Is a portrait expensive?

Cameras and equipment. What can I say? I always need something else.....always. Some days I wonder if any one person has enough money to have a photography business. When I first started shopping around for photography equipment I realized that everything is expensive. Once I educated myself about quality camera gear and looked at the prices, I couldn't help but feel extorted.

If only that was where it stopped... That is just the camera and lenses and all "fun stuff". When I started being educated about the business of photography, it became so much easier to understand why photographer charge so much! Lets not forget that we aren't even talking about the education or time that we had to put in to get to that point or even the hours that we put in doing our job in the first place.

People always ask us photographers how much that camera that we are carrying around cost us. There are two problems with this question. 1.)Why do I want to tell the random stranger that I have never met before that they could buy a car with what we have in my camera bag??? I mean really, that just doesn't sound intelligent. 2.) I don't want to admit it to myself!

The camera is one of the cheapest investments that we make. It's sad, but true. There is so many little things that are essential to digital photography and none of them are cheap! At the school that I am attending, we have this saying that will make that average person question our sanity. "200 dollars, that's cheap" I even cringe when I say that!

Just to finish off this thought process, let me actually tell you why I started writing this blog. All this talk about how expensive this business is. All this talk about how the camera body is one of the cheapest investments in photography. When my camera body breaks, I am out of business. Get a second one! Today, was the third time my camera body has broken. (I really don't understand why my professional "I can pound in nails with it" camera body broke for the third time in under a year, but it did) Just some food for thought for all those people who wonder about why their portraits cost so much.