car maintenance over time.
Photographer: Own camera, insurance, lights, lenses, backdrops, computer, software licenses, photodelivery platform costs, know how to use them. Pack up gear into car, drive to shoot, lug all the gear, setup, shoot, position, pose, pack up all the gear, drive back, stow all the gear, transfer images to computer, Lightroom, cull, Photoshop, color/image/wrinkles/clothing fixes, blinks, smirks, stray hairs, put it into a gallery,
The Uber driver spent 30 minutes
The photographer spent 6-8 hours.
If the photographer is gatekeeping you, hire the Uber driver to take your picture for $12.
the prices they charge and the inability to give me the damn RAWs is why I just got a camera instead.
Our wedding photographer gave us both RAWs and processed JPEGs
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Ohhhh this pisses me off soooooo much. I decided to do family photos and specifically asked for the raws before I went into the shoot. They still gave me a hard time after the shoot to get the raws. They gave me a stripped down .dng without any camera settings. Ohhhh that pisses me off so much.
For the price of one shoot, you can buy someone’s lightly used $5,000 kit on ebay. I’ve had a Canon I bought a decade ago that’s still works great. Maybe got it for $250 or so IIRC.
I found a guy willing to chuck me RAWs for a lower price, still felt a bit ripped off. He shot 90% of the day on a walkabout zoom and the photos were nothing special.
The audacity to ask for the raw, unprocessed photos for a lower price, and then complain that they look boring.
You wanted the raws. Process them yourself.
Processing won’t do shit to a shitty shot, with terrible composition and lighting.
The audacity to ask for the raw, unprocessed photos for a lower price, and then complain that they look boring.
That has the same energy as going to a restaurant and asking for the raw ingredients.
I mean this comment makes total sense if we pretend that all photos are equally valuable and that the color balance is the only issue but not if we actually address the part where the photographer ostensibly took a bunch of poorly framed candids and failed to capture the energy of the moment
Oops, sorry, I forgot you already decided that the photographer must have been the good guy so that means I’m wrong
Yeah and that Uber driver can’t afford rent. Photographers often have less business in the winter, too, and they have a ton of extra equipment to lug around. I know a wedding photographer and it’s a lot of work day of and post work to make sure it’s all nice.
Uber effectively corner a market and have drivers working for very little.
Uber and Lyft are terrible to their workers, but you can still call a cab.
My education cost 200,000. You think I made all that back in one paycheck? Cry me a river, Natalie.
shes probably rich or well off, of course she afford to this.
tbf I doubt many Uber drivers actually profit, especially the ones driving $40k cars
On the Uber and transport topic, I sometimes get to ride the light rail and I have to drive to the park n ride to leave my car and ride the rail.
The trip from my home to the park n ride is a quick 10 to 15 minutes by car. By bus it’s 1 to 2 hours. By foot it’s probably a few days.
The light rail takes me 30 minutes from north king county to Seattle downtown. If I drove there it would take an hour of mostly just sitting in traffic.
Progress is slow but if there was a light rail from bothell to Kenmore to the I-5 corridor, that would basically eliminate my need for a 40 to $90 Uber. We only pay that if we a traveling. That way we get a car from our house to the link and then easy 30 minutes to the airport.
The whole Uber thing is great unless there are only a few riders or a few drivers. Plus the cut that goes to Uber is probably stifling innovation. I recall that there’s an open-source Uber system called…
a quick 10 to 15 minutes by car. […] By foot it’s probably a few days.
Just as a raw ballpark estimate. By car could be 50km/h on average, with a walking speed of roughly 5km/h, that’s 10x the time it takes by car, i.e. 2-3 hours.
A few days usually takes you trough a few adjacent townships. Do you have to take a humongous detour on foot?
Or they are so weak they can only walk 30 minutes per day and had to rest until the next day
5km/h is also faster than average walk that is probably not a pace you’d maintain for hours? After considering you also need to stop on intersection you may be getting the average down to less than 4, but then if it’s actually a 10 minute ride you’d probably also spend enough time in stop lights and your average speed would also be way lower than 50km/h
not a pace you’d maintain for hours?
