What a Photoshoot Costs in Sydney

How much does a photoshoot cost? It's usually the first real question in an enquiry, and it's often asked half apologetically, as though money were an awkward thing to raise.

I'd rather you asked. A price you understand is easier to sit with than a number that turns up at the end of a friendly email, and what a photoshoot costs in Sydney is mostly explainable.

The short version is that a portrait price covers a lot more than the time I spend with you. My current figures live on my packages page, so they're always the real ones.

The longer version is everything below.

What happens before the day

Before a session I'll ask you things that sound unrelated. Where you spend your weekends. What your kids are like at 5pm. Whether anyone in the family goes stiff the moment a camera appears.

Then I work out where to put you. I know which parks in the Hills hold soft light until 7pm in January, and which ones lose the sun behind a ridge by 5.

I'll help you dress for it too. Colour changes a gallery more than most people expect, which is why I wrote what to wear for family photos and send it to everyone I photograph.

None of that shows up as a line on an invoice, and it's usually 2 or 3 hours of work before I've packed the car.

The hour or 2 with a camera in my hands

A portrait session runs somewhere between 1 and 2 hours, depending on what you've asked for and how old the smallest person is.

This is the part you're picturing when you ask how much a photoshoot costs, and it's the part you'll remember.

I shoot slowly. I let kids wander, let couples talk to each other instead of to me, and wait for the moment after the posed one, which is almost always the better photograph.

The hours after I put the camera down

A 90 minute session gives me somewhere between 800 and 1500 frames.

Culling comes first, going through all of them to find the ones where the light is doing the thing I stayed for and everyone's eyes are soft.

Then every chosen image is edited by hand, individually. Colour, warmth, skin tone, the little distraction at the edge of the frame that your eye would catch later.

A gallery of 40 photographs is a full working day at my desk, sometimes 2. That's the quiet half of the price, and it's the bigger half.

Your gallery, and keeping it safe

Your images arrive in a private online gallery you can download from, share with your mum, and come back to.

Every set is backed up in 3 places: the drive on my desk, a drive that lives somewhere else entirely, and cloud storage I pay for monthly.

Years later, when someone emails asking for a print file, I can still find it in a couple of minutes.

Gear, insurance and getting to you

I work with 2 camera bodies and a small set of lenses I've chosen for how they render skin and light. A second body means a session keeps moving no matter what.

I carry public liability and equipment insurance. Some venues and councils ask for the certificate, and I'd want it either way.

Being a photographer based in the Hills District means Castle Hill, Kellyville and Dural are a short drive, and travel barely registers in the quote.

A session in the eastern suburbs, on the coast, or up in the Blue Mountains takes a larger piece of the day, so travel is priced honestly rather than hidden.

Session fee plus images, or all inclusive

Most Sydney photographers price 1 of 2 ways, and both are perfectly fair.

A session fee plus images means you pay for my time and skill on the day, then choose the photographs you want afterwards. The entry price is lower and you spend on the frames you fall for.

All inclusive means the session, the editing and an agreed set of images sit inside a single figure decided before I pick up the camera. You know the total the day you book.

I lean towards all inclusive for families, because the number is settled early and choosing your photographs afterwards can be purely about which ones you love.

A proposal shoot is priced on a different logic again, built around timing and secrecy rather than a planned hour, and what a proposal package covers walks through it.

So how much does a photoshoot cost in Sydney?

The range across the city is wide, and what moves it is fairly consistent: how long the session runs, how many edited images you receive, whether prints or an album are included, how far I travel, and whether it's a weekday or a Saturday.

Where any photographer sits in that range tells you how they've built their business and how much of the year they can give to each family.

Mine are listed on the packages page, kept current, with what's included written out so you can see exactly what you're comparing.

What the price is still doing 4 years later

Last winter a mum emailed me about a session I'd photographed 4 years earlier. Her son had started school, she'd repainted the hallway, and she wanted that one frame big.

It took me 10 minutes to find the file, check it and send it across.

When you're weighing up what a session costs, that's part of what's sitting inside the number. Someone who still has your photographs, and still cares how they look on your wall.