Pricing

Portrait collections begin at $400, all portrait bookings have a session fee of $125 (required prior to your session).

 

 

 

Wedding Collections begin at $2200.

Please contact me for full pricelists.

 

A Word On Pricing and Digital Files…

The question I am asked the most when I get enquiries is ‘Do you sell the images on a disc?’. In this day and age, that’s quite a reasonable question. Some photographers do not sell digital files, some do. I fall into the latter category. It took a fair bit of internal debate before I came to the conclusion that I would sell the digital files. But in the end, I thought ‘What would I like if roles were reversed?’. Well, I would want the files! I would want to show them off on Facebook, email them around to relatives – share my beautiful images with the world.

Traditionally, prints are how photographers have made their money – and this is still the case for many photographers. This is how they pay their bills, feed their kids and run their business. And the business is not without it’s costs – there’s insurance, camera gear, computers and editing programs, travel, the website etc. Somewhere along the line, in the change from film to digital, the negatives have lost some of their value. I would really like to give you a break down of the work that goes into your custom images:

- First, we have your session. It can run anywhere from an hour to two – this is what the session fee covers.

- After that, I get home and back up all your images straight away.

- Then, I open them up in an editing program and spend a bit of time culling and whittling anywhere from 200-300 images down to around 40-80 images.

- I do the basic corrections for all the images in one program and then open them up in a second program to do all the fine tuning. This is what takes the majority of the time – all that cropping, cloning, colour, sharpening, deciding between B&W or colour – bringing out the best in your images.

- They get uploaded to a private online gallery where you can pick and choose the images you wish to purchase.

I am often told at weddings, ‘Wow, you get the easy job – just click a button!’ Bless their little souls, they have no idea how much work we do on the day, let alone aftewards. Wedding photographers barely pee, they barely eat and their brains do not stop buzzing. At all, all day. Ever. I have heard some photographers compare shooting a wedding to running a marathon – you get home exhausted, with sore arms, sore feet and a sore brain. We often work from around midday to 10pm without stopping. Generally after a wedding, I get home, take a few Nurofen and sit in front of the tv like an imbecile for an hour before my brain function begins to return. Then I eat, have a cup of tea and sleep like the dead. At a wedding, I will take upwards of 1000 images, so the whole culling and editing process is obviously much more intense. Most professionals shoot in RAW format, which means (just like the film days!) the images need to be processed to look their best.

Anyway, you get the idea. Photographers work just like any other person, in any other job. Most of our work is done away from the client, after a session. Our digital files are valuable – so the good ones price them that way. I recently heard an excellent analogy from another photographer – she said that prints are like milk, which makes the digital files the cow (I know, but bear with me). I could sell you the milk at a few dollars per litre each time you wanted it, or I could sell you the cow and you could get your milk for free whenever you felt like it. So what price do I put on the cow? She is certainly valuable. These images on disc are valuable things – we pour our heart and souls into them and therefore, we charge appropriately. We agonise over every colour, every crop, we search for colour casts, we spend so much time searching for the perfect professional printer. Really, we do.

And on the subject of printing – please, please print your images. Do not admire your lovely disc of images and stick it in a drawer. Print your photos! Display them on your walls! Get them printed into a lovely book or on a canvas. I really can’t emphasise that point enough. Professionally printed images last – most DVD/CDs have a lifespan of 10 years or so, did you know that? So please make back up copies of your disc and please print your images. But don’t print them at a kiosk type place that charges 20c per print. Why? (warning: this is going to get a bit science-y) Because photographers worth their salt have their monitors calibrated to the specification of their professional printing labs. That means that our images print just how we see on our screens. Cheapy kiosk printers don’t have calibrated printers. Your painstakingly processed images, will probably end up printing out too dark/too orange/purple/green etc. And people will come into your home, see your prints on the wall and secretly think ‘Ugh, what horrid amateur photographer took this beautiful family and made them Oompa Loompa orange?’. For that reason, I provide a print of each image you order – whether it’s five or the entire gallery. As individual prints or as a book. I provide you with a professional print so you know what they should look like. I will also provide a list of professional labs, so you know where to get your images printed.

If you’ve made it this far – thank you for taking the time. I hope I’ve been able to shed some light on the value of digital files and also the work that goes into that seemingly simple disc of images.