• gigastasio@sh.itjust.works
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    18 days ago

    Nobody cares what your camera costs, Nat. You can still take shitty pictures with a $5000 camera. Charge what you think your service is worth and work for clients who pay it.

    • exasperation@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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      18 days ago

      Exactly.

      There is real skill involved in photography, and it takes real time even after being skilled. A 1-hour shoot in a new location still requires probably an hour of planning, maybe an hour or two of logistics, and maybe 2-3 hours of work after the fact to get the photos processed and distributed. And it’s basically the opportunity cost that will eat up the entire day, because you can’t double book the same sunset or other lighting conditions or whatever. There’s seasonality, too, if you want specific seasonal conditions in the shot, if you want to book the Saturday that other clients want, etc.

      That’s before expenses like insurance, the amortized cost of the software and hardware (including the cameras and lenses and computer), web services for distribution of the files, etc.

      It’s fair to charge a full day’s fair pay for a job like that, and that might mean wanting to charge something like $1000 for an experienced photographer, maybe $500 of which actually represents “profit” for the sole proprietor. But that only happens at that price if there are clients willing to pay that price.

      For bigger jobs like parties or weddings, it gets a bit more involved, which is why a 2- or 3-shooter wedding job can cost several thousand, or even above $10k.

      But for easy jobs like anything in a high volume studio where the lighting is already known, and there aren’t any logistics involved, it should be much cheaper. It just all depends.

        • exasperation@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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          18 days ago

          Wedding images are challenging because venues, decor, wardrobe, etc., are chosen for real-world regular eyeball beauty. In darker settings (many churches, nighttime), or settings lit by bad lights for photography (fluorescent bulbs, LED bulbs without good wide spectrum light, random dance floor stuff), adds a lot of post processing work, and wedding clients tend to be very demanding clients (for good reason). It’s all real work, well beyond what can be seen in the day-of interaction between photographer and client.

          • a_non_monotonic_function@lemmy.world
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            18 days ago

            I would also highlight the sheer volume.

            Somebody wants a few senior pictures taken or their kid in front of some toys and trees and stuff, and you could be dealing with a relatively manageable number.

            Weddings take hours, often have dozens of people, and with everything being digital these days you can take a fuckton of photos to make sure that you capture everything possible.

        • kamen@lemmy.world
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          17 days ago

          That’s why it’s important to set expectations in advance. 50 images shot in the same setting and processed in bulk with maybe minor adjustments to each is something very different from 50 images that you have to touch up every single one.

    • I’ve met too many people who think the number they associate to a thing somehow makes them a better user of it.

      Tons of people take amazing photos with tons of thought and skill involved in composition and everything, with a phone camera or shitty digital from 2010.

      People who use the price of the equipment to justify expense instead of the quality of their work are usually bad at whatever it is they’re charging for.

      • SeductiveTortoise@piefed.social
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        18 days ago

        You can shift the quality a lot with great equipment, but that requires you to know what you’re doing first. And it still depends on what you’re trying to shoot. Somebody trying to capture a great moment in high speed sports might need a better camera than a cat dad. But without knowing how to use it, it is worth nothing.

    • wonderingwanderer@sopuli.xyz
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      18 days ago

      At $100 per shoot she can pay off her camera in one year doing one shoot a week. That’s if it’s a hobby.

      But since it’s not a hobby for her, as she points out, that means she can do 3-5 shoots per week. If she charges $300 per shoot, and averages let’s say 4 shoots per week, that’s over $60k per year. A small salary, but people get by for less.

      If she wants to make more, that’s fine. But she has to convince people that she’s worth a higher price by doing quality work and demonstrating consistency, professionalism, building a network of returning clients and recommendations if she wants to be fully booked each week. Not by telling them how expensive her equipment is…

      • Soulphite@reddthat.com
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        18 days ago

        Just playing devils advocate here, there should be more involved than simply taking pictures. There will be editing, and putting together an album that makes sense to the customer as well; therefore she could charge more for her time and upcharge for album features such as hard copy decorative stuff.

        Then again, there is that saying “starving artist” and all…

        • wonderingwanderer@sopuli.xyz
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          18 days ago

          Sure, but I factored that in by considering 5 shoots per week “fully booked.” That gives you an average of 8 hours per shoot for everything from transport, set up, shooting, take-down, editing, archiving, billing, etc.

