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'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.

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...

… 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.

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?

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.

Nice shots but if you're wanting gorgeous candid shots of fast moving action (like weddings/events), you're gonna struggle without the expensive glass/body.

Taxes, assistant fee, mileage, you own more than one lens and one cam body…no lol not even close. We haven’t even talked about post processing, delivery, rights, etc.

And then there's lights. A decent portrait setup will run you thousands easily, and if you want to do anything even slightly abnormal (colored lights, say) it can be astronomically high. Art is expensive.

She’s not really full of shit, but she is being kind of bitchy. Meanwhile, Xavier’s just a trolling asshole.

Good photographers are actually pretty rare and - in my experience - treat the field of capturing visual information as a science, but since the advent of consumer DSLR and mirrorless systems, modern-day digital cameras with nearly instant automatically-focusing lenses that utilize a grid array and intelligence models to smartly maintain clarity on what is most likely a subject as it moves in 3D space, have made it so much harder to fuck things up that it essentially has opened the floodgates of photography so that there's an endless sea of morons thinking that buying a $5000 Canon with a full-frame sensor and a lens the size of a Stanley thermos makes them Ansel Adams.

It's the same with any field where the bar to entry gets suddenly lowered. The market becomes immediately flooded with new "experts" because the tools evolve to the point that they become nearly idiot-proof. Think Claude vibe coders calling themselves programmers / software engineers, Gemini prompters calling themselves visual designers, and people on SoundCloud uploading jingles they farted out on SUNO calling themselves musicians.

Its all based on their time involvement. Hourly wage basically. You cab shoot for an hour and then spend several hours editing the shots. Wedding photographers might commit 20-40 hours to a wedding. 3-5 day of, rest editing. Batch editing and croppjng isnt bad but touch ups are the worst.

As an IT guy, i feel the opposite. I fixed it in ten minutes because I have ten years of experience. My hourly rate goes up because I spend so little time fixing the problem, if I charged any less, I couldn't earn a living.

That's not what she was talking about though.