$700 for images, what a rip-off!

Many models contact me and are playing the "poor student" card. Which is fine, you may be a poor student, but why is a photographer supposed to care about that?

Here is a breakdown of where your $700 goes.

You understand that that $700 is not that much right? Ok, forgoing all the costs associated with being a photographer you pay me my $700 1/2 day rate for images.

From that $700- $200 goes to my MUA leaving me with $500. On the day of the call time is 8am, wrap time is 2pm.

So that is 6 hours. But we are not done, I must then go through the images getting rid of images that will make you or me look like we don't know what we are doing.

Two hours later I take those selects and place them into the editing program to make my color adjustments. Another 3-4 hours goes by. I then process the images into JPGs and send them to you via FTP.

You select your 10 images for retouching. At an average of .5 hours per retouch that is 5 hours of retouching.

So discounting the costs for computer, software, marketing, maintaining my loft, wardrobe, photo equipment, paying my own health care costs, and loan payments from my very expensive schooling we have me making $500 for 17 hours work.

That is how much an hour? $29.42 an hour, or what you make working for the phone company.

Nobody owes you anything. Nobody owes me anything. Wanting to model, is in the end an expensive occupation/hobby. But please, don't try to make it sound like photographers aren't earning every penny of what they charge.

Photographers are not trying to take you for a ride, that one day shoot is normally 3 days work.