This is after all the human superpower.
5km/h is on the low end of the “average” walking speed but waiting at intersections and lights will murder that speed. You could easily be on the upper end of six and then have to wait 5+ minutes at an intersection, bringing you back below a 5.
don’t cars usually go at least 65mph?
Tops. Waiting at intersections, slowing down for other traffic situations and driving on roads with a lower speed limit drags down that average, as others have mentioned with regards to walking.
just hypothesizing but: the part of the burbs they’re traversing doesn’t have much in the way of sidewalks along the highways, forcing detours along the local trails like the burke gilman.
At my house there are no buses. There are no light rails. There are no sidewalks, no bike lanes. You can walk in the easement of people’s front yards but it’s mostly a ditch, full of water when it’s raining. I live inside the loop highway that runs around my 2+ million population city. Cars are the only option, even most of the homeless have cars here.
sounds like a real shithole. texas?
could be anywhere, usa
What about Nacho Libre as a replacement for GooberEats and Doortrash?
light rail from bothell to Kenmore to the I-5 corridor
that’ll be st12? 15? lol.
after the excavate under the mountain of queen anne to connect ballard…
honestly the real solution is to move out of the sticks, or stop working in downtown.
Nobody cares what your camera costs, Nat. You can still take shitty pictures with a $5000 camera. Charge what you think your service is worth and work for clients who pay it.
Wedding photographer is an interesting job. With a lot of jobs, people buy the minimum viable equipment they need to get the job done.
But, people who get into wedding photography seem to generally be people who are really into photography. Rather than a $5000 camera being the requirement for the job. The $5000 camera is a present you can justify getting yourself if the wedding photography game is going well.
It’s not a tool that goes into the case and stays there until the next wedding. It’s something to be used for the kinds of pictures that don’t pay the bills but that you love taking: nature shots, architecture, abstract art, gritty realism, etc.
Exactly.
There is real skill involved in photography, and it takes real time even after being skilled. A 1-hour shoot in a new location still requires probably an hour of planning, maybe an hour or two of logistics, and maybe 2-3 hours of work after the fact to get the photos processed and distributed. And it’s basically the opportunity cost that will eat up the entire day, because you can’t double book the same sunset or other lighting conditions or whatever. There’s seasonality, too, if you want specific seasonal conditions in the shot, if you want to book the Saturday that other clients want, etc.
That’s before expenses like insurance, the amortized cost of the software and hardware (including the cameras and lenses and computer), web services for distribution of the files, etc.
It’s fair to charge a full day’s fair pay for a job like that, and that might mean wanting to charge something like $1000 for an experienced photographer, maybe $500 of which actually represents “profit” for the sole proprietor. But that only happens at that price if there are clients willing to pay that price.
For bigger jobs like parties or weddings, it gets a bit more involved, which is why a 2- or 3-shooter wedding job can cost several thousand, or even above $10k.
But for easy jobs like anything in a high volume studio where the lighting is already known, and there aren’t any logistics involved, it should be much cheaper. It just all depends.
I did a gig for a while doing Photoshop clean up of wedding images and portraits.
Just that one step can be an exceptional amount of work.
That’s why it’s important to set expectations in advance. 50 images shot in the same setting and processed in bulk with maybe minor adjustments to each is something very different from 50 images that you have to touch up every single one.
Wedding images are challenging because venues, decor, wardrobe, etc., are chosen for real-world regular eyeball beauty. In darker settings (many churches, nighttime), or settings lit by bad lights for photography (fluorescent bulbs, LED bulbs without good wide spectrum light, random dance floor stuff), adds a lot of post processing work, and wedding clients tend to be very demanding clients (for good reason). It’s all real work, well beyond what can be seen in the day-of interaction between photographer and client.
I would also highlight the sheer volume.
Somebody wants a few senior pictures taken or their kid in front of some toys and trees and stuff, and you could be dealing with a relatively manageable number.
Weddings take hours, often have dozens of people, and with everything being digital these days you can take a fuckton of photos to make sure that you capture everything possible.
