Plights of a Labor of Love

I am having a wee bit of an identity crisis, trying to find my roots and where I belong in the world of pro photography.

My problem, is I have so many loves, and I can't really pinpoint one particular love of photography to focus on.

Something that has never sat right with me, is charging for my passion. When I started becoming interested in the world of portraiture, I grew tired of paying $1,000s for photos and I didn't even get original digital images or the rights to my photos that I had just paid someone to take!

I started my own business, so that I could offer affordable photography to everyone. So that everyone and anyone could have beautiful photos that would last generations to come. Why should you pay $1,000s? I know my equipment is expensive, and I spend 10hrs per shoot probably, perfecting each image and delivering around 360 photos to each client per shoot! But it is a labor of love.

The hardest question is how to define what my time is worth, how do you put a price on a memory that will outlive you? Maybe even outlive your children, or grandchildren? I see photos of my dads parents, and their grandparents! And when you, god forbid, lose a loved one, those precious photos continue on.

I've been fighting with myself, some say too expensive, some say too cheap! Those that see my prices before my portfolio frown and turn away assuming that cheap is always nasty, when if they took the time to look at my portfolio first, they would see this isn't the case with me....

So where do I go? What do I do when I can't settle on a price? The thought has crossed my mind, of putting that power in the clients hands. Oh what a revolution I could start, if I instead of telling people what to pay me, instead placed a 'donation' button on my website, and after clients receive their photos, can make a donation in a sum that they feel I was worth?

Beloved readers, your feedback on this would be much obliged, so please, comment or if you feel uncomfortable talking aloud, send me an e-mail, jody_k_smith@hotmail.com