Randy's Blog

This year I was asked to take some photo’s of neighborhood teens that were attending this year’s prom. Rather than taking the typical photo’s in the front or back yard I decided to set up some seamless white paper in the garage and get some strobes on light stands ready to go. I had two groups, one right after the other, come through my “studio” and shot a few frames. Lots of fun and energy in the kids that night which I hope came through in the photos.

CLICK HERE to view all the Prom Photo’s taken that night.

The morning of Sunday May 2nd at about 6am construction crews lifted a Boeing 747-100 cargo plane atop of a new water park structure that will be part of Del Smith’s Evergreen Aviation & Space Museum campus.   Its the biggest plane to sit atop a building and the biggest plane that’s been lifted onto a display structure.

I wasn’t up at 6am to take photos but I did drive up later in the day to snap a couple of shots. Below is what I got –

Below is a video of the placement of the 747 onto the water park structure.  These are over 6,000 still photos someone took and put together to make a video of the event…

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Alicia and I were at the coast for the weekend when we got one of those calls at 3:00am. We were on the road in less then 30 minutes and home before the coronor left our neighbors house.

The “why” we will never know in our life time, soon we will meet again and talk about it then. We remember the man that Dan was, the time we had to spend together, as short as it was. But, it will still be sad to see him go so fast, so young, and with so much.

Rest peacefully my friend, I’ll see you on the other side!

Dan Selsor from Randy Kashka on Vimeo.

As I take more and more photo’s, learn more about this hobby I have, and share it with others I get asked, generally, the same question – how much do you charge? Well – I have been doing it for fun but perhaps now is as good as any to start looking at this as an opportunity to make a little money to offset costs.

As I did some research, talking to people, reading what I can on the web, and looking at what other photogs charge I find that there is no real guideline except that your services are worth something and “it all depends”. Depends on where you live, depends on what you shoot, and depends on your experience and style. In the end I found it very difficult to create a price structure.

I don’t think I’ll get rich and famous taking photo’s, that’s not my intent. I want to learn as much as I can to capture the best photo as often as I can. In the process of doing this I am finding that this field of work does have some costs involved from the light stands to hold a light, the softbox to make the light appealing, the lens to get the sharpest images possible. All these items do cost money. If I can create a price structure to offset my costs and time then I think I am successful.

So after looking at what others charge, comparing my works with theirs, and giving it much thought I finally put together, what I think, a very competitive price matrix for that question I often get asked – how much do you charge? I figure my time to take the photos is worth something, then the processing time to go through each photo, evaluate them to see if they are keepers or not, make adjustments to lighting, cropping them to exploit the real topic of the shot, cleaning up the skin, eyes, etc (do photogs really do that – yes), other post processing edits to make the photo pop and then create a web page for others to view them is worth something. Then to get prints or copies of those is also worth something – they are works of art, aren’t they?

At the top of this blog you will now be able to find a link to my price structure for my work, which of course can change at any time and is definitely negotiable.