About your Investment…

Custom portraiture *is* an investment. It’s not something that everyone may want or feel they need, but if it’s important to you to have professional images then it may mean saving up in advance to afford it. When you hire me as your photographer you’re investing in someone who’s skilled and knowledgeable about lighting, composition, and the equipment being used. I invest a lot of my time getting to know my clients, arranging a date/time that fits everyone’s needs, taking the time needed to get beautiful images, professionally editing each image, and making sure my clients know how and where to print their photographs. With DSLR cameras at very affordable prices it may be difficult to understand why someone should pay $400 for a session when 5 of their friends charge only $50 (but i’m really hoping you can SEE the difference!). There is so much more that goes into custom portraiture than the camera and photoshop. Some of the *behind the scenes* work includes:

Time, time, and more time. This is the part where people think they’re just investing in the time it takes me to shoot a session. So much more goes into it than that.. time it takes to drop the kids off at a sitter, show up to the shoot, 1-2 hours of shooting, travel time, and editing. Editing takes up a lot of a photographer’s job. I don’t open an image in photoshop and apply tacky pre-set filters, brighten your teeth and eyes until they’re too bright to look at, and turn your skin into a plastic doll. But I do sort through each session, eliminate duplicates and weed some out only leaving the best to choose from, and make subtle enhancements to each image before cropping and saving them.

Marketing and Advertising. Designing, printing, and passing out business cards and other marketing materials takes up so much time! Not to mention maintaining a website!

Equipment. A decent camera and nice lenses is important and so is the knowledge it takes to use it correctly! It takes time to save up for a $2000 lens, but it’s even more important to have the skill to go with it!

Software, memberships, and insurance. A lot of money goes into upgrading software (photoshop, noiseware, monitor calibration, actions or templates, tax software etc) and yearly membership fees to organizations. Insuring 20K worth of gear is important too!

Taxes!! This one is HUGE, HUGE. To make things easier on my clients, I include sales tax in all my session fees. Taxes are my biggest headache.. federal ones especially. I spend a lot of time on other areas of my business so having an accountant is important.

So why does a custom session cost $400???

When I started back up in 2011, I made the controversial decision to offer session that include all of your images with a print release. Many photographers may read this and want to give me a virtual slap in the face for many reasons (I’m losing sales this way, cutting myself short, and running the risk that my images will be printed at walmart and hung on walls for everyone to see).. and very true points. My reasons for choosing to do this are simple, because that’s what I would want if I hired a photographer! Typically you go to a professional, pay a $100-$200 session fee, and choose maybe 3-4 images to order prints of and come out spending $400-$2000 anyway. But why should I store your images on my computer when you can enjoy them on yours? You may not want to print them, or maybe you want to print them all.. that should be your choice. By giving a flat rate I may sell myself short, but a potential client knows the total investment with no hidden fees or upsales. $400 does not mean I’m making $200 and hour.. if you read the above, there’s much more that goes into a session than time shooting and the $400 fee is a great price to pay for beautiful images that you get to keep, share, and print on your own terms.

Thank you for reading this. I hope you understand that, while I would love to try to help everyone be able to afford my work, I am still a person trying to make a living too. I understand that not everyone can afford to pay for custom photography, and I’m ok with that, it’s an investment that may take planning and saving.