I found a guy willing to chuck me RAWs for a lower price, still felt a bit ripped off. He shot 90% of the day on a walkabout zoom and the photos were nothing special.

For the price of one shoot, you can buy someone's lightly used $5,000 kit on ebay. I've had a Canon I bought a decade ago that's still works great. Maybe got it for $250 or so IIRC.

shes probably rich or well off, of course she afford to this.

Ah, so that's why you're known as the cum farter, you were the sloppy seconds.

A man after my own heart. Plus, dinner and a show.

Partially, but it's the £5000 camera in combination with the additional kit a £5000 camera owner carries around with them, like putting a tripod bag and a spare lenses bag on the same shoulder.

Wedding photographer is an interesting job. With a lot of jobs, people buy the minimum viable equipment they need to get the job done.

But, people who get into wedding photography seem to generally be people who are really into photography. Rather than a $5000 camera being the requirement for the job. The $5000 camera is a present you can justify getting yourself if the wedding photography game is going well.

It's not a tool that goes into the case and stays there until the next wedding. It's something to be used for the kinds of pictures that don't pay the bills but that you love taking: nature shots, architecture, abstract art, gritty realism, etc.

Exactly.

There is real skill involved in photography, and it takes real time even after being skilled. A 1-hour shoot in a new location still requires probably an hour of planning, maybe an hour or two of logistics, and maybe 2-3 hours of work after the fact to get the photos processed and distributed. And it's basically the opportunity cost that will eat up the entire day, because you can't double book the same sunset or other lighting conditions or whatever. There's seasonality, too, if you want specific seasonal conditions in the shot, if you want to book the Saturday that other clients want, etc.

That's before expenses like insurance, the amortized cost of the software and hardware (including the cameras and lenses and computer), web services for distribution of the files, etc.

It's fair to charge a full day's fair pay for a job like that, and that might mean wanting to charge something like $1000 for an experienced photographer, maybe $500 of which actually represents "profit" for the sole proprietor. But that only happens at that price if there are clients willing to pay that price.

For bigger jobs like parties or weddings, it gets a bit more involved, which is why a 2- or 3-shooter wedding job can cost several thousand, or even above $10k.

But for easy jobs like anything in a high volume studio where the lighting is already known, and there aren't any logistics involved, it should be much cheaper. It just all depends.

… is a bold marketing strategy during an economic depression

Never undersell the possibility that this person is lying.

Or that this is a stock photo and the text is clickbait.

Taxes, assistant fee, mileage, you own more than one lens and one cam body…no lol not even close. We haven’t even talked about post processing, delivery, rights, etc.

Good photographers are actually pretty rare and - in my experience - treat the field of capturing visual information as a science, but since the advent of consumer DSLR and mirrorless systems, modern-day digital cameras with nearly instant automatically-focusing lenses that utilize a grid array and intelligence models to smartly maintain clarity on what is most likely a subject as it moves in 3D space, have made it so much harder to fuck things up that it essentially has opened the floodgates of photography so that there's an endless sea of morons thinking that buying a $5000 Canon with a full-frame sensor and a lens the size of a Stanley thermos makes them Ansel Adams.

It's the same with any field where the bar to entry gets suddenly lowered. The market becomes immediately flooded with new "experts" because the tools evolve to the point that they become nearly idiot-proof. Think Claude vibe coders calling themselves programmers / software engineers, Gemini prompters calling themselves visual designers, and people on SoundCloud uploading jingles they farted out on SUNO calling themselves musicians.