Art is a very hard way to make a living. I’ve done a lot of things in my life, and I know that one from the inside. I spent years behind a camera, and I watched people who’d spend a fortune on a party treat the person photographing it like the kid who parks the cars. It made me angry then, and it still does, so I don’t do graphics.
Picture a wedding the morning after. The cake’s been eaten, and the flowers are wilting in a dumpster behind the hall, the rented chairs are on a truck, and the dress is going into a box nobody will open for twenty years. Of everything the couple paid for, the photographs are what anybody will look at again. Keep that morning in mind, because it explains almost everything wrong with how people pay for creative work.
Why I don’t do graphics
I’m not a graphics person, and I don’t want to learn to be one.
It could be fun to learn. It’s still not what I want to do with my time. My work is writing, and I stay there. When I took a copywriting job, I took it because copy still falls under writing, even if it veers off a bit. I’m a better writer than I am a copywriter, so the job stretched me, and I like stretching myself out of the box. Graphic design sits outside the box entirely. Any client who paid me for it would be paying for my learning curve.
When one of my own books needs art, I hire it. My belly dance coloring books started as my photographs. I did the designs as sketches from my photography, then hired an artist to turn them into pages people could color. The first few were belly dance books, all my dancer friends ended up in them, and they were thrilled. I’ll probably hire an artist again someday to do them right.
Knowing what you won’t do is a career skill. An hour spent fumbling with layers and fonts would come straight out of my writing time, and writing is what people hire me for. A mediocre designer charging writer prices helps nobody, least of all the client.
Why do couples underpay their wedding photographer?
Couples have no idea what they’re buying. I was a wedding photographer for a while, and they didn’t get it.
They’d be paying something like $60,000 for the wedding, and then they’d want to pay me a couple hundred bucks for a job that’s a $5,000 gig. It really is a $5,000 gig.
No. You’re paying $60,000 for the wedding and you can’t afford a wedding photographer? Go away.
National numbers make the same point. The Knot’s Real Weddings Study 2026 put the average American wedding at about $34,200 in 2025, with couples spending an average of about $3,000 on photography. That’s under a tenth of the budget for the purchase that outlives the morning after. The cake costs real money and it’s gone by midnight, and the bar tab is gone by 1 a.m.
Couples sign for both without blinking and then haggle over the photographer. I hate that.
Would they ask the caterer to work for tips? Would the band play for exposure? Nobody does, because everybody understands that food and music cost money. Photography gets the treatment because the buyer thinks it’s easy.
What does a wedding photographer do for the money?
Far more than one day of pushing a button. A wedding starts weeks before the date with meetings, a shot list, the family politics of who stands next to whom, and a visit to the venue to see where the light falls at four in the afternoon.
On the day, the photographer’s on their feet for eight or ten hours with two camera bodies, spare batteries and spare cards, because nothing gets a second take. The first kiss happens once. Afterward the photographer sorts thousands of frames, edits the keepers and delivers a finished set weeks later. Insurance, gear that wears out, software subscriptions and self-employment taxes all come out of that fee too.
Event photography is physical work. For five years I was one of the photographers at the Rose Parade. That meant getting there at 3 in the morning, setting up, and following the parade inches from the floats. One year a rainstorm came through and it was miserable and super cold, and it was still an adventure. Nobody looking at the pictures afterward knew any of that. They aren’t supposed to know.
Good photographs are supposed to look easy, and clients fall for it. The better the work, the less the client believes it was work.
Can a friend with a good phone camera shoot a wedding?
Your friend can take pictures at your wedding, and you’ll get pictures. Coverage is a different thing, and you’ll find out the difference too late.
Everybody carries a camera in their pocket now. Nothing has done more damage to the price of photography. Owning a phone makes you a photographer about as much as owning a pen makes you a novelist. Unfortunately, the buyer can’t see the difference until the pictures come back, and by then the day is gone.
The professional knows where to stand before the moment arrives and how to handle a dark reception hall. A professional can get forty relatives to look the same direction for one second. The friend with the phone takes nice pictures of the people they like and spends half the reception at the bar, because they’re a guest. Somebody paid to be there gets the grandmother who won’t be around for the next wedding and the uncle nobody talks to, because somebody’s going to want those pictures later.
Graphic design took the same hit. Cheap templates and free tools convinced a lot of buyers that design is clicking a button, and now designers get offered pocket change by people who couldn’t do the job themselves in a month.
That’s insulting. Anybody thinking about art as a career should go in with their eyes open.
Eight years and 300 faires behind the lens
Most of my photography wasn’t weddings. After my wife died, I picked up the camera and used it to break a lifetime of shyness. I talked to people through the lens until, after something like 1,500 photo shoots, I didn’t need the lens anymore.
