Reply To: No sugar coating needed.. I am a big boy

[Peterography]

While I understand that it is easy to assume that I don’t use contracts, have insurance, or pay taxes because I am new to the wedding photography world, that isn’t the case.  I will admit initially I didn’t have insurance, but I’ve always used contracts. As for taxes, I pay both federal and state. I do avoid paying sales tax by not selling tangible/physical items.

I guess the reason for my critique is to get some feedback. Although wedding photography isn’t meant to be my future source of income, we can’t always predict what will happen. I will be doing wedding photography for the next couple of years and I would like to improve in the years to come, and hopefully charge more for my services.

Let see, if I work at McDonalds I’ll make $8.50/hr at 24hrs a week.. equalling about $650-$700 after taxes. Now if I do one wedding month at $800, given that I would shoot for 6hrs and edit 16 hrs I’ll make the same amount but with less time actually working. McDonalds I would be investing 96 hrs a month, whereas photography I would be investing maybe 40-50 hrs. Before I made the switch to wedding photography I was working retail to pay through school, but when I realized I could make the same amount in less time so I made the switch and used all this ample time to take classes during the day and not at night. It also gave me a significantly more time to study. As for the coffee table book, it is only $50 and makes for a nice gift, sure I could save that $50 which adds up to to like $600 for the year but hey I’m not that great of a business person lol