          Not unreasonable, especially considering that’s a 40 hour week. Overtime exists if she needs longer, and should be billed accordingly. $1500 in one week is more than a lot of people make, even working over 40 hours.

          Is the $100-$300 she mentions a flat rate or an hourly rate? Even as a flat rate that would be decent for one day’s work. If it’s hourly, that’s pretty lucrative and leaves no room to complain, especially not about all the extra stuff that’s involved.

          Physical copies would of course be charged a la carte or as a bundle or whatever; it’s pretty standard for those to be add-on costs, unless a certain number of items were already part of the negotiated contract. But with print-on-demand services these days, that adds very little additional work or overhead expense for the photographer.

          But yeah if she wants to charge more than $300 for one shoot, then she needs to spend time building her reputation, not complaining about the cost of her equipment and acting like her cheapskate customers are to blame.

          You can build a reputation with a $400 mirrorless camera, if you’re a good photographer. Then invest in professional equipment when you can afford it.

      • UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world
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        18 days ago

        At $100 per shoot she can pay off her camera in one year doing one shoot a week.

        Assuming you don’t value your time, sure. Pro-photographers charge a lot more than that. Also, who wants to give up a year’s worth of weekends for a fancy camera?

        • ajikeshi@lemmy.world
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          17 days ago

          and if you do not pay taxes, and do account for software licenses, work going into post processing, and general admin work for your business as a start.

        • wonderingwanderer@sopuli.xyz
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          18 days ago

          Let’s look at the rest of that paragraph you selectively quoted:

          At $100 per shoot she can pay off her camera in one year doing one shoot a week. That’s if it’s a hobby.

          [emphasis added]

          What a bad faith attempt to stir shit up over nothing.

          • UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world
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            18 days ago

            ???

            Get some thicker skin, my guy. If you’re getting paid for the work, its going to be more than a hobby. Especially if you’re planning to work 50 separate gigs.

            Ffs, if you can file taxes as a business, we’re well past the point of hobbying. That’s just a part time job

            • wonderingwanderer@sopuli.xyz
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              18 days ago

              This isn’t about having thin skin, this is about you being unnecessarily combative. Don’t flatter yourself thinking I’m torn up about it.

              If you’re getting paid for the work, its going to be more than a hobby. Especially if you’re planning to work 50 separate gigs.

              Ffs, if you can file taxes as a business, we’re well past the point of hobbying. That’s just a part time job

              Hence where the rest of my original comment comes in. I know you like cherrypicking excerpts devoid of context, but ffs everyone can see my whole fucking comment. It’s right there. And you’re acting like you’re actually making a point here? Go away.

    • merc@sh.itjust.works
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      17 days ago

      Wedding photographer is an interesting job. With a lot of jobs, people buy the minimum viable equipment they need to get the job done.

      But, people who get into wedding photography seem to generally be people who are really into photography. Rather than a $5000 camera being the requirement for the job. The $5000 camera is a present you can justify getting yourself if the wedding photography game is going well.

      It’s not a tool that goes into the case and stays there until the next wedding. It’s something to be used for the kinds of pictures that don’t pay the bills but that you love taking: nature shots, architecture, abstract art, gritty realism, etc.

    • UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world
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      18 days ago

      Nobody cares what your camera costs

      It’s certainly a curiosity. Like, what’s the value-add of a $5k camera relative to a cheaper model? What’s the step-up or step-down in price? What features are you prizing? What brand are you favoring? What are your clients looking for that someone else can’t necessarily bring with a cheaper device?

      Whole books have been written about the industry, the technology around the industry, and the kinds of people who pursue it.

      Charge what you think your service is worth and work for clients who pay it.

      Finding clients who pay well is half the work of any freelance job.

    • socsa@piefed.social
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      17 days ago

      $5k is also literally hobby money. I’ve spent way more than that snowboarding and hiking over the years. My lab setup at work is literally worth more than I will make in my entire career. Sit down bitch.

    • Kangae_Hishiryo@scribe.disroot.org
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      18 days ago

      And even if your pictures were good, more than 100$ per photo is overpriced asf, and with that you can recover your inversion and gain more.

    • GreyEyedGhost@piefed.ca
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      18 days ago

      On the flip side, Uber is basically a hobby. Do these people buy their cars just to drive for Uber, or do they drive for Uber to make some extra cash with the car they already have/need?

