How many time have we heard of people complaining about how photographers charge? Or how many of us have ever wonder why do photographers charge that kind of amount for portraits? All they do is just press a button only. Well, there are many reasons why they charge such prices. Today, I will share with you one of the reason why photographers charge in such way (more about this in upcoming posts). Before I go further, I will have to say that there are people who charge at a much lower rate than others. Everything is priced according to what they deem right. There is nothing wrong in charging a low rate, everything is based on supply and demand.
Photographers charge differently on your needs and the type of photography needed. Generally, an event shoot will cost lower than a portrait shoot. For event photography, some photographers will just hand over the unedited photos while some will take the effort to do basic editing such as color correction. For portrait photography, there is a lot more work involved. Apart from color correction, there are many micro adjustments done to the photo to make it good.
Below is a time lapse video of how I edit a portrait of this young girl. Take note that the overall duration of editing this photo does not include the time taken for photo selection. Everyone has a different workflow for editing, I choose this method as I like the end result. The video is 7.27 times faster than time taken to edit. I spent about 23 mins to edit this photo. It’s about the average time taken to edit my portraits. So, if you engage a photographer for 1 hour to take your portraits, the photographer doesn’t work 1 hr only. He has to go back and spend time to edit. So, the “1 hour” shoot could be more than 4 hours of work depending the number of photos required. Please watch till the end (especially the last part) to see the transition from a raw pic to an edited photo.
The purpose of this post is to create awareness of how photographers spend their time after a shoot. Hopefully, this will make people understand that every form of photography is different and thus priced differently. You can’t expect an event photography’s rate for a portrait shoot. A 2 hour event shoot may result in more than 300 photos but a 2 hour portrait shoot may produce only 5 photos, it’s a big difference.
