Not only have I been a victim of someone editing out my watermark and not paying for the package but I’ve been seeing people ask for Santa photos for cheaper than $20?
Why is this normal ? I don’t understand how someone can want a professional photographer with exspensive equipment and high quality skill to take time out their schedule to not only shoot the photos but edit and proof them. If that’s not worth at least $50 then why not just get creative with that iPhone you dropped $1k on ?
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You pay peanuts, you get monkeys, as they say.
It would be fun to troll them back.
“Thank you for your enquiry. As you intend to get married at a church, the weather (sunny, cloudy, rainy,) will determine the equipment to be used, as well as the use or not of off-camera flash; similarly, it may be necessary to use a high ISO, necessitating the correct use of noise reduction later. Depending on various other factors, a wide angle zoom lens may be suitable, or, for other shots, a moderate tele lens. However, as you just offered an insulting amount of money for this service, I suggest you get your phone out and do it yourself. Sincerely…”
Because people don’t know the difference between pressing the shutter button on phone and professional shooting
A lesson I learned a long time ago is you never focus on what the bottom 75% of a field is paying/doing/wanting. There’s no margin and that’s just a game of how hard can you run before you exhaust yourself.
“for the exposure!!!”
Photography is cheap. Everyone has a camera.
Photographers don’t like to hear this – and I say this as a photographer – but most people are OK with reasonably shitty photos. They don’t care if you want to spend an hour touching something up then charge them for it. They’d rather have something poorly framed and overexposed shot on a smartphone and get it free.
I’m lucky in that 99% of what I shoot is part of my day job, so I get paid regardless. But if people ask me for photos that I’ve taken at work or incidentally during a work shoot I just send them jpgs free. There are a lot of photographers like me who do that, too, which probably also hurts the market for people asking money for photos.
One recent example is I was shooting portraits for a marketing initiative at work and a passing student asked if I’d shoot his headshot for a resume or something. I had all the gear set up so I said sure. It took like 10 minutes later to edit and send him the photo, so it didn’t matter much to me. But some people try to charge guys like $100 for that simple task, which is silly.
The internet.