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I’m a photographer by hobby and you very often see people wanting to hire someone good but who isn’t expecting to make a living at it with offers like “I’ll let
by lacey 8y ago
I’m a photographer by hobby and you very often see people wanting to hire someone good but who isn’t expecting to make a living at it with offers like “I’ll let you shoot my event to help build your portfolio, and all you have to do is give me a copy of all the photos.” Or alternatively offering something like $100 for four hours to do lifestyle street shoots.
I don’t know how often they are successful at getting photographers for these types of things but I know that if I were going to shoot for those kinds of wages I would rather donate my time to a charity that I support.
- ghaff 8y ago"For the exposure/to build your portfolio." Uggh. To be clear, I sometimes shoot events for free as a favor. And I sometimes shoot concerts or sporting events just because I feel like it. And if you find my photos on Flickr I'll probably give you permission to use them for free. (Though if you want to pay me, that's fine too and I do sometimes get annoyed with the presumption that I'm not going to ask for a fee.) But I'm probably not going to take you up on a minimum wage offer unless it were something I was going to do anyway.
- jackfraser 8y agoDo you _really_ think your photography job deserves the same hourly wage as an engineer or manager?
- detaro 8y agoWhat quality freelance developer or manager in the US takes 4 hour jobs for even close to $25 per hour, in a customer choosen location?
- ghaff 8y agoI think his gist is that, of course a developer should expect to be paid more than that because they're special. But photographers just click pictures so they should be grateful to make anything at all.
- BadassFractal 8y agoThere's a little more to being a photographer than clicking a button, but it might not look like that from the outside. It's like calling basketball "just tossing a ball around".
- meko 8y agoProgramming is just glorified copy and paste, so it has more in common with photography than you think.
- mediocrejoker 8y agoThe general sentiment here seems (to me, anyway) to be that photography is one of those things that many people _are_ going to do anyway, which is why it's very difficult to be highly paid for it. If so many people are willing to do something for free, is it really fair to vilify someone for inquiring as to whether you are one of those people?
- ghaff 8y agoFor the most part, yes. In general, my doing something that I want to do for free is different (usually) from you asking me to do a job that you want done for free. Now, of course, there can be exchanges that don't involve money changing hands. Perhaps part of the deal is that I get into a concert (or whatever) for free and that may be perfectly reasonable. I do attend events on media passes on the (implicit) condition I'll publish a story about some aspect of the event.
- zenkat 8y ago"You can die from exposure, you know."
- jackfraser 8y ago> Or alternatively offering something like $100 for four hours to do lifestyle street shoots. I personally think that's not a terrible offer. $25/hour to stand around clicking pictures? It's a lot easier than most work people do for minimum wage, first, and secondly it's not like you have massive film costs or need a ton of technical knowledge anymore. 99% of the shots people want can be accomplished with stock or relatively cheap lenses, too; you don't have to be a gear-head who spends all their profits on their kit for no appreciable difference in how much people are willing to pay. Most of us don't have $500-1000 to pay a photographer so we simply don't bother and rely on friends and family for it. I might consider getting professional pictures of my family if it didn't cost the obscene amount that it does. There's probably a market on the volume, low-cost side that simply isn't being tapped because photographers are often such dilettantes. For someone who wants to break into photography, finding a steady supply of low-paid jobs to build up the portfolio and their name recognition for word-of-mouth marketing is probably the best way to go. You wouldn't want to be running at these wage levels for more than a year, but to start, well, there's certainly worse paths.
- ghaff 8y ago>$25/hour to stand around clicking pictures? I'm going to assume good intent but that's an incredibly condescending remark. Just so you know. How about if I offer a trained developer $25/hour to write me some software? It's just sitting and typing.
- mediocrejoker 8y agoWhy do you assume that the parent was talking about your photography ability, and not their own?
- dwaltrip 8y agoThey were talking about the act in general.
- bryondowd 8y agoDepends where you are. Pretty sure I've made under $25/hr most of my development career. And that was just fine, in the Atlantic City, NJ area, because the cost of living was pretty low and I had no interest in moving or commuting to a big city. EDIT: Although I guess it might've been a bit more if you include the value of health insurance and such.
- wolco 8y ago25 an hour might be a good rate for someone starting out. I do programming work that takes that long and charge less than that amount.
- ghaff 8y agoIn all fairness, when I was an undergrad long ago I earned beer money doing various photography-related jobs for the alumni association and other such groups for not a lot of money. But, today, $100 to go somewhere, spend 4 hours doing something you otherwise probably aren't interested in doing, and probably spend the rest of the day editing? $100 for basically a day really isn't great money unless there were some reason you wanted to do the job and the money was just a little something extra.
- literallycancer 8y agoDo yourself a favor and spend a few of those hours researching how much you can reasonably charge for programming work.
- LanceH 8y agoI'm not keen on how most professional photographers for these events don't point out they'll retain copyright on all shots. I know what that means, but they let their customers find out when they aren't allowed to get raw/negatives or prints from anyone else. I'll take a work for hire option, thanks, without the attitude that it's an art and they're above that.