“I assume there is at least one zero missing in your ‘generous’ offer.”
That was my reply to a professional agency that contacted me for event coverage in Switzerland and offered 100 CHF per session.
That is not a typo.
That is not a student project. That is not a favour for a friend. That is what a so-called professional intermediary thought was a serious offer.
And that tells you a lot.
Not about the value of photography. Not about the Swiss market. But about how some agencies see photographers: interchangeable suppliers expected to show up, deliver files, and quietly accept whatever number is thrown at them.
Ridiculous requests exist everywhere.
What made this particularly absurd was not only the fee itself. Ridiculous requests exist everywhere. The real problem was who sent it: not a private person with no clue what professional photography involves. Not a small organisation testing its luck. An agency. A business that presents itself as professional, charges clients as a serious partner, and should know perfectly well what proper visual production involves.
They also added the usual little detail meant to make the whole thing sound more reasonable: they only needed RAW files, because their editing team would handle postproduction.
That part is always revealing.
It suggests that the photographer’s value only starts once the shooting is over. As if the real work lived in the retouching alone. As if turning up, seeing what matters, reacting in