  • sp3ctr4l@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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    18 days ago

    Advertising yourself as:

    1. Bad at internal budgeting

    2. Full of yourself

    … is a bold marketing strategy during an economic depression, for a freelance/contract worker.

    Best of luck Nat.

    • UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world
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      18 days ago

      … is a bold marketing strategy during an economic depression

      Never undersell the possibility that this person is lying.

      Or that this is a stock photo and the text is clickbait.

    • TrickDacy@lemmy.world
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      18 days ago

      This is really taking a pretty harmless comment too seriously. The point is shit is expensive and clients want everything cheap. Any freelancer can relate to this particular framing. I used to have people want $300 websites and they didn’t care that it would take potentially a week to build their site. Surely just abstractly we can all relate to shit being expensive though?

        • TrickDacy@lemmy.world
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          17 days ago

          Why did you delete this? It’s true. No idea why someone downvoted this true but deleted comment.

          • MeatPilot@sh.itjust.works
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            17 days ago

            I initially thought I attached it to the wrong thread and reposted.

            https://vger.to/sh.itjust.works/comment/26999091

            But yeah I’d only be real like that after I got to know them more during the initial introduction. If someone was just telling me what I was going to do without having a discussion about it, being an asshole or control freak. I’d eliminate the cheap for them and throw a high estimate because I just didn’t want to deal with them for less.

            At that point I realized whatever I was going to estimate they were going to go way way out of scope on and easier if I just assumed that financially ahead or just didn’t get the job.

            Overall I hated dealing with clients and the “marketing guru” jerk offs. So now I have a boring slower job with nice pay and if I do anything on the side, I got to be somewhat interested in it myself. The luxury is I can just hang up on those people now.

    • Echo Dot@feddit.uk
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      18 days ago

      I mean she’s got a point. I used to do web design and the number of people who reckoned that it should cost the equivalent of $40 was ridiculous. I’d required at least 10 times that just as compensation from having to work with shopify.

      • ch00f@lemmy.world
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        18 days ago

        One of the main reasons I got into hardware is because there’s an inherent bias that digital things have no intrinsic value.

        Like, you might expect a calculator app to be free, but nobody expects a calculator to be free.

      • sp3ctr4l@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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        18 days ago

        … did you market yourself as a stuck up prick who can’t budget well?

        Or did you maybe save that for some stage of contract negotiations?

        There are ways to dance the dance; hers seems to be the equivalent of loudly complain that no one is picking her to dance with because no one can afford her.

        Just not a good strategy.

        • Echo Dot@feddit.uk
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          18 days ago

          Well I certainly found it was a good idea to not keep the customer in the dark about my prices. If I’m going to be expensive I might as well tell them outright, it’s not like I’m going to get more customers if I led them on.

  • otacon239@lemmy.world
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    18 days ago

    If my photographer can get me the picture I need with the $300 camera, I’m hiring them first. Not everyone needs their pictures on a billboard or TV ad.

  • Tanis Nikana@lemmy.world
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    18 days ago

    I shoot with a refurbished $600 Canon EOS Rebel T7. I use two lenses for the majority of my work: an 18-55mm, and a 75-300mm.

    Fite me irl, Nat, my shit’s gorgeous and I know it.

    • FellowEnt@sh.itjust.works
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      18 days ago

      Nice shots but if you’re wanting gorgeous candid shots of fast moving action (like weddings/events), you’re gonna struggle without the expensive glass/body.

      • Tanis Nikana@lemmy.world
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        18 days ago

        I’ve got a nifty fifty which can open to 1.6, and that’s pretty good for getting as fast as 1/250th in dim light, and I got it for free! :D

        Catch is, the zoom controls are at the bottom, on my feet.

        • 14th_cylon@lemmy.zip
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          15 days ago

          you don’t zoom with your feet. that is how you change perspective, and it is not the same as zooming. serious hobby photographer should understand the difference.

          • Tanis Nikana@lemmy.world
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            15 days ago

            Lemme use my cute euphemisms.

            Alternatively: drat, you got me, I’m not a hobby photographer, I’m just a lesbian with a camera.

            Alternatively: drat, you got me, am I still approved by the board you’re on to take pictures of cool things, or should I turn my kit in?

            Alternatively and truly: what is the point of the tone you’re using in the last sentence? You’re not aiming to shame me out of taking and making photographs, are you? Even if you don’t want to call them art, I’m still using a camera to capture visuals that I enjoy to a file, and adjusting them to my heart’s content. And what if I don’t really understand your definition of perspective vs. zoom? English is a second language for me!

