A well trusted virtual mentor, Scott Bourne, has been holding a discussion revolving around setting the value of “professional” photographic services over on his blog Photo Focus. Specifically the discussion involves $500 wedding photographers versus “pros” who charge much more, but it expands outward from there.
Mr. Bourne and his supporters are beating the drum so often heard from veterans of any industry. Photographic services are expensive to buy because photographic services “should” be expensive to buy. Experience, quality, and talent cost money.
Yes they do.
I’ve, in fact, been on the front lines of a similar pricing battle in my career and have seen it all but destroy the industry in which I once worked.
I was a production and quality manager for a large digital color printing service bureau for 13 years. I remember back in 1995 we used to get $15 per square foot for a basic photographic large format print. A 24×36, mounted, and later thrown in the trash following the big presentation, with a 2-day lead time, once cost around $150 in total.
As technology improved over the years our profits increased. Our company, and most other companies like ours, kept those profits to ourselves with the argument that the customer was really paying for the expertise of our technicians to provide color accurate and high quality product the first time, on time, every time.
Sound familiar?
We were raking it in. Printer costs were crashing and new software was making it faster and easier than ever to produce color accurate, high resolution prints with little more than a touch of a button faster than ever before.
But a mounted 24×36 mounted print was still running our customers around $150 each in 2005.
Remember those crashing printer costs? Well, it wasn’t long before a number of “Mom and Pop” operations were able to get into the game and cut us off at the knees. More and more customers started going to the guy down the street because he was half the price. He wasn’t getting rich, but he was making money. And his quality? Well, “good enough” will send a chill down any premium content providers spine.
We tried to react to the changing market and match the new pricing, but ultimately our company went broke. Why? Because we were fat. We all had new car payments, mortgage payments on nice houses, a new building lease, new equipment leases, and the confused assumption that our product and services would always yield a premium price with a very nice profit margin.
We lost because the next guy, while maybe not as skilled and maybe not possessing the latest and most complete set of tools, was able to give the customer what they wanted at a more attractive price.
Was their work as good as ours? No. Was it good enough? Yes. Thus, we lost.
What I’m reading between the lines in this debate by professional photographers versus the discount photographers is that the pros are starting to be priced out of the market. It is becoming easier and cheaper to satisfy the customer with more limited skills thanks to advances in ever more affordable photographic technology.
Yes, an experienced wedding photographer, nature photographer, portrait photographer, whatever, will be able to produce a superior product in less time with less effort thanks to their years of work in the field as well as their superior equipment and technique.
Technology however, as it did in my case with the digital printing world, is closing the gap in the final quality of the resulting product. And, in this weakened economy, more people are willing to settle for the inferior, but still acceptable, version and save a few bucks in the process.
If Uncle Jeff wants to charge $500 to shoot the wedding and the happy couple are pleased with the results… Even if the reception pictures are a bit blurry and Uncle Jeff missed the bride dancing with Grandpa Jones… Then that is what it costs to shoot their wedding. If they aren’t happy with the results? Well, that is a risk more couples are willing to take now that technology has increased their odds of getting at least decent results with off-the-shelf gear and a little practice.
Plus, I hear Cousin Dave is a whiz with Photoshop…
The bottom line for me is this: You have to be able to justify to the client why your work is a premium product and well worth the upcharge over the discount photographer. Becoming angry at the discount photographer and insisting he raise his prices, to me, seems more about not having the ability to justify your services as a premium product than it does about having the market artificially deflated by bottom feeders.
In my digital printing company we got fat. When push came to shove we couldn’t justify our premium price versus the quality we provided when compared to the competition. We lost.
How are you going to make sure you don’t lose?
Tags: photography
Wow this just completely misses the mark. It is based on the extraordinarily faulty assumption that giving a new Nikon D3 with top-quality lenses and flashes to 10 people will result in 10 equally-good quality wedding albums. That’s sort of like saying you can hit 300 yard drives (and score beautiful women) if you buy the exact set of clubs used by Tiger Woods!
There is a huge difference between being able to buy digital printing and hiring a wedding photographer. If the digital print you buy is faulty, most halfway decent companies will give you a free remake. If the wedding photographer misses the shot, has his gear fail because he charges so little money he can’t afford backups, just fails to show at all because he’s got a better offer somewhere else, is rude and ruins the wedding mood, or a hundred other things that go wrong – then there’s no do-over. None. You can’t ask the bride’s family to fly back across the pond from London next week since Uncle Henry missed the shot.
The notion that gear improving is the reason the price gap is closing is just wrong. It’s a very small part of the equation.
There’s an old joke. The famous painter was seen on the streets of Paris one day offering $500 portraits. The business man, wanting to impress his wife signed up. He sat down his pretty wife and the famous painter commenced to doing a marvelous portrait of her in about five minutes. The business man loved the portrait but uncomfortably complained, “Wow it’s great but $500 for five minutes work?” to which the famous painter replied, “No sir – $500 to cover the 30 years of practice to know how to do it in five minutes.”
Scott – First, thank you for taking the time to add such a valuable response to my somewhat clumsy response to your post.
I think, given a forum more conducive to real conversation that we would be standing on more common ground than we both realize.
I fully support the point that hiring a fully skilled and equiped professional photographer will result in far superior results for the bride and groom. It costs to go first class and it should.
My point was simply that, thanks to new technology, Uncle Jeff isn’t as far off the mark as he once was. Does he understand composition? Lighting? How to work with people?
No.
But will more couples settle for close enough? That was the question.
Thanks again. Exchanging blog posts and comments aren’t ideal for a discussion such as this. I hope we can sit down some day over a Coke and hash this out. With utmost respect… – Mike Nally