Yesterday our AC unit didn’t turn on at our normal temp of 74 while the house was already at 79 and it was only 8am. In haste we called our normal AC guy \ family friend who said he’d come over. Fortunately the AC started out of the blue, but since we had him coming over already we decided not to cancel the appointment and wanted him to do a system wellness check. Texas summers without AC is a NO GO!
When he got here today he checked out the system, made sure everything was good, nothing seemed wrong. He checked the inside and outside unit. Freon was good, thermostat was good… who knows what went wrong but now we have peace of mind that we should be good for these next few brutal summer months.
He wrote up an invoice for his time (maybe an hour) at $75 dollars which I gladly paid since I value and expertise his time and it hit me. This is why I quit photography a few years back. Though its true I wanted to focus on other things, which I did. The reality is you’d be surprised how often I was put in a situation of people not valuing my time or experience.
Recently I had a situation where a past wedding client (that hadn’t paid for their photos) said to me they didn’t want to “waste” money on photos right now, can I just give them the digital files.
So lets take a wedding or any shoot really. What goes into me delivering the final product to you.
For a wedding there is a little more work, but the premise is the same for any shoot really… if video is involved the process becomes 3X the work.
A few days before the wedding I make sure all my memory cards (up to 10-12 for weddings) are empty, and organized in the wallets I secure them in. I grab all of my rechargeable batteries (stealing the ones back from my son) and making sure they are charged. If anything is missing I’m ordering more to make sure I have more than enough for the day.
The day before I do a final camera, battery, SD card check and load everything in bags. We bring a few camera bodies, lens, lights and more. I know it’s obvious but we aren’t showing up with an iPhone and calling it a day.
The day of the wedding I travel to location, who knows how long but and hour + each way isn’t unheard of. Often grabbing a bite to eat on the way so I can stay focused on the wedding and not worried about the food. During the 4-7 hour wedding, of course I’m on my feet the whole time locked in capturing 2-3k images. Oh yeah did I mentioned normally Alicia is there as well so the number of images can be double that.
After documenting the bride and groom, posing, take photos of someone drunk uncle calling me “Hey camera man” laughing and doing the Cupid Shuffle, I finally head home to unload the photos.
Before heading to bed I make sure each card is unloaded and copied to a HD so it can start the backup to my cloud solution (backblaze).
The next day I grab all the images put it on a separate portable drive which I can take with me and edit as I get the chance. I load everything in Lightroom (Classic of course) and let me computer start making 1:1 previews. This takes a few hours for the amount of photos we capture. Now it’s time for me to cull… I quickly start going through each photo killing all the bad, very under or over exposed, blurry or obviously bad ones.
I go through a second time and reverse cull I’ll call it, so instead of weeding out bad ones I pick the good ones to stay. This can still be over 1000 images (sorry wedding peeps). Now of these images I go through and edit \ touch each one. This isn’t some instagram filter I just select, but every look that you see from my images are ones I created in LR and sometimes have to tweak on each image.
For a 1 hour photoshoot this can take 1-2 hours alone, for a wedding this takes a better part of 10+ hours… actually much more, but not straight.
Ok now the images are where I like them everything is tweaked and done… what next? I have a few final things that aren’t necessary but I do to give my clients the best experience I can.
First I run everything though a software that soften the faces, a bit. Digital cameras pick up EVERY bit of detail, trust me you dont want that kind of truth in your life… I may also do a little “manipulation” here, we know the camera adds weight. Finally I rename the images make sure they are in order of the day no matter what camera they come from the images shouldn’t jump around, so I painstakingly line up things like the first kiss to make sure all the angles are as close as possible… hopefully I remembered to set the cameras up front so I make this easier on myself.
I make a “PRINT” export and a “WEB” export, FB and some services dont like you uploading 14+ mb files for sharing.
Granted for a photo session I don’t do all of this but a lot of it is the same… If I spend 40 hours on a wedding. I probably spend, 5-7 hours on a normal photo session. Can I do it faster, yup, but for the quality I want to deliver this is my current process.
What was I charging for the digital images to the wedding client that hadn’t paid in YEARS? $300… I can tell you I’ve shot more “promise” I’ll pay you stuff than I’d like to admit.
I noted all of the time and effort that goes in an event here, but let’s be real it’s more than that, between the classes, learning new equipment, constantly refreshing dated and broken equipment. Or just the hundreds of thousands of photos I’ve taken to refine the photography skill, of 10,000+ hours…
Anyone that has shot with me knows I LOVE shooting, they will often get tired of posing before I get tired of shooting… so I had to quit photography as a business. As much as I love it, it still has to be financially worth it for me to be away from my family, or take me away from other responsibilities I have. I have an itching for getting back into photography all the time….
But when my AC guy comes over for 30-60 minutes worth of work and asks for $75 and I put in 20-40 hours, with physical products as well as something that will be with you for the rest of your life and $1400 is unreasonable, let alone $300…. it’s hard to justify the time spent.