The Shoot Day Is Not the Work

I see this written about from a billing perspective pretty frequently, especially here on LinkedIn. Photographers and videographers spend a lot of time trying to justify their rates, which I guess is what I’m doing here. There’s a lot of talk about the “years and years of honing your craft that justifies it,” but very little about actual time investments and treating it like an actual business, rather than a side hustle where you just sit around waiting for someone to call.

It’s an exhausting and endless debate, and a difficult conversation to broach with clients, for sure. Because when they hear, “$3,000 for you to stand with a camera for 8 hours,” they really hear, “I’m expensive and hard to justify, blah blah blah.” And this is just for shooting, not even editing, where things can really start to add up.

But the shoot day is not the work.

It’s just the visible part of the work.

So let’s look at the time on the front end before a shoot.

First, you probably have spent countless unpaid hours trying to court businesses for sales. That time adds up, and while maybe it isn’t “fair” to charge people directly for the time you spend doing backend marketing work, that only really seems to apply to multimedia professionals. Goods are priced specifically to account for the needed sales volume to also cover down on admin costs, marketing costs, and the cost of catching and converting a potential customer. So why would that be any different for a service like multimedia production?

The next stage is planning. You discuss with the client what their needs are and how you can fit them in. Sometimes that means you have everything you need already, but that still leads to a heavy review of your current equipment and capabilities. What are we making? Where is it being made? How much time do we have? How many people are involved? What does the final product need to accomplish? Will you need to rent another body or lens? Do you need more lighting equipment, more batteries because you’ll be in a situation where you can’t keep charging them, more media, or little things like extra screws or mounting options to make sure your gear is up to the task?

And this is where the rate conversation gets a little funny, because if you were hiring an in-house shooter, or asking an employee to handle the production internally, the cost of renting the equipment alone can become a significant portion of that professional day rate very quickly. A cinema camera package, lenses, audio, lighting, stands, media, batteries, grip, and cases are not free just because the person using them already owns them. The fact that a professional shows up with the tools, knows how to use them, maintains them, stores them, transports them, insures them, and replaces them when they break is part of the value. You are not just renting a person for the day. You are accessing the working system that person has built around the job.

This can even boil down to something as small as, “I have a boom mic stand, but it’s missing some screws for the tension locks on the extension. For sit-down interviews, it’s been fine. But now I’m setting up a boom mic for standing interviews, so I need to find and purchase replacement screws.” That sounds ridiculous until the moment the missing screw becomes the reason your audio setup doesn’t work. Basically every shoot results in an audit of your equipment, ensuring that you have what is needed, and then shopping to fill in the gaps. And that takes a lot more time and effort than you’d ever realize.

Once you’ve audited your gear for the shoot, it’s time to pack. And boy howdy is that a time-consuming process. Packing for a real production is not throwing a camera in a bag. It’s breaking down camera rigs for travel, rigs that you usually leave set up or brace in the car, because now you’ll be moving them in and out of vehicles. You need them protected in case of an accident, protected from being knocked around, and packed in a way that makes sense when you arrive. So you figure out your perfect travel equipment setup, and sometimes that means you need an alternate case that you didn’t have before. Suddenly even just the act of packing means that you’re spending money. Seems really, really, really dumb, huh? But that’s part of it.

Packing itself into the most space-efficient setup across lighting, audio, gaff equipment, camera systems, lenses, and any other possible need takes hours, sometimes even a day or more depending on the scale of the shoot. You spend hours in the days before sorting batteries, charging them, checking media, confirming accessories, and making sure that you can hit the ground running without having to wait for an interruption. It’s time consuming, and even when you’re spending time doing other things, there’s a good chance that you’ll be spending a lot of mental bandwidth planning, going over checklists in your head, and randomly ideating about the upcoming shoot.

There’s a lot to unpack.

Or pack.

So now we’re finally past the hours of time spent on pre-production and gear prep that aren’t considered “billable” time for a shoot, but are significant and absolutely have to be accounted for in a rate. Then you arrive on set, and you make it all happen.

Fast forward.

You’re driving home with all your stuff, exhausted, but probably still enthusiastic. The post-production and editing processes start spinning up in your mind and you’re planning your edits, your workflow, and the next steps. The drive isn’t so much a rest break as it is more time on the clock, ensuring that you have a plan for where the project goes after this.

Then you get home and unpack everything. Sort it back into its proper place for storage and make sure that you do any needed maintenance from things that might have happened at the shoot. Mount chargers and systems that you took on the trip back where they go. Rebuild the pieces of your kit that had to be torn apart to make the shoot work. This can take several more hours depending on the scale of the shoot, because chances are pretty good that if it was a big one, you had to do a lot of tearing apart of your storage and organization systems to get everything out and prepared.

Chances are also good that during this time, you’re dedicating hours of computer downtime to backing up assets, double checking and triple checking that all of the cards are dumped properly, that backups exist, and that you’re not going to accidentally overwrite something important when you go on your next shoot. Personally, I spend a lot of time before a shoot staring at my equipment and mentally game planning exactly what it is that I need. Sometimes I’ll build a camera rig, get a bunch of equipment ready, and then realize that I don’t need something, or that the structure should be fairly different from what I’m setting up.

That is all part of the job.

The thinking, the testing, the packing, the repacking, the “wait, that won’t work,” and the “I need to solve this before I’m standing in front of the client trying to solve it on their time.” And all of this time — chasing clients, pre-production, prep work, packing, driving, unpacking, ingesting footage, backing up assets, and resetting equipment — quickly turns an 8-hour shoot day into 20, 25, or 30+ hours of actual time investment.

So yes, the day rate is $3,000.

But the day rate is not just the time standing there with a camera.

It’s the business structure behind the camera.

It’s the planning, the systems, the gear, the maintenance, the admin, the experience, the backups, the insurance, the problem-solving, and the years of learning how to make sure the shoot happens properly once the clock starts. It is also the cost of showing up with a production package that would be expensive to rent, expensive to replace, and useless in the hands of someone who does not know how to make it all work under pressure.

Every serious business prices things according to more than just the moment of delivery. Products are priced to account for materials, labor, overhead, sales, marketing, operations, admin, waste, and future growth. Service businesses should be no different, but for some reason, media professionals are often expected to absorb a lot of that invisible labor for free.

It’s a weird quirk of service-type jobs in general. Even landscaping jobs are like that. The $50-a-week lawn care visit is just a fraction of the time spent around the business to make it profitable and functional. Maintaining equipment, managing invoices, pursuing leads, buying tools, planning routes, communicating with clients, keeping the schedule full — none of that is free. It all has to be accounted for somewhere.

Media production works the same way.

So when a professional photographer or videographer gives you a day rate, it is not just a number attached to the hours they are physically standing in front of you. You are not just paying for someone to stand there with a camera. You are paying for the preparation that makes sure the shoot works when it matters. You are paying for the systems that protect the footage. You are paying for the experience that anticipates problems before they become expensive. You are paying for access to tools, and the judgment required to know which tools are actually needed.

You are paying for the boring, invisible work that allows the visible work to look easy.

And that preparation is the difference between hiring someone with a camera and hiring someone who can actually carry the job.