[Rajah Sulayman]

Originally Posted by archersdad

I would like to point out that spending $50,000 on gear does not make someone a good (or professional) photographer.

I neither stated nor implied otherwise. In fact I explicitly and specifically said she didn't have to buy $50,000 gear. What I said was that when someone hires a photographer to do a job, they expect better than an entry-level dSLR and a stock lens.

Many people consider $200/day to be great pay. That is more than the median income in the US. The median teacher's salary is less than that. Should teachers, who also meet the definition of professional, stop teaching because some accept less than $200/day?

Please don't turn this into some philosophical or pseudo-social debate over salaries. You could apply that argument to any profession that makes higher than the median income. Do hair dressers deserve to make more than teachers? Do actors? Do screenwriters?

This isn't about teachers or anybody else. This is about photographers. Once you start making it a comparative argument it completely falls apart. There will always be someone worse off and there will always be someone better off. It's a pointless argument.

And for what it's worth, a paycheck doesn't exist in a vacuum. There are environmental factors to take into account. For example, New York is pretty much the center of the photographic universe. So it makes sense that if someone is going to attempt to build a career or business in it, this would be a good place to go.

But New York is expensive. And it'd be tough enough as it is just to survive on $48k a year (after HEFTY taxes) by itself; it'd be damn near impossible to build a business on it.

The fact is, there is no set-in-stone exact value for a photographer's talents. There are too many variables involved, ranging from location to skill to personality to experience to you-name-it. But there is an understanding of how much is not enough, and $200 for a job (and let's remember, some jobs take more than one day) is not enough.

You could argue that $48k a year (max, gross) is higher than a lot of other, more "deserving" jobs, and you'd be right. But that would be neither here nor there and has no real bearing on the discussion at hand. Bringing it up is little more than an injection of pathos in an attempt to distract with emotion.