I’ve met too many people who think the number they associate to a thing somehow makes them a better user of it.
Tons of people take amazing photos with tons of thought and skill involved in composition and everything, with a phone camera or shitty digital from 2010.
People who use the price of the equipment to justify expense instead of the quality of their work are usually bad at whatever it is they’re charging for.
You can shift the quality a lot with great equipment, but that requires you to know what you’re doing first. And it still depends on what you’re trying to shoot. Somebody trying to capture a great moment in high speed sports might need a better camera than a cat dad. But without knowing how to use it, it is worth nothing.
All the money in the world can’t buy talent
All the talent in the world can’t perform brain surgery with a chainsaw
OH YEAH?!
I’m stealing this 😂
$5k is also literally hobby money. I’ve spent way more than that snowboarding and hiking over the years. My lab setup at work is literally worth more than I will make in my entire career. Sit down bitch.
At $100 per shoot she can pay off her camera in one year doing one shoot a week. That’s if it’s a hobby.
But since it’s not a hobby for her, as she points out, that means she can do 3-5 shoots per week. If she charges $300 per shoot, and averages let’s say 4 shoots per week, that’s over $60k per year. A small salary, but people get by for less.
If she wants to make more, that’s fine. But she has to convince people that she’s worth a higher price by doing quality work and demonstrating consistency, professionalism, building a network of returning clients and recommendations if she wants to be fully booked each week. Not by telling them how expensive her equipment is…
Just playing devils advocate here, there should be more involved than simply taking pictures. There will be editing, and putting together an album that makes sense to the customer as well; therefore she could charge more for her time and upcharge for album features such as hard copy decorative stuff.
Then again, there is that saying “starving artist” and all…
Sure, but I factored that in by considering 5 shoots per week “fully booked.” That gives you an average of 8 hours per shoot for everything from transport, set up, shooting, take-down, editing, archiving, billing, etc.
Not unreasonable, especially considering that’s a 40 hour week. Overtime exists if she needs longer, and should be billed accordingly. $1500 in one week is more than a lot of people make, even working over 40 hours.
Is the $100-$300 she mentions a flat rate or an hourly rate? Even as a flat rate that would be decent for one day’s work. If it’s hourly, that’s pretty lucrative and leaves no room to complain, especially not about all the extra stuff that’s involved.
Physical copies would of course be charged a la carte or as a bundle or whatever; it’s pretty standard for those to be add-on costs, unless a certain number of items were already part of the negotiated contract. But with print-on-demand services these days, that adds very little additional work or overhead expense for the photographer.
But yeah if she wants to charge more than $300 for one shoot, then she needs to spend time building her reputation, not complaining about the cost of her equipment and acting like her cheapskate customers are to blame.
You can build a reputation with a $400 mirrorless camera, if you’re a good photographer. Then invest in professional equipment when you can afford it.
At $100 per shoot she can pay off her camera in one year doing one shoot a week.
Assuming you don’t value your time, sure. Pro-photographers charge a lot more than that. Also, who wants to give up a year’s worth of weekends for a fancy camera?
and if you do not pay taxes, and do account for software licenses, work going into post processing, and general admin work for your business as a start.
Let’s look at the rest of that paragraph you selectively quoted:
At $100 per shoot she can pay off her camera in one year doing one shoot a week. That’s if it’s a hobby.
[emphasis added]
What a bad faith attempt to stir shit up over nothing.
???
Get some thicker skin, my guy. If you’re getting paid for the work, its going to be more than a hobby. Especially if you’re planning to work 50 separate gigs.
Ffs, if you can file taxes as a business, we’re well past the point of hobbying. That’s just a part time job
This isn’t about having thin skin, this is about you being unnecessarily combative. Don’t flatter yourself thinking I’m torn up about it.
If you’re getting paid for the work, its going to be more than a hobby. Especially if you’re planning to work 50 separate gigs.
Ffs, if you can file taxes as a business, we’re well past the point of hobbying. That’s just a part time job
Hence where the rest of my original comment comes in. I know you like cherrypicking excerpts devoid of context, but ffs everyone can see my whole fucking comment. It’s right there. And you’re acting like you’re actually making a point here? Go away.