            Alternative and deeply truly, in my bones: who the fuck are you? Let’s see some of your damn portfolio.

            (And yes, I downvoted myself to save you the damn click, cause let’s be real, you’re not gonna reply, you’re gonna downvote and move on.)

            • 14th_cylon@lemmy.zip
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              15 days ago

              Alternative and deeply truly, in my bones: who the fuck are you? Let’s see some of your damn portfolio.

              i am someone pointing your attention to the fact that you don’t zoom with your feet. i assume you did not know that, because why would you say that otherwise, so now you know something you didn’t before and you can think about how to apply that knowledge to your pictures of cool things. i don’t really need to present my portfolio for that.

              And yes, I downvoted myself to save you the damn click,

              you seem to have forgotten to do that. what is the point of making such bizarre performative claim when you don’t even follow through?

              if simple comment sends you into such tailspin, maybe public discussion is not for you…

        • FellowEnt@sh.itjust.works
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          17 days ago

          Zooming with your feet (and switching primes) is part and parcel to events photography. If I see a zoom lens at a wedding I will judge the photographer.

    • Echo Dot@feddit.uk
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      18 days ago

      Yeah but for all we know she’s a wedding photographer, photographs wildlife or something uncooperative, unlike a bridge which tends to sit still most of the time.

      • Tanis Nikana@lemmy.world
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        18 days ago

        Man, I wish bridges sat still. Shit bounces.

        That said, wedding wildlife does sound notoriously uncooperative; trying to get a bridal veil on a rhino sounds, well, difficult.

    • Seleni@lemmy.world
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      18 days ago

      Those are really nice! I especially like in the first one how you captured the city lights on the water and filled in that potential darker space on the left with the bridge span.

      Of course, there’s scenic photography, which is basically having really good composition skills, knowing good locations, and timing, and then there’s people photography, which is… extra. I don’t blame photographers for charging more for that shit lol

      ‘I want our wedding photos to be the two of us on a cliff at the beach at sunset with really pretty clouds behind us!’ And you’re thinking, okay, drive time, waiting for a good colorful sunset instead of a cloudless or too cloudy or foggy one (always a fun game of roll-the-dice in Oregon at least), and they want their backs to the sunset, so that’s extra lighting (that you’ll have to carry to the location) and extra time in photoshop to be sure you can still see their faces clearly…

      • Tanis Nikana@lemmy.world
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        18 days ago

        Yeah, I don’t do people cause they’re hard to look at, what with the brain damage and all, so scenery’s more of my thing. Scenery doesn’t stay put, but it’s a hell of a lot less wiggly than people.

        And I mean, I’ve never seen the Oregon Coast look bad, you just have to take what it gives you when you show up, no expectations.

        Fuuuuck, I think I’ve gotta go there this weekend, just to get out of town.

      • Tanis Nikana@lemmy.world
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        18 days ago

        It’s a preference. I’m biased away from cool light as a person, and like my work to be a bit warmer.

        I turn off QRedShift when I’m working, then I ultimately end up re-creating it by hand, cause I’m just like that.

    • darntootin@lemmy.world
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      18 days ago

      Hey man, I support your hobby, but uh, this is embarrassing to boast about. Be humble, you’re an amateur and that’s okay.

        • Tanis Nikana@lemmy.world
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          17 days ago

          They’re not even out here identifiably.

          I’m out here with my legal name up front, making art that I like, and being really, really proud of it.

          I, uh, don’t have a website though, just a Pixelfed account that I update with new work fairly often.

          I’m gonna start posting more work, not just because I like the work I post, but now with an added layer of spite! (Nothing functionally will change except my spirits will continue to be undampened, despite their recent attempts at doing so.)

      • Tanis Nikana@lemmy.world
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        18 days ago

        Seriously, I don’t care if you’re Gregory fucking Crewdson, you do not say that shit to aspiring artists.

        Cultivate us goddammit.

        DO NOT DEMORALIZE PEOPLE OUT OF THIS FIELD.