Over eight years I went to about 300 Renaissance faires, and many of them hired me as the photographer. I shot belly dance shows by the hundreds, and on four belly dance cruises I was the photographer for 150 belly dancers. A masquerade ball in Hollywood hired me to shoot an event where you weren’t allowed through the door without a tux or a costume, and I was the photographer for the first, and only, world mermaid beauty pageant.
I enjoyed being the photographer.
That work left me with about 980,000 photographs and a pass to shows outsiders never saw, because the photographer gets behind the scenes. It never left me thinking photography was an easy living. One day I looked at another faire and decided I’d seen everything. I put the camera away, and writing became the work I do for a living.
Owning a phone makes you a photographer about as much as owning a pen makes you a novelist. – Richard LoweShare on X
How should freelancers price creative work?
Price the hours you work, including the ones the client never sees. A wedding is ten hours on site, and the planning and editing around it take far longer than the day itself. Cover art works the same way, with a few hours of finished drawing sitting on top of sketches, revisions and file preparation for every format. If you price the visible part and nothing else, you’re working for less than minimum wage and calling it a business.
Price the result too. A wedding album gets looked at for fifty years, and a book cover sells or sinks the book.
Set a minimum and say it early, before anybody falls in love with your portfolio. Put the work, the deliverables, the deposit and the payment schedule in writing. Take a deposit before you block a date. A wedding photographer who holds a Saturday for a couple who then vanishes has lost the one income that Saturday could have produced, and nobody’s paying it back.
And walk away from people who argue over price. If somebody’s fighting me over the price, they’re somebody I don’t want to work with anyway, because they don’t appreciate the value of what they’re getting. Unless you need the money, of course. Most freelancers have taken a job like that, and it’s the job that brings the most aggravation for the least return. The client who haggles at the start argues over every revision later.
Don’t compete with the cousin with a phone. You’ll lose that fight on price every time, and winning it would be worse. If your whole pitch is that you’re cheaper, you’ve told the buyer your work is worth less, and they’ll believe you. Compete on what the cousin can’t promise. Get the shot every time, and deliver it when you said you would.
Is a cheap book cover a false economy?
Yes, and it’s the same mistake couples make with the photographer. Authors spend months writing a book, or pay serious money to have one ghostwritten, and then try to save a few hundred dollars on the part every buyer sees first. If you’re paying tens of thousands for a book, why quibble over the artist? I don’t get it.
Readers judge books by their covers, and a cheap cover tells them to expect a cheap book.
A good cover takes two people, and they’re different jobs. The artist does the artwork, and the designer handles the fonts, the layout and the genre signals, and genres have conventions you’d never guess: a romance gets curvy fonts, a military book gets square, blocky ones. A good designer knows all that stuff.
I don’t recommend stock art, because everybody uses the same stock art, and a book designer working cheap is going to reach for clip art. If you insist on clip art, buy the high-end kind, and by then you’re paying what an artist would have cost.
Save money the smart way. When I hire a cover designer, I have them do the Kindle, paperback, hardcover and audiobook covers all at the same time, because each one is a different template, and doing them together gets a better rate. The same logic applies to an index. Hire a professional indexer after the book is finished. Compared to the price of the whole project, it’s cheap, and it makes the book look professional.
Paying the best tattoo artist I could find
When I turned 50, I went to the best tattoo artist I could find, a man with a reputation around the world. He made me wait a year. If I still wanted it after that, he said, he’d do it. A year later I came back and still wanted it, and I sat through long sessions in his chair. I wrote about the artist who taught me patience elsewhere.
I’d seen what cheap tattoos turn into. People let anybody put anything on them, and before long it looks terrible. I was going to wear that work for the rest of my life, so why the hell would I go bargain hunting?
A tattoo is the wedding photograph of the body. It outlasts every other decision made that day.
What wedding photography taught me about pricing my own work
Ghostwriting is creative work, and it gets the same treatment photography does. People see a finished book and assume somebody typed it up. They don’t see the interviews, the hours of listening for the client’s voice, the drafts nobody reads and the revisions. I wrote about why ghostwriting costs what it does for the people who ask, and the answer there matches the one I’d give a couple haggling over their photographs. Charge for the work you do, and charge for the years the result will last.
If you’re trying to build a living from creative work, my book Make a Living as a Self-Published Author covers the business side.
The rest of the leadership hub covers careers and professional development, and my ghostwriting service explains how I work on a book from first interview to finished manuscript. Buyers who lowball artists are paying for the cake and skimping on the photographs, and I’ve got no patience for it. Ten years from now the party’s a memory and the bar tab is long forgotten. The photographs and the book are still sitting on the shelf, and they’re the part of the money that was well spent.
