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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.
She’s not really full of shit, but she is being kind of bitchy. Meanwhile, Xavier’s just a trolling asshole.
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.
on top of that, the uber driver’s job was done in 10 minutes, which is little less than typical wedding…
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.
Driving is not as skilled as photography. High end photography requires a lot of technical understanding of light and the camera settings.
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.
Supply and demand. Lots of people willing to take that risk. Not as many want to learn about the physics of light.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Yeah I figured a photographer would have an hourly rate, an that rate would depend on a lot of variables.
Its just like drawing. The technique matters most.
With food youre working with colours and macro, mostly, while with action you are trying to position yourself so you can get the best shot. With weddings its a mix.
It dosent matter if you are really good at drawing underage incest furry porn if the dude wants you to make an oil painting of the Alps.
And it all depends on what kinda.professional she is.