Nobody cares what your camera costs
It’s certainly a curiosity. Like, what’s the value-add of a $5k camera relative to a cheaper model? What’s the step-up or step-down in price? What features are you prizing? What brand are you favoring? What are your clients looking for that someone else can’t necessarily bring with a cheaper device?
Whole books have been written about the industry, the technology around the industry, and the kinds of people who pursue it.
Charge what you think your service is worth and work for clients who pay it.
Finding clients who pay well is half the work of any freelance job.
On the flip side, Uber is basically a hobby. Do these people buy their cars just to drive for Uber, or do they drive for Uber to make some extra cash with the car they already have/need?
The math has been done and the wear on your car isn’t worth the pay, either, so it’s a net loss that desperate people are using in an economy where jobs are harder to come by. So uber is taking advantage of people and subsidizing their wages by taking advantage of the impoverished, similar to how the biggest company with the most people on welfare is Walmart. It’s not a hobby, it’s a blight on our society because rich people created a broken system that they then use to further increase profits.
No one decides uber is a fun hobby, if someone says they do it for fun, they’re lying or insane, I’ve done uber, it’s dangerous and a third of the riders are drunk and scary as shit. I’m a big dude, but crazy and drunk is unpredictable, and vomit is impossible to get out of your carpet.
Yeah, I don’t think many people call it fun, but like you said it also isn’t a great way to make money.
And even if your pictures were good, more than 100$ per photo is overpriced asf, and with that you can recover your inversion and gain more.
When I used to film pornography I got sloppy seconds.
It was the definition of win/win.
Ah, so that’s why you’re known as the cum farter, you were the sloppy seconds.
A man after my own heart. Plus, dinner and a show.
Advertising yourself as:
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Bad at internal budgeting
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Full of yourself
… is a bold marketing strategy during an economic depression, for a freelance/contract worker.
Best of luck Nat.
… is a bold marketing strategy during an economic depression
Never undersell the possibility that this person is lying.
Or that this is a stock photo and the text is clickbait.
It is. Last time I saw thisnpost, the photographer was different.
Apparently her name is actually Kortney. But reality doesn’t matter when a bunch of redditors get together to hate a woman
This is really taking a pretty harmless comment too seriously. The point is shit is expensive and clients want everything cheap. Any freelancer can relate to this particular framing. I used to have people want $300 websites and they didn’t care that it would take potentially a week to build their site. Surely just abstractly we can all relate to shit being expensive though?
deleted by creator
Why did you delete this? It’s true. No idea why someone downvoted this true but deleted comment.
I mean she’s got a point. I used to do web design and the number of people who reckoned that it should cost the equivalent of $40 was ridiculous. I’d required at least 10 times that just as compensation from having to work with shopify.
One of the main reasons I got into hardware is because there’s an inherent bias that digital things have no intrinsic value.
Like, you might expect a calculator app to be free, but nobody expects a calculator to be free.
When doing websites. I always told people upfront, you can do it cheap, fast, or good. Pick two because all three doesn’t exist.
I’ve stopped asking people this. They ALWAYS pick cheap and good because fast is an unknown variable to them.
Well technically you can have all three be met at the same time.
The omly question you have to ask yourself is ‘Are you as happy of the idea of slavery as most other capitalists are?’
as long as it’s at least an ocean away it fine™
Offshoring and Unequal Exchange 101©®™ 😋👍 ☠️👎🏿
SaaS (slavery as a service)
… did you market yourself as a stuck up prick who can’t budget well?
Or did you maybe save that for some stage of contract negotiations?
There are ways to dance the dance; hers seems to be the equivalent of loudly complain that no one is picking her to dance with because no one can afford her.
Just not a good strategy.
Well I certainly found it was a good idea to not keep the customer in the dark about my prices. If I’m going to be expensive I might as well tell them outright, it’s not like I’m going to get more customers if I led them on.
Price transparency != Marketing strategy.
Don’t you dare question Nat of “Insert Last Name Photography” of being bad at marketing.
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