Stop advertising $175 full sessions. There, I said it.

I’m not even packing my gear into my camera bag for $175.

Beginners should charge beginner prices while they learn. I did. Every photographer starts somewhere, and there is absolutely a season where you are building a portfolio, figuring out your camera, learning how to work with people and charging accordingly. What gets weird is when a full session with all edited images included is advertised for $175 and then presented like that is a normal professional rate.

Once people see that price enough times, they start to think that is simply what professional photography costs. They open the hometown Facebook group and see, “Full session. $175. All edited images included.” Then they land on the website of a photographer charging $500 or $700 and understandably wonder what in the hell the difference is. Apparently ‘she also owns a camera’ is where the comparison ends for some people

From the client’s perspective, both people own cameras. Both show up for an hour. Both send over photos afterward. Most clients have no reason to know how much work happens before and after the part they actually see, and they have no idea that they are dangerously close to something going terribly wrong and precious memories being unsalvageable (because thats part of the skill that comes with being a true professional) and that is exactly why the $175 full-session thing drives me nuts.

At $175, I’m barely interested in charging my batteries. Respectfully, I have snacks in my pantry worth more than my profit margin on that session. A one-hour session is never one hour of work. I have already answered emails, talked through what you are wearing, picked or researched a location, watched the weather, prepped my equipment and driven to wherever we are shooting before I ever take the first photograph. After the session, I still have to drive home, back everything up, cull hundreds of files, edit the final gallery, export it, upload it and deliver it.

If I have six hours invested in your $175 session, I have grossed about $29 an hour before taxes or a single business expense comes out. Now subtract payment processing, gas, software, gallery hosting, website expenses, insurance, equipment replacement, storage and all the other boring things that keep a real business running, and that number gets ugly pretty fast. I did not spend more than a decade getting good at this so I could build myself a job that pays less than the one I could go clock into somewhere else.

Clients usually aren’t comparing the same product

Cheap does not automatically mean bad. There are wildly talented photographers who undercharge themselves, and there are expensive photographers whose work I personally would not pay for. Price by itself does not tell you whether someone is good, but it can tell you something about how their business operates.

A hobby photographer can charge $175 because that money may be extra income. Their mortgage does not have to come out of it. Their health insurance does not depend on it. They may already own the camera because photography is something they love doing, and if they make a few hundred dollars on the weekend, great.

A full-time professional has to price the work so the business can actually survive. Taxes have to be paid. Equipment has to be replaced. Software gets billed every month. Hard drives fill up. Websites cost money. Insurance costs money. Camera bodies eventually die and computers eventually need replacing. Somewhere after all of that, the photographer still needs to get paid.

You can be an incredibly talented hobbyist or an incredibly talented beginner. You can also be somebody who has been taking beautiful photographs for years and still has no idea how to price a sustainable business. Talent and business structure are two different things.

So if you are consistently charging $175 for a full session with everything included, call it what it is: hobby pricing. You can be mad at me for saying it, but please be mad while holding a calculator. There is nothing shameful about that. The problem starts when hobby pricing gets held up as proof that established professional photographers are ripping people off.

the Uber driver argument makes absolutely no sense

I recently saw somebody make this comparison: “My Uber driver paid $40,000 for his Tesla and drove me to my destination for $50.”

Apparently the implication was that photographers should stop talking about how much their equipment costs because an Uber driver also owns expensive equipment and only charged $50. It sounds clever until you think about what the Uber driver actually sold you.

He sold you a ride. He picked you up, drove you somewhere and dropped you off. At that point his work for you was done, and he could immediately pick up another passenger. He did not go home and spend four hours sorting through your ride, correcting the color of your ride, retouching your ride, backing your ride up on multiple hard drives, uploading your ride to a gallery and answering an email about which version of your ride would look best on a Christmas card. Although I would absolutely pay $50 to watch somebody try to Lightroom an Uber ride

The Tesla can complete ride after ride all day. My camera is also a tool, and the fact that the camera is expensive is not, by itself, why my photography costs what it costs. The price comes from the entire job attached to that camera.

There is the session itself, but there is also the planning, communication, travel, culling, editing, file storage and delivery. Then there are the years it took to get to the point where I can reliably produce the work you saw in my portfolio. When the Uber driver drops you off, he can accept another fare. When you leave your session, I probably still have hours of work left before your job is finished. Those businesses do not operate the same way.

you’re also paying for all the mistakes I already made

Experienced photographers make a lot of decisions very quickly, and clients usually never see any of them happening. I can walk into a location and know pretty quickly where I want to put you because I have spent years learning what ugly light looks like before I photograph somebody in it.

