Bart Reardon - Photographer

An important message via Bianca Dopson about being careful who you get to do photos of your bub.

Newborn Safety Warning {PLEASE TAKE THE TIME TO READ THIS}

As an experiment and for something different to do I'm going to limit how I can take personal photographs for the next week. The simple rules I have set myself are:
1 - photos must be in monochrome.
2 - the lens used must be a prime lens

This does a couple of things intend to force a different way of thinking when taking images. Firstly, with monochrome you have to consider what colours are going to look like when converted to greyscale. This can change with the addition of filters so that, for example, a blue sky can be rendered black with the use of a red filter. Shooting on a digital camera has the advantage of inbuilt red, green and blue filters that exist as part of the bayer array on the cameras sensor. The camera can be told to ignore one or more colour channels and the result is the same as using a filter on the lens. In order to force this rule I am also shooting JPEG instead of raw. The reason is that when shooting in raw you are keeping all the information about the image, including colour information. The purpose of this exercise is to not be tempted to go back to the colour image. The camera will bake the image into a black and white JPEG and that's all I'll have. The added advantage is that a 4gb card now holds a gazillion photos.

Secondly, by using a prime lens (one that doesn't zoom) I have to think more about positioning myself in relation to the subject. I can't just zoom out to fit more in or zoom in to see detail. I need to "zoom with my feet" so to speak. Fortunately this rule is easy as I only have one prime lens and that is my trusty 50mm.

I haven't set any rules oth than this so I can still control iso, aperture, shutter speed as well as adjust the settings the camera will use to create the black and white image. There are all pre-shutter adjustments though so I still have to think about what I'm doing before I do it.

The aim of all this is to keep active those parts of my brain that influence how I take images. The end result is to better myself, become a better photographer and not be reliant on camera defaults or image editing software for great images.

I really like going back on my older images. Re-processing after a couple of years or more of experience can give an alternate, sometimes better, view on what might or might not work.

This image is one of a series of 5 or so that I took of the same view while visiting Cape Conran in Victoria (on my way through to Melbourne and ultimately Tasmania). The original image I uploaded to flickr was in colour and when I look at it now it seems very contrasty. This time round I wanted to emphasise the softness created by the subtle movement in the water and thus went with a black and white treatment. Whether it's better or just different than the original is in the mind of the viewer.

I've added 4 more images to my Redbubble profile.

The problem with Norfolk Island is it's a damn beautiful place to take photos....even when the place is in drought.

These two will be the last Norfolk Is shots for a while as I concentrate on offering other images for sale.

Here's another image from my Norfolk Island trip from earlier in the year. I'm picking out some of the better ones (in my opinion), re-processing them and uploading to RedBubble.

The cost of Photography

If you ever wondered why photographers cost as much as they do and why beginner photographers that charge $50 per session will never make it then read on.

There are some assumptions that one must make when determining what to charge a client. These act as guidelines for the photographer and are designed to present a baseline. A minimum of income and what needs to be done to achieve that. Things to take into consideration are:

 - how much you want to earn
 - how much it costs to run a business
 - how busy you want to be

How much you want to earn is easy. Pick a figure you are happy with and start with that. Look at the average income for your area or look at what you are currently earning (if you have a full time job). In Canberra, the average income is $75,000 but for this example I'll aim a bit above that as I want to be comfortable but not struggling. I'll aim to earn $85,000.00 but then I have two kids and a mortgage to take care of as well.

How much is costs can vary. You need to take into consideration the cost of running a website, ordering process, computers and software, internet, advertising etc. Most of these should be tax deductable but they are real costs nonetheless. This doesn't include the cost of the shoot (that comes under client fees).

How busy you want to be is a personal preference. You might be able to handle 2 wedding per weekend for 8 months or you might want to do less than that but this number and the amount you want to earn per year determine (roughly speaking) how much you need to charge the client. In simplistic terms you could charge one client $85,000 or 85,000 clients $1 and you get the same amount.

So here's some very conservative assumptions we are going to make:
 - I want to gross $85,000 per year
 - I want to charge around $2000 per wedding
 - I want to charge around $500 per portrait session
 - Each wedding costs $500 to produce (transport, prints, other package items  etc)
 - Each portrait session costs $200 to produce
 - I want to split those workloads 60:40 (weddings are more profitable but portraits are less stress)
 - I have very lean ongoing costs of around $3000 per year (averaged over 3 years), half of which is for some minimal advertising
 - I want to spend just a day editing each portrait session (typically delivering 10-15 photos)
 - I want to spend a week editing wedding photos (typically delivering 10-15 special shots and up to 100 additional images)
 - I want to assume I can make all my income from shooting. Selling prints and products after the fact aren't included in the cost estimate

Here's how some basic figures run, taking into consideration the ongoing costs, tax that needs to be paid to yourself and the running cost of each event:
To pull in my $85,000 I will need to produce 34 weddings and nearly 114 portrait sessions

That's a lot of shooting! 34 weddings per year might be doable but 114 portrait sessions might be out of my reach, so either the wedding price, or the portrait price will need to increase. A quick calculation shows that by increasing the wedding photos price to $2500 and adjusting the ratios to 80% weddings, 20% portraits I can still shoot 34 weddings but the number of portraits I need to do drops to a bit over 55. If I decide I need to advertise more to bring the numbers up then that extra cost is passed on to the client and so on and so forth.

There are a few ways in which these numbers can be adjusted, including re-thinking how much I want to earn and having greater separation between business costs and income, but whichever way you look at it, charging $100 or even $200 to clients for a simple portrait package is unsustainable if the photographer want's to make a living. A hobby done on the side for the love of it can easily turn into a career you resent. To make the same $85000 your $50 a pop photographer needs to get 1700 clients, or nearly 5 clients per day for 365 days straight.

Food for thought.

I had the privilege of being the wedding photographer of fellow photographer Andrew and his bride Yulan on the weekend.


The location was Kangaroo Valley Bush Retreat which I can highly recommend. Wonderful vistas and plenty of opportunity for taking some great images.

Had a great shoot this afternoon. The clouds were out for a little which made for some nice light in the yard. Got some rather nice natural light shots as well as some indoor ones with flash. 

I'll be filling up a new gallery in the coming weeks. This one showcases family/child photography with examples from the past 3-4 years.

Sometimes toy take a photo at a location and you want to return one day to see what else you could do.

There will already be lots of discussion about this out there on the big bad internet...but for my 2c...

Every photographer worth their salt will have a screen calibrator of some sort. Even the cheapest type is better than none at all because our eyes and brains are designed to deceive us, something that can be easily demonstrated. So we need to get our screens representing colour as accurately as possible if w are to have any hope of having the image not only look good but look the same as it did on the screen when it's printed.

A recent post on Photo Business News & Forum (blog by John Harrington) on the costs of photography explained with one helpful commenter following the breadcrumbs back to the original article, linked here http://www.caughtonfilmphoto.com/costofphotography.html

Specifically, photos.

A while ago I had a message on my site that there would be some disruption while I moved galleries to another host. That particular host wasn't ideal but it had a really nice user interface for displaying galleries to clients. Two things have meant I will have to move the galleries again :(

As promised, an image from Norfolk Island