        • honesthenery@thelemmy.clubBanned from community
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          16 days ago

          Too late…I used to get covers and was all city. Saw my work in the paper and every news stand. Didn’t matter… I gave up on it a long time ago. Most slobs just want porn, piggy slop and you know what I don’t care anymore. Shoot your own damn photos, fix your own $8000 bicycle and fix your own damn car. Fucking twats I hope this slob ass nation is nuked into oblivion. and I mean that. Their little meaningless lives and their own self perception blinds them into thinking they are somehow important. What good is a doctor if no one can afford it. What good is a lawyer if no one can afford it. Don’t get me started on these marketurds and office chimps. I kinda enjoyed when all the middle manager gen X’ers lost their jobs to AI. The great equaliser. 👍️. More layoffs to come. These assholes will be wiped out.

          PS the paper I worked for the owner thought I wasn’t worth making full time. He got caught selling drugs went to jail and the paper went belly up. He never showed his face around town after that… then after jail worked at a hotel at the desk after that🙂 humbled you could say. Fuck everybody and this whole gawd damn world. All these little piggies. OINK OINK OINK Fuck these boomers.

          All the “successful” photographers I knew were boomers about to retire and scam artist. Fuck the arts forever I just pray for nukes. Support small business bla bla bla capitalism gonna capitalise on you damn ass real soon if it hasn’t already.

          • Tanis Nikana@lemmy.world
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            16 days ago

            I just shoot the art that I wanna shoot. I like my works, I’m real damn proud of them. I wanna show them to as many people as I can, to get in galleries, to have my work be seen, to make my mark on this world.

            I’m not a laborer with my camera. I don’t shoot food for packaging, I don’t get ninety seconds with an NBA star, I’m not on NatGeo.

            I’ve made a grand total of $300 from this gig cause I sold a canvas and a few prints, and I sold a shit ton of magic cards to get the camera to begin with.

            I guess what I’m saying is, I’m not gonna be some jaded old hack like the dude I replied to up there. I do this simply for the love.

            And for what it’s worth, your words have a good weight. :)

      • Tanis Nikana@lemmy.world
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        18 days ago

        Hey, you might want to reset the password on your account, someone used it to post something absolutely idiotic under your username. Just letting you know, so that you get this sorted out.

        Actually no, I’m preserving the text of what you said here so you can’t do a dirty delete: @darntootin@lemmy.world said “Hey man, I support your hobby, but uh, this is embarrassing to boast about. Be humble, you’re an amateur and that’s okay.”

    • altphoto@lemmy.todayBanned from community
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      18 days ago

      On the Uber and transport topic, I sometimes get to ride the light rail and I have to drive to the park n ride to leave my car and ride the rail.

      The trip from my home to the park n ride is a quick 10 to 15 minutes by car. By bus it’s 1 to 2 hours. By foot it’s probably a few days.

      The light rail takes me 30 minutes from north king county to Seattle downtown. If I drove there it would take an hour of mostly just sitting in traffic.

      Progress is slow but if there was a light rail from bothell to Kenmore to the I-5 corridor, that would basically eliminate my need for a 40 to $90 Uber. We only pay that if we a traveling. That way we get a car from our house to the link and then easy 30 minutes to the airport.

      The whole Uber thing is great unless there are only a few riders or a few drivers. Plus the cut that goes to Uber is probably stifling innovation. I recall that there’s an open-source Uber system called…

      https://libretaxi.org/

      • Hupf@feddit.org
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        18 days ago

        a quick 10 to 15 minutes by car. […] By foot it’s probably a few days.

        Just as a raw ballpark estimate. By car could be 50km/h on average, with a walking speed of roughly 5km/h, that’s 10x the time it takes by car, i.e. 2-3 hours.

        A few days usually takes you trough a few adjacent townships. Do you have to take a humongous detour on foot?

        • mojofrododojo@lemmy.world
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          17 days ago

          just hypothesizing but: the part of the burbs they’re traversing doesn’t have much in the way of sidewalks along the highways, forcing detours along the local trails like the burke gilman.

          • Hupf@feddit.org
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            17 days ago

            Tops. Waiting at intersections, slowing down for other traffic situations and driving on roads with a lower speed limit drags down that average, as others have mentioned with regards to walking.

      • doingthestuff@lemy.lol
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        17 days ago

        At my house there are no buses. There are no light rails. There are no sidewalks, no bike lanes. You can walk in the easement of people’s front yards but it’s mostly a ditch, full of water when it’s raining. I live inside the loop highway that runs around my 2+ million population city. Cars are the only option, even most of the homeless have cars here.