I have already screwed up the backlighting. I have already learned what happens when you let a wedding timeline get too tight. I have photographed the painfully nervous senior who swears they are awkward in every photograph, the toddler who decides the session is over eight minutes after it starts and the family where nobody is looking at me at the same time.

After enough repetition, you stop thinking consciously about every camera setting and every tiny adjustment because you have already spent years working through those decisions. A five-second choice about where to put somebody can represent years of experience, and clients are paying for the fact that I already made a lot of the mistakes they do not want me making during their session.

camera gear is also stupid expensive

A professional camera body can cost several thousand dollars, and that is before I add lenses, flashes, memory cards, batteries, hard drives, computers, editing software and all the other crap quietly eating money in the background.

Wedding photography adds another layer because I need redundancy. I am not showing up to photograph somebody’s wedding with one camera body and a positive attitude. Jesus can take the wheel in a lot of areas of my life, but He is not my backup camera body. If my camera dies while a bride is walking down the aisle, nobody is going to turn around, walk back outside and start the ceremony again while I run home for another one.

I need another camera ready to go, extra batteries, enough memory cards and backups of the files afterward. The client will probably never notice any of that unless something goes wrong, which is kind of the point. A lot of professionalism is paying for problems before they happen.

$175 becomes the number people remember

What bothers me most about seeing bargain full sessions constantly advertised in community groups is that people see that number over and over until it starts to feel normal.

Someone posts, “Looking for a family photographer!” and underneath it are 42 comments from photographers offering full galleries for $150, $175 or $200. A photographer charging $600 suddenly looks outrageously expensive even when that photographer has simply priced the job according to the actual number of hours it takes to complete and the cost of staying in business.

Nobody is required to hire that photographer, and there are clients at every budget. Mini sessions are a great example of how lower pricing can make sense. A photographer can stack several short sessions in one location, reduce travel and planning time, simplify the workflow and offer something more affordable without pretending a customized full session costs the same amount.

Portfolio-building sessions make sense too, and so does charging less when you are genuinely new and still learning. If you have been photographing professionally for years and are still doing full sessions for $175 because you are afraid clients will not book you otherwise, eventually the math catches up with you. You either raise your prices or spend every night editing while wondering why your business account is still empty.

weddings are where this gets completely ridiculous

Wedding photography Facebook groups are an especially fascinating place. Someone posts, “Looking for a wedding photographer. Eight hours. Budget $600,” and twenty photographers immediately comment that they would ‘absolutely love to be considered’. * cue extra spicy eye roll in true kassi fashion *

Ma’am, eight hours of wedding coverage can turn into twenty or thirty hours of actual work pretty easily. Before the wedding there are emails, questionnaires, timeline planning and equipment prep. Then comes travel and the wedding day itself. Afterward, there can be thousands of photographs to back up and sort through before editing even starts.

Divide $600 across all of those hours and then start subtracting business expenses. The photographer is not making $600 for eight hours of work, which is why established wedding photographers charge thousands of dollars.

You are paying somebody to photograph a day that cannot be recreated while handling rapidly changing light, unpredictable timelines, family dynamics, dark receptions, movement and whatever else the day decides to throw at them. You also need that person to go home with your files, keep them safe and eventually deliver a gallery that still looks like the work that convinced you to hire them in the first place.

That requires considerably more than owning a nice camera.

if you’re new, be new

There is no shame in being new. Charge less while you learn, build your portfolio, photograph your friends, try weird things, screw things up, figure out your editing style, learn how to direct people and learn how to recover when the light sucks and your plan does not work. I had to learn all of that too.

What I do not understand is photographers who have been doing this for years still trying to win clients by being the cheapest person in the Facebook comments. You will always lose that game because somebody will always charge less. If you charge $300, somebody will charge $200. If you charge $200, somebody will charge $150. Eventually somebody is practically paying the client to let them take pictures. At that point just Venmo them twenty bucks and stay home.

I would much rather compete on the actual work. Look at my galleries, look at my consistency and look at my experience. Decide whether you like how I photograph people and whether you trust me with whatever you are hiring me to document.

If another photographer gives you what you want for $175 and you love their work, hire them. Truly. Just stop using that $175 session as evidence that professional photographers charging sustainable prices are greedy or overpriced.

She can have the $175 session. I’m not even cleaning out the leftover fruit snack wrappers from my camera bag for that.

Sincerely,

A mildly feral photographer who is tired of Facebook pricing.