Photographers are like sailors or pirates, cowboys or cheetahs – we are best left to run all our affairs alone.

We are a team of professional real estate photographers who all are experts in their own right, and operate individually. What makes someone a ‘Professional Real Estate Photographer’? If the answer is yes, then it is worthwhile paying for it. And that is where the main thing comes in:Īre the photos you want taken going to add more value than they cost? We want to strike a healthy balance by having time to improve our editing skills, do workshops, take creative trips, take holidays(!), and generally make sure our creative juices are still flowing but… still do enough hours and work that we are value for money. A concert pianist or creative specialist can earn R30,000 a day (or much more depending) but they take years to hone their craft, and don’t get paid to practice.Ī photographer is somewhere in the middle – not many of them are totally creative types who make a fortune on fancy advertising shoots a lot of them work day in and day out to earn enough to get by. A few things I choose to remember that help me are: On one end of the spectrum, a bricklayer or street sweeper often earns R150-R250 a day, if that. We are not Norway, nor China – we are South Africa and somewhere in the middle – and thankfully, I think the industry is quite healthy in terms of price. Enough for a photographer to live, work well, feed his family, have a pension, but not so much that it is over the top and prices their business out the market.

In a perfect world we would have a nice market economy with a mix of skills, and perfect competition would bring prices down to a reasonable amount for all involved. There is no real way of saying that “this service” is worth “that”.

Business central price list