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Comment by ghaff | Hacker News Reader

See also photography, writing, art, etc. Some professionals are in fact resentful to greater or lesser degrees of amateurs willing to work for free (either just for fun or because it's useful to them professionally for reputational or other reasons).

I asked a journalist I knew whether he minded the fact that people like myself publish articles/blogs for free in publications that also have paid staff/freelancers. His response was basically "That ship sailed long ago." But there are definitely people who feel more strongly that people having "fun" are taking food off their family's plate.

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Photography has been hit hard this last decade, with IG blowing up and everybody having a half decent camera in their pockets all the time, AND knowing exactly where to go to get high quality shots. For most people it's about replicating the exact formula, vs doing something original, but that's actually pretty common for every art form. It's simply more visible in photo than in other creative endeavors: https://www.instagram.com/insta_repeat/

Seems to me that if you want to "be special/be paid/be known" in your art form, you need to pick the ones that are enjoyable to you AND have a significant moat, or barrier to entry. e.g. making complex pieces of music, assuming you're not stitching together prefabs from Splice, is actually much harder than pulling your phone out. Same thing with shooting, color grading, and cutting a great video, that's MUCH harder than shooting a frame and applying a filter. Same with doing a beautiful sketch or painting, that takes years of practice.

Photo cameras used to be moats a long time ago, when they were bulky, expensive, a novelty, and the development of film was not as straightforward. But now, it's gotten 100% democratized.

I fully agree with all that. I was photo editor of my undergrad paper back in the day and just the mechanics of shooting film, developing it, printing it required quite a bit of knowledge just to get to output that was reasonably competent technically.

Of course, go back pre-35mm and that was even more the case but--as you say--even just a phone takes precent decent pictures for at least certain types of shots if you even halfway know what you're doing. I have tons of equipment and even I just default to my iPhone a lot of the time for casual "memory" type shots.

The sheer quantity of shots changes everything. Back in the day of film, a pro could burn a roll of film for a single usable shot (maybe). An amateur had development and printing combined (expensive) and had to make every shot count, leading to most shots being of a staged and unnatural variety.

For B&W, it actually wasn't quite that bad with 35mm relative to today. For something like a football game, I might have shot 5 rolls (so 200 frames or so). Random assignments for a given day a roll or two. You made contact prints and printed up what was needed.

Definitely a bigger consideration than today but it's not all about quantity.

I’m a photographer by hobby and you very often see people wanting to hire someone good but who isn’t expecting to make a living at it with offers like “I’ll let you shoot my event to help build your portfolio, and all you have to do is give me a copy of all the photos.” Or alternatively offering something like $100 for four hours to do lifestyle street shoots.

I don’t know how often they are successful at getting photographers for these types of things but I know that if I were going to shoot for those kinds of wages I would rather donate my time to a charity that I support.

"For the exposure/to build your portfolio." Uggh.

To be clear, I sometimes shoot events for free as a favor. And I sometimes shoot concerts or sporting events just because I feel like it. And if you find my photos on Flickr I'll probably give you permission to use them for free. (Though if you want to pay me, that's fine too and I do sometimes get annoyed with the presumption that I'm not going to ask for a fee.) But I'm probably not going to take you up on a minimum wage offer unless it were something I was going to do anyway.

Do you _really_ think your photography job deserves the same hourly wage as an engineer or manager?

What quality freelance developer or manager in the US takes 4 hour jobs for even close to $25 per hour, in a customer choosen location?

I think his gist is that, of course a developer should expect to be paid more than that because they're special. But photographers just click pictures so they should be grateful to make anything at all.

There's a little more to being a photographer than clicking a button, but it might not look like that from the outside. It's like calling basketball "just tossing a ball around".

Programming is just glorified copy and paste, so it has more in common with photography than you think.

The general sentiment here seems (to me, anyway) to be that photography is one of those things that many people _are_ going to do anyway, which is why it's very difficult to be highly paid for it.

If so many people are willing to do something for free, is it really fair to vilify someone for inquiring as to whether you are one of those people?

For the most part, yes.

In general, my doing something that I want to do for free is different (usually) from you asking me to do a job that you want done for free.

Now, of course, there can be exchanges that don't involve money changing hands. Perhaps part of the deal is that I get into a concert (or whatever) for free and that may be perfectly reasonable. I do attend events on media passes on the (implicit) condition I'll publish a story about some aspect of the event.

"You can die from exposure, you know."

> Or alternatively offering something like $100 for four hours to do lifestyle street shoots.

I personally think that's not a terrible offer. $25/hour to stand around clicking pictures? It's a lot easier than most work people do for minimum wage, first, and secondly it's not like you have massive film costs or need a ton of technical knowledge anymore. 99% of the shots people want can be accomplished with stock or relatively cheap lenses, too; you don't have to be a gear-head who spends all their profits on their kit for no appreciable difference in how much people are willing to pay.

Most of us don't have $500-1000 to pay a photographer so we simply don't bother and rely on friends and family for it. I might consider getting professional pictures of my family if it didn't cost the obscene amount that it does. There's probably a market on the volume, low-cost side that simply isn't being tapped because photographers are often such dilettantes.

For someone who wants to break into photography, finding a steady supply of low-paid jobs to build up the portfolio and their name recognition for word-of-mouth marketing is probably the best way to go. You wouldn't want to be running at these wage levels for more than a year, but to start, well, there's certainly worse paths.

>$25/hour to stand around clicking pictures?

I'm going to assume good intent but that's an incredibly condescending remark. Just so you know.

How about if I offer a trained developer $25/hour to write me some software? It's just sitting and typing.

Why do you assume that the parent was talking about your photography ability, and not their own?

They were talking about the act in general.

Depends where you are. Pretty sure I've made under $25/hr most of my development career. And that was just fine, in the Atlantic City, NJ area, because the cost of living was pretty low and I had no interest in moving or commuting to a big city.

EDIT: Although I guess it might've been a bit more if you include the value of health insurance and such.

It's almost never a good idea to start by charging less. The people who don't want to pay your rates are just looking for the easiest excuse and weren't going to become customers anyway.

The bulk of commercial photographers' work are weddings. A run-of-the-mill wedding probably costs about 50k, so to have nice pictures from it you'll spend maybe 10% (?) on a photographer. So 5k for a day and a half of work? This puts a lower bound on other photo shoots as well, since there is never going to be a shortage of weddings.

I'm not sure exactly how to interpret "the bulk of commercial photographers' work are weddings".

Do you mean by total revenue, or for a given photographer?

I ask because in general people who do weddings tend to focus on those almost exclusively for their income (the same is true for some of the other categories I mention below).

The way I think of it is that there are perhaps only a few sources of steady income that pays a livable salary with photography:

- weddings

- headshots

- real-estate

- advertising / marketing

In many cases either photographers are being asked to do more these days (e.g. write the editorial that the photographs go with) or people who wouldn't traditionally have photography as part of their job are being asked to do the photographic work on top of their existing responsibilities (e.g. journalists who are asked to bring a camera along and snap some shots for a story).

[EDIT: I am not sure where the day and a half of work figure comes from, either. It is typical for something like an edited/touched-up photo album to be delivered a few weeks after a wedding shoot, with the photographer doing a few shoots in between and then sitting down and editing several in a batch over the course of a week or two until they are happy with the results.]

25 an hour might be a good rate for someone starting out. I do programming work that takes that long and charge less than that amount.

In all fairness, when I was an undergrad long ago I earned beer money doing various photography-related jobs for the alumni association and other such groups for not a lot of money. But, today, $100 to go somewhere, spend 4 hours doing something you otherwise probably aren't interested in doing, and probably spend the rest of the day editing? $100 for basically a day really isn't great money unless there were some reason you wanted to do the job and the money was just a little something extra.

Do yourself a favor and spend a few of those hours researching how much you can reasonably charge for programming work.

I'm not keen on how most professional photographers for these events don't point out they'll retain copyright on all shots. I know what that means, but they let their customers find out when they aren't allowed to get raw/negatives or prints from anyone else.

I'll take a work for hire option, thanks, without the attitude that it's an art and they're above that.

Exploitation, then.

You mean a straightforward negotiation.

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