Repost from April 1, 2001. Perhaps it bears repeating.
Don't be a cheap whore, you won't get respected for it, and when you want to graduate to being a high class whore, no one will be willing to pay you for it. I have seen it happen before in my under populated part of the world. People will only value your work as much as you do. The guy I mentored with had a thriving weekend wedding business going. In 1972, I started going out on paying jobs with him, learning how to photograph weddings. By 1975, he had over a dozen photographers working for him, shooting weddings. Over time, these people started going out on their own, becoming competition for the trade. Eventually, the market for wedding photographers saturated to the point where my mentor decided to become more competitive. He started dropping his prices. He is now on welfare, and pretty god damned bitter about it. Being a cheap whore is always a mistake. People will pay quality money for what they percieve as a quality job. By charging cheap, you are sending a message that you don't think your work is worth their money. This is not a strategy for long term business success. You want to know what happens in markets where someone comes in and low balls the available work? Everyone suffers for it. The photographers suffer because some idiot is saying that photo portraiture isn't worth paying for, and everyone has to drop their prices to compete. The clients suffer because with the new, lower pricing, quality suffers, because it isn't worthwhile to do a good job anymore. -- PDML Pentax-Discuss Mail List [email protected] http://pdml.net/mailman/listinfo/pdml_pdml.net to UNSUBSCRIBE from the PDML, please visit the link directly above and follow the directions.
