Why do race pictures cost so much?

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.

Growth

Well, today is a momentous day indeed. My personal blog has been up since May where this photo blog has been up for just over 1 month. In the blogging world, there seems to be some degree of growth over time so it was a surprise when I saw that my photo blog has just past my personal blog in number of visits in the past 30 days.

As a businessman, I have to ask "Why?" so that I can continue to grow my business and brand. One reason is that there is a limited degree of interest in my personal blog. I talk about my running and triathlon adventures and ongoing things in my life, family, technology, work and the like. My typical readers there are runners, triathletes and personal friends and family.

I also talked about photography and posted some pictures there as well. Those were some of the most commented on and viewed pages, so it would account for some dropoff of my viewers on my personal blog, but there has not been much of a dropoff. Even though the photo entries on my blog were popular, that would not account for all of the quick growth of my photo blog and site, so what explains the growth?

Since starting my photo site, I have started trying to photo blog ever 2-3 days which helps create a dynamic page and attracts visitors. I have also started to Twitter and have seen some traffic from that as well. Finally, I have devoted some time to reading other blogs and commenting on them. I have tried to diversify my readership by going to a variety of blogs, including fitness, religion, political as well as other photo blogs. The photo blogs have the added benefit of getting some additional inspiration.

Well, that is it for this little detour into the twilight zone of statistical analysis. Stay tuned for more photo posts in the future. Several neat ones already lined up for next week.