There are many times when price alone should not be the driving factor, but value. You might spend hundreds of dollars on something that you value and treasure that someone else might consider a waste of money. As the daughter of a professional photographer, my article about school photos was, quite frankly, thoughtless. As my dad commented:
I hate to say it, but the high school guy, while embracing "new" and "modern" business methods is a perfect example of why making a living as a photographer is getting more impossible.
Many areas of photography are engaged in a "race for the bottom" to see who can do something the cheapest. Stock photography which used to provide us with a good living is basically a skeleton of what it was. Images available on-line for a dime or less. The multi thousand dollar sales I used to have regularly are now few and far between.
I've seen my dad reinvent his career many, many times in my lifetime. But at no time have I ever seen him up against the types of business challenges he faces now. His work is--and always has been--stunning. He truly has a gift. What he offers definitely has value far beyond the price. Art--and I definitely include photography--is one category that value is much more than what you paid.
Back to the topic of school pictures for a bit. I hope that the $20 CD I bought was as good a value for the photographer as it was for me. I hope that his markup was higher on the CD than on the prints I didn't buy. When shopping for a photographer for my son's senior pictures, if I can't talk my dad into driving 1,000+ miles with all his photographic equipment to do the job, I hope to find a talented photographer trying to break into the field who might be willing to work out a deal with us in exchange for effusive word-of-mouth advertising and recommendations.
I hope that none of us are so fixated on the bottom line, and getting something for as little as possible, that we overlook those areas in our lives where value is more important than price. My great-aunt is a wonderful example of that. She used to shop at Deseret Industries (like Goodwill) and was incredibly frugal in her household expenditures so that she could afford season tickets to the ballet and the Utah Symphony. She truly understood the concept of value.
