Times are bad? Or people pushing their luck? Or both?

Someone called me for my daily rates a few days ago, and I promptly quoted my normal figure that has been unchanged for the past 6 years. This person promptly asked me for my half-day rates, and I promptly halved it, (that’s a big mistake, costs of business never work out proportionally). Then the caller finally asked me if I could charge half-day rates for a certain number of hours over a couple of days (How ridiculous can it get?)

Does the caller even know how long it takes the photographer and team to set up and style the set for the shoot? Set-up and styling are part of the photography hours, for that amount of time each session that’s been requested it wouldn’t be possible to do anything properly. I hope the caller’s just trying to push his luck.

Any usual photo session won’t take anywhere less than three hours (unless it is a mass shoot set, and each shot may take about 10 minutes for portraits in a portrait studio). A tailor-made photo-shoot can hardly be completed in two hours.

And how about the back end post production work that photographers have to do? The general ratio for photography and post-shoot work is 1:3, every hour spent on photography equates to 3 hours of computer work. How would pictures even be right without this important step? It’s important that photographers complete this step themselves before anyone else lay their fingers on the images.

So in reality, one day’s shoot equates to 4 working days or 32 man-hours worth of work. It’s good money for a good amount of work without the financial burden of a permanent employee.

Digital photography is good, it makes the transition of photography from camera into various mediums quick and easily available. However many users don’t seem to know how to charge for work since the digital media for submission costs only a dollar. Damage well done. No film costs involved, but so much more work! The instancy of digital photography itself is a cost to be borne into the fees involved. Polaroids are instant, and it costs anywhere between $2.50 to $3 per click and pull on Fuji FP100C instant film packs.

Getting undercut is one thing, in the long run no side benefits from it; photographers won’t be able to upgrade and update their equipment as quickly, and clients don’t get the full benefit from the technological advancements for quality work. Unlike photography on film-the equipment hardly gets outdated, same quality of images are achieved every time, drum scanners are high quality, providing image data of at least 25mp.

Times are bad? Or did people make times bad? Or people pushing their luck? Or all of the above?