Well, this is good jumping off point to talk about my photo studio in Missoula Montana. This October will mark my one year anniversary and even with 28 years of professional Photography experience I feel I am experience new business growing pains.
The photo market, since I began has gotten more challenging with easier access to create a photo, aka digital photography. The combination of digital and recession creates even greater challenges to maintain professional price standards to the market. Sadly, I am still hearing stories of new photographers giving "it away" to try and establish themselves. " Giving their services away" not only hurts the entire industry but is a short term disaster for their business. I recently got an e-mail from a groom who wanted to know what I charged for a wedding. He was getting married in three weeks and expected 300 guests at a Missoula, Montana wedding and he wanted 12 hours of coverage. I told him my starting price was $2,500 plus $200 overtime after 10 hours ( very reasonable, I thought). He e-mailed me a couple of days later saying he found a photographer for $800 that would do all 12 hours and asked if I knew of other wedding photographers in Missoula that would be cheaper. My only reply was "Nope", I was livid.." How can a professional photographer spend 12 hours shooting, 6 hours editing and post production and sales and make any money? That is about 20 hours of work at $40 dollars an hour. To a someone who works at McDonalds that my sound like a lot of money but the investment the professional photographer has to put into that one day of shooting turns out to be a wash. Camera and lenses to shoot the wedding are a minimum of $3K, insurance, computer, software..post production etc..$120 an hour around $800, advertising to get that job up to $1k etc...Not to mention the skill level and not a second chance stress...well I think you get the idea. It is skewed when you hear photographers like Annie Leibowitz charges $100K for a portrait..according to the Washington Post...which is hard to believe since even an Avedon icon print will auction around $110K, sorry Annie in not Avedon.
Ok I feel I am venting about the state of professional photography and that is not a healthy. I do feel fortunate to have made my living as a professional photography and do find joy in photographing weddings, senior portraits, family portraits and children. The retail side of the business is new territory for me, after shooting commercial work for so long. It is like the Hare and tortoise analogy..In commercial you make a lot of money in a short time and in the retail photography business you make a moderate amount of money over a period of time. The commercial assignments are few and far between the retail are more and over the long run will be more consistent. My theory...being a Capricorn is probably more in line with my personality.
I am looking forward to my second year of having a photo studio in Missoula Montana and see what happens..my goal is to build clients, strengthen my brand and do more than just break even but actually climb out of debt...a tall order in this recession but worth a try..sorry no photos in this blog..go to my website www.begleiter.com to look at images..I feel better writing this out, thanks to my former student
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