      • mojofrododojo@lemmy.world
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        17 days ago

        light rail from bothell to Kenmore to the I-5 corridor

        that’ll be st12? 15? lol.

        after the excavate under the mountain of queen anne to connect ballard…

        honestly the real solution is to move out of the sticks, or stop working in downtown.

  • OldChicoAle@lemmy.world
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    17 days ago

    My education cost 200,000. You think I made all that back in one paycheck? Cry me a river, Natalie.

  • TigerAce@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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    17 days ago

    Only 5k? Sound like a hobby, because most professional photographers have a body that is already 5k by itself, plus several lenses ranging between 2 and 20k. I mean, I’m a hobby photographer and my gear already exceeds at least 8k. So stop bitching Karen.

    • hansolo@lemmy.today
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      17 days ago

      For the price of one shoot, you can buy someone’s lightly used $5,000 kit on ebay. I’ve had a Canon I bought a decade ago that’s still works great. Maybe got it for $250 or so IIRC.

    • jaschen306@sh.itjust.works
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      17 days ago

      Ohhhh this pisses me off soooooo much. I decided to do family photos and specifically asked for the raws before I went into the shoot. They still gave me a hard time after the shoot to get the raws. They gave me a stripped down .dng without any camera settings. Ohhhh that pisses me off so much.

    • FellowEnt@sh.itjust.works
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      17 days ago

      I found a guy willing to chuck me RAWs for a lower price, still felt a bit ripped off. He shot 90% of the day on a walkabout zoom and the photos were nothing special.

      • chewypoops@lemmy.world
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        17 days ago

        The audacity to ask for the raw, unprocessed photos for a lower price, and then complain that they look boring.

        You wanted the raws. Process them yourself.

        • Jtotheb@lemmy.world
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          17 days ago

          I mean this comment makes total sense if we pretend that all photos are equally valuable and that the color balance is the only issue but not if we actually address the part where the photographer ostensibly took a bunch of poorly framed candids and failed to capture the energy of the moment

          Oops, sorry, I forgot you already decided that the photographer must have been the good guy so that means I’m wrong

        • FellowEnt@sh.itjust.works
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          10 days ago

          They were boring because of the lens choice and lack of effort/skill of the photographer. Processing isn’t going to do anything to change that.

        • kamen@lemmy.world
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          17 days ago

          The audacity to ask for the raw, unprocessed photos for a lower price, and then complain that they look boring.

          That has the same energy as going to a restaurant and asking for the raw ingredients.

          • FellowEnt@sh.itjust.works
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            10 days ago

            The craft I’m paying for is in the taking of the photos, processing is subjective and isn’t going to transform a shitty photo into a gorgeous one. Your restaurant comparison is shitty, it would only make sense if I was asking to just plate the food myself.

  • Etterra@discuss.online
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    17 days ago

    Yeah and that Uber driver can’t afford rent. Photographers often have less business in the winter, too, and they have a ton of extra equipment to lug around. I know a wedding photographer and it’s a lot of work day of and post work to make sure it’s all nice.

  • jaschen306@sh.itjust.works
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    17 days ago

    Pppffffssshhhh… 5k?!?that is hobby level money. I’m over 15k into just my lenses and I do this as a hobby and shoot friends and family for free.

  • greedytacothief@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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    18 days ago

    I don’t really understand photography. Like it seems too broad of an art form. Like the guy who takes pictures of food is different from action photography is different from a wedding photographer. I feel like I don’t have the context to know she’s full of shit, but it kinda feels like it.

    • ClownStatue@piefed.social
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      18 days ago

      She’s not really full of shit, but she is being kind of bitchy. Meanwhile, Xavier’s just a trolling asshole.

      • kestrel7_7@lemmy.world
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        18 days ago

        Right, like the uber driver is getting ripped off too! The existence of multiple jobs not getting paid enough doesn’t justify any of them not paying enough.

        • 14th_cylon@lemmy.zip
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          15 days ago

          on top of that, the uber driver’s job was done in 10 minutes, which is little less than typical wedding…

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        18 days ago

        I’m not so sure.

        I guess you could argue that the rideshare driver doesn’t own a car solely for rideshare, but the same argument could be made about the camera.

        I’d argue that the rideshare driver is putting more wear and tear on the vehicle than the photographer is per shoot.

        OOP maybe doesn’t realize it, but her post is perhaps an argument for spending less on the camera.

        The photographer even at these rates that she percieves to be low, is going to pay off her camera before the rideshare driver pays off the car.

        • cantstopthesignal@sh.itjust.works
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          18 days ago

          Driving is not as skilled as photography. High end photography requires a lot of technical understanding of light and the camera settings.

          • OpenPassageways@programming.dev
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            18 days ago

            Even if that were true (most of the time I get a rideshare it’s in a place you couldn’t pay me to drive in)…

            Driving is way more risky than photography, unless you’re shooting in a war zone.

    • |IlI|lIIl|IlIll|Il|IllI|@lemmy.world
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      18 days ago

      Good photographers are actually pretty rare and - in my experience - treat the field of capturing visual information as a science, but since the advent of consumer DSLR and mirrorless systems, modern-day digital cameras with nearly instant automatically-focusing lenses that utilize a grid array and intelligence models to smartly maintain clarity on what is most likely a subject as it moves in 3D space, have made it so much harder to fuck things up that it essentially has opened the floodgates of photography so that there’s an endless sea of morons thinking that buying a $5000 Canon with a full-frame sensor and a lens the size of a Stanley thermos makes them Ansel Adams.

      It’s the same with any field where the bar to entry gets suddenly lowered. The market becomes immediately flooded with new “experts” because the tools evolve to the point that they become nearly idiot-proof. Think Claude vibe coders calling themselves programmers / software engineers, Gemini prompters calling themselves visual designers, and people on SoundCloud uploading jingles they farted out on SUNO calling themselves musicians.

      • FauxPseudo @lemmy.world
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        18 days ago

        To me, the difference between a person who takes pictures and a photographer is that Ansel Adams might spend a week waiting for exactly the right lighting conditions before taking a single picture of a setting. There’s a whole lot of planning we don’t see.

        • mojofrododojo@lemmy.world
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          17 days ago

          yeah, and Adams was dealing with enormous negatives that required chemical processing, which then got printed onto enormous prints and were very very very much edited! one example you can see here with the artist, they’re quite distinct! But this is analog editing, overexposing some areas (burning) and underexposing the image in other areas (dodging), using lights and mattes to select areas.

          https://jtunney.com/the-art-of-dodge-burn/

          there’s a tremendous amount of intent that goes into finding the location, then the weather, and time, and waiting for magic - that part in the clouds or just as light filters past a ridge - and then with analog photography, you shoot and hope lol, there’s no instant feedback, just trust the process and be meticulous.

    • Typotyper@sh.itjust.works
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      18 days ago

      Its all based on their time involvement. Hourly wage basically. You cab shoot for an hour and then spend several hours editing the shots. Wedding photographers might commit 20-40 hours to a wedding. 3-5 day of, rest editing. Batch editing and croppjng isnt bad but touch ups are the worst.

      • |IlI|lIIl|IlIll|Il|IllI|@lemmy.world
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        18 days ago

        Don’t forget - the “difficult” client who wants you to make additional specific time-consuming changes AFTER reviewing them a first time.

        When driving someone, they don’t usually have the ability now to ask you to drive them to additional locations after you both agreed on an original destination and fee.

  • Diddlydee@feddit.uk
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    18 days ago

    My house cost 300 grand and you want me to look after your kids for 60 quid a day?

    • darntootin@lemmy.world
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      18 days ago

      A good photographer with a shitty lens will not make a good commercial product lol come on guys.

      • dream_weasel@sh.itjust.works
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        17 days ago

        No, but a good used lens and an older camera body is plenty sufficient for good photos especially if you can edit worth a shit. You don’t need some new mirrorless body and some crazy lens that lets you take aperture down to f/2 that is brand new to, for example, .

        I’m confident that with my old canon EOS 5D Mark 2 I can outshoot any hobbymom who spent 5k on Amazon today for something new, and anything the camera can’t do is accomplishable in Darktable.

        • darntootin@lemmy.world
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          18 days ago

          Not in a technical field. You shoot with a Barbie camera and I’ll use a hasselblad. Which will be better? “The best camera is the one you have” is bullshit.

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            17 days ago

            Yes, a Barbie camera won’t have great pictures. You know very well “the best camera is the one you have” isn’t talking about Barbie cameras, though.

          • Digit@lemmy.today
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            18 days ago

            Well, the expression does come from an age where it was more commonplace that the artisan, the workman, the technician, would be making their own tools. Takes on new poetic meaning, in this age and economy.