I made less than minimum wage in photography

Yeah you read that correctly. I made less than minimum wage for my photo shoots for a long time and didn’t even know it.

How is this possible you may ask? Well its just business. If you don’t pay attention to the numbers you tend to think your making money but in fact you may actually be loosing money.

When I took into account all the extras I was doing to produce a final product I realized how little I was actually left with for me. The hidden cost in a photography business are only hidden when you technically don’t pay attention like I was with my business and just enjoying the ride.

When I factored in the actual time spent on a session, the money spent each month for website, utilities, transportation, maintenance and other expenses I was left with $19.00 and that’s on a good day.

I made far less than minimum wage

How can this be possible? I’m sure many persons believe that photographers make a lot of money. After all many charge a good amount for a photos shoot.

Well that’s the problem, if you don’t break down your cost of doing business then you may believe you are making some good money when in fact you are not. So lets break this down if you don’t mind.

$150 per hour, this is what I charged for a while when I switched to digital sessions. This was back in 2016 when I wanted to make a bit of money from my skills.

A digital photo session is on where the person would get all digital files instead of actual photo prints. I made this choice because at the time more persons were simply posting on social media than hanging photos on their walls or placing them on tables.

Besides, prints, matting and framing can be costly and many people just don’t appreciate them any more.

Actual Time involved in a basic photo session

Process	Time
Initial call, consultation and booking	Average 90 min total (1hr 30min) This entails the initial call from the client, discussion on what they want and where they want to shoot along with the pricing and payment schedule, often anywhere from 25% to 50% down and balance due upon completion.
Location scouting	1-2 hours Drive to multiple locations ensuring that the area is kept clean, it is safe for you and the client. Typically depends on what the client wants. Sunset sessions take more time as you can only visit the location during sunset to know if its a good spot or not.
Actual photo session	2 Hours for a 1 hour shoot Day of the session, prep all equipment pack car drive to location at least half an hour before the session to ensure all is still good and if not advise client to utilize second location. Carry out photo session as planned hopefully without any delays and a bit of chit chat at the end.
Culling of images	2 hours (if your are good) Download images to computer, sort them in appropriate file folder with name of client and date. Open computer software and review all images selecting the best images from the photo session reducing the amount of images to more than the expected amount agreed upon for the session. Separate the selected images into a folder to be edited.
Basic image edit	1 -1.5 hours Run a basic edit on the RAW images (digital negative) to approximate the final image. Reduce the size of the images for web viewing. This is to make the images available for the client to review and select their images.
Upload for client review	1 – 3 days (if they efficient 30min) If the session called for 10 images typically the client has about 15-20 images to choose from. This time often can take up to 3 days for clients to finalize their selection.
Final editing	1hour 40min After client selection, the actual edits begin of the 10 selected images. Image edits are tricky as depending on the session it can vary from 20min per image to over an hour per image. For basics we will estimate 10 min per image for a total of 100 minutes
Image storage	1hour Upon completion of image edits. The images must now be renamed as they are completed images and stored in a separate folder within the client folder. If photographer offers digital images as well as prints there is more work to be done such as uploading to a website for delivery or having images printed.
Printing	2hours This requires photographer to drive to print shop if he/she does not have a printer. Drop off the digital files for printing and either wait or come back for the prints. This comes at a cost that should be covered from the initial down payment
Delivery to client	1hour Once images are collected. A good photographer would have his/her own way of delivering the products. This entails a bag or folder with photographer logo or something with branding on it which of course has a cost to it.
Collect final payment	As a part of delivery to client upon the completion of the job.
TOTAL TIME (minimum value)	13 hours 40 min

The time of 13 hours and 40 minutes is based on a basic photo session and everything going smoothly including having prints.

Unfortunately this type of smooth sailing rarely happens. So looking at the time spent on a basic photo shoot and what I was charging, even Stevie Wonder could see it wasn’t sustainable.

Okay I get it that’s just time but there was no real overhead expenses right… WRONG!

When I looked at all I did on a daily, weekly or monthly basis to offer this service. Things took a turn for the worse.

Actual business expenses to consider in your photography business

The business expenses paid on a daily, weekly, monthly and even yearly basis made matters even worse. I was not earning enough to sustain my newly formed photography business.

Here are just a few of the expenses I was not considering

• Business license
• Bank expenses for a business account
• Web page design
• Web domain name
• Web hosting
• Business email
• Secure web (https)
• Automotive fuel to photo shoot, home, to print company to client
• Automotive maintenance (wear and tear on vehicle)
• Gear maintenance and insurance (lens and camera body repairs)
• Electricity (during editing time)
• Mobile phone data and calls (Phone minutes spend with clients)
• Internet usage
• Software subscriptions to edit (Adobe suite for photography among other software)
• Business advertisements – social, web pages, promos, shirt, business cards etc

The list isn’t even a full list as I didn’t want to bore you to death but lets take a look at the numbers.

If I were to group a few things but start at the cost of a photo session, lets see what I would truly end up with.

Breaking down my photography business expenses

Business Expenses taking hourly cost of consistent items including yearly payments broken down to an hourly rate. Then considering the amount of session I can actually do in a good year, which is based on the weekends mainly but during Daylight Savings time when when there is more sunlight in the evening I can squeeze in a few sessions.

• Utilities – $7.50
• Business Expenses – $32.00
• Mechanical Expenses – $18.00
• Photography Expenses – $55.00

To break this down, Utilities includes, internet, mobile phone, electricity, and water.

Business Expenses include Business license, web address, hosting, security, insurance, web storage and others paid monthly or yearly but calculated hourly.

Mechanical Expenses include equipment maintenance such as computer, camera gear, transportation and others.

Photography Expenses include in my case outsourced work, marketing and advertising.

These things are all needed. I have to take an account for these things because I do have to use them to contact the client, upload and download images and actually complete a photo session. Without any of them, then there is no session.

If we take the cost of a digital photo session at the time of $150.00 and subtract all the expenses to complete just one photo session that’s 7.50+32+18+55= $112.50. This is the cost to complete a one hour photo session $112.50.

Now lets consider the balance of $37.50. This is where the time factor actually comes into play. The perceived time is 1 hours session but when you factor in the actual time listed above I will be working for a client for an average estimate of 13 hours.

Perceived time 1 hour Actual time 13 hours

This was the eye opener for me. Once you take that $37.50 and divide that by the average time of 13 hours, this left me with and hourly rate of $2.88.

Bahamian minimum wage at the time was $5.25 per hour .

What it boiled down to was $115.20 per week or $460.80 per month.

I get it, some may say well that is not bad because you can do multiple shoots per week and make more money.

Again this is not a typical photo session. Ronnie Butler said it best. “I know dem long time, them people is mine” In other words it never works out to be this easy.

To make matters worse this was only part time and on the weekend. It would have been easier for me to get a second job and work less with more pay than to do this continually.

Well what if I went full time into my photography business?

The barrier to entry into photography is so low that there is major competition in this space no matter how good you are or think you are. Getting consistent clients in a country of over 350,000 known population but estimated 500,000 in total. Then with such a small amount of roughly 2% interested in photography and then even less interested in portraits that cuts the market down to under 2000 people interested in photography at any given time

Next you have to cut that amount down further as it represents the entire Bahamas. I am on New Providence so on the regular I was looking at a market of about 800 people to share among an average of 200 photographers, beginners and pro alike.

Not very good numbers at all. I could expect perhaps 2 sessions per month as a beginner unless i squeeze sessions in during prom time. Either way the amount of work was not worth it.

I needed to make drastic changes if i was considering to continue this photography journey.

Changes I did… by investing in myself, understanding the business of photography and learned how to grow an actual photography business.

This article will be interesting for me to read in a few years to see if and how I have grown. if you are a new photographer there are some lessons here to be learned