Photography

We take a different approach to photography than most. It always seemed unfair to me to pay a photographer hundreds of dollars to come and take wonderful photos of an event, only to have the photographer keep all the photos hostage until you paid him more money to buy a "package." It seems to me that if you pay a photographer, you should be paying him for his time and talent -- you already own the images.

If you hire HippieBoy Design to photograph your event, all three of us (Chris, Dagmar and Barb) will swoop in with our camera bags flapping in the breeze and our tripods at the ready. When the event is over, we'll do some "quick 'n dirty" editing on the photos and put them on a disk for you. You're then free to take the disk anywhere you please and get prints made at any size. If you want some images edited further or airbrushed after you see them, just let me know -- we'll work something out. If you're not comfortable getting the prints made yourself, we'll get them done for you at cost. We can even put the still photos on a DVD as a slideshow if you want, though that will cost just a little extra. (Note, we usually end up with between 600 and 1,000 photos.)

The Price

We've been specializing in bands and outdoor/informal weddings lately, but we do all sorts of stuff. Depending on the circumstances, we're asking $500 to $650 or so for three photographers for a day's work. This might sound high, but if you check around, you'll see we're about half the cost of other photographers.

Each circumstance is different, so we hesitate to put a firm price on an event, but what we're shooting for is around $40 per hour per photographer. Again, that might sound high, but we have equipment to maintain, and we do an awful lot of work behind the scenes that we don't charge for (the initial color correction, cropping, and editing, for example, often takes me anywhere from fifteen to twenty hours to complete, but we don't charge for that).

If you want references, just let me know! 712.898.5220 or e-mail me HERE.

The Equipment

Just a quick overview: Between the three photographers we have two digital Canon SLR's, two good zoom lenses, several lens filters, two tripods, some lights 'n umbrellas, a glare-reduction doodad, two Olympus and one Kodak digital "point 'n shoot" cameras, all of pretty high resolution. (The Canons are both 10 megapixel, the Olympus and Kodak are both above 7 megapixel. The last Olympus is "for emergency use only" -- it's a little 3.2 megapixel.) We also have other miscellaneous equipment hanging around, and we're always acquiring more. I use a combination of several software packages to tweak and enhance the photos, depending on the circumstances.