How much does it cost to hire a professional photographer?

Or why are photographers so expensive?

I’m glad you asked, let me explain…

Most photographers operate as their own businesses whether freelance sole traders or incorporated as a company.

This means all the running costs such vehicles, tolls, travel, updating and maintaining equipment, insurances such as equipment, vehicle and home contents, studio costs, retouching, photoshop software costs, cloud storage, website….the list goes on and on, all these costs of doing business are born by the photographer so when they are commissioned to shoot a job most will have worked out a cost of doing business which takes all of these ongoing business operational costs and combining them all you can come out with a number that the photographer will charge that takes all of the related costs involved in running their business from day to day into account, as well as charging for their skill, experience and know how and including some profit ( we are all in business to make a profit I am assuming )

This may also answer why some photographers seem to be charging more perhaps double or triple what others are charging.

In most cases the most experienced photographers are the one’s charging more, it may be they are more confident charging larger rates due to the decades of experience they have working as a professional where as in general new photographers that are less experienced and less confident tend to charge less.

So in general you are paying for experience,

Different kinds of jobs may mean that photographers charge in different ways, as an example I charge a flat fee per person for staff head shot photography that rolls all the costs including travel, set up time, shoot fee, post processing, professional retouching, all into one fee that makes it easy to scale the costs up and down depending on the number of staff to be photographed, there are different fees for one staff head shot compared to 25, 50, or 100

If you’d like to talk about a commercial project, staff head shots or something else, please get in contact