Originally posted by Prof_Fate:
You bring ups a very good point. Everyone seems to think that about photography. That's why so many see weddings as easy money.
You have your TIME. That's worth something and costs something (unless you work for free, then give your paycheck back to your boss).
You have the prints or whatever the product was. My senior packages run $300-500 and 18-21% of that is material cost (prints, frames, etc). And I use a cheaper than average lab and do my own color correction. To let the lab handle it would run my costs up 50%.
perhaps you can take photos without a camera or lens or lights, but I can't. And I had to buy mine using money I got from...selling photos. I also have computers, PS and other software and that damned adobe, about every year they want money for an upgrade. I suppose I could have stuck with PS 5.5, but then I suppose I could have stuck with my first camera (kodak instamatic 126) too.
Advertising. Perhaps you can tell a friend who tells a friend and suddenly there is a line at your door of customers. I can get 3 or 4 that way in a year, but even at '$700' per I can't buy the gasoline i use in year on that meager total.
The average full time photography studio owner in the US makes less than $40,000 in personal income a year.
The average car repair place..well the last one I worked at charge $75/hour and paid the mechanics $15 an hour on average. And most mechanics could do more than 40 hours of work in a 40 hour work week, as they all worked flatrate. There were 6 of them. And while the owner wasn't poor he wasn't ripping people off either. The building cost him $1.2 million - YOU sign that mortgage paper see what your attitued about $75 an hour is then! LOL |
AMEN!!!!
I build waterfalls for a living. The contract may be for $15,000 but I will bring over $150,000 worth of equipment to build it. A $700 photo being shot using well over 10 times that in equpment is nothing.
Someone may say, "oh I could build that myself".... well then you should have done it. When I got married I was so mad at the $$ we had to fork over to "some guy to take pictures". Oh how I have grown....
Just because someone is unhappy with the result never means they got ripped off.
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