I have heard this question and it is a fair one. I even asked it myself when looking at my own race pictures. You may also wonder why a 4x6 picture is being sold for upwards of $10 when you can take your own pictures into many retailers or upload them on your own and get the same size picture for way under a dollar.
There are many factors that impact the prices race photgraphers set an I thought I would share some of them here to help people understand the prices on race pictures.
One area that greatly impacts prices are the costs involved:
- photographers time. Typically 10 photographer hours shooting for even a short race with only a few hundred
- photographers equipment. High-end cameras and their lenses can run upwords of several thousand dollars
- indexing needs to be done so you can find your pictures. One recent race involved reviewing almost 3000 pictures to identify race numbers and select the best pictures for each competitor. Typically around 10 hours of work or more.
- other expenses like internet hosting company, business insurance, transportation, advertising and more
These costs mean that the last couple races we have shot has brought in an average hourly rate of under $10/hr. Remember, you get what you pay for.
If you compare race pictures taken by friends to ones taken by some professionals, you will often see a difference beyond the improvement in quality that comes with a more advanced camera. You will see that the professional shots will often have a background that highlights the best features of the race area (nice tree lined streets) where the friend snapshots are likely to have cars or crowds in the background. A professional photographer understands how to use the available lighting to maximize the quality of the photograph. Faces in dark shadows or washed out from over done flashes make a less memorable race picture. Furthermore, a professional can edit the final image and bring out the best possible image.
While many times a friends picture of a race will be a nice souvenir, a professional race photograph can be framed and displayed proudly for years to come to celebrate your achievement.
Flowing Desert Photography is proud to try and keep the prices as low as possible, while still being able to be profitable enough to keep professional photographers on the team.
While it was nice having an almost private beach, it was sad to see the local economy hurting this much. This guy didn't seem to mind having the place to himself.
He wasn't alone and I got a fair number of bird pictures over the weekend. I played around with some settings on my camera and ended up shooting most of the weekend at ISO 400 which gives a bit grainier pictures than I usually like. I do like the grainy look for some shots, like this little worm creature we saw swimming around in the shallows. We were not sure what they were, but they looked bigger than the swine flu virus and smaller than a snake, so we didn't worry too much about them.
I will be reviewing the rest of my bird pictures soon and will have a South of the Border - Bird Edition out soon. Stay tuned.
