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Message: <blockquote data-quote="STM" data-source="post: 115294" data-attributes="member: 12827"><img src="http://i1338.photobucket.com/albums/o690/photodotnet/DOH_zps1e20fbf9.jpg" alt="" class="fr-fic fr-dii fr-draggable " style="" /><a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KrGhC3J8SHE" target="_blank">http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KrGhC3J8SHE</a>I can certainly sympathesize about the portrait biz. It is very difficult to make a living wage doing independent professional photography today. Everyone wants professional quality work but they want to pay Walmart prices for them. And the problem with that is there will always be some dolts who are willing to charge Walmart prices. Of course their work is on par or even below par with what you would expect from a Walmart photo studio but you get what you pay for, caveat emptor. Time is money and our equipment is not cheap. It was even worse back in the film days because in addition to your time and having to amortize your equipment, studio, etc into your prices, you had to pay for film and processing (and the postage to send it) as well as proofs and THEN the final prints. Digital has cut down a lot of the overhead, to be sure, and enabled clients to see their proofs the same day, but the fact remains that if you have a studio, it costs you money to keep the lights on, and you still have to pay for what can be very expensive equipment. I have a superb Canon Pixma 9000 printer which will print amazingly excellent prints up to 13"x19" but anything bigger than that I have to send out. I do all my own printing on stuff that is smaller than that. Still, I do it mostly for fun and some extra pocket change, but have a REAL job to keep the lights still burning. I would not want to work THAT hard to make the same money I make at my job. In a town my size I am not sure I could even do it.</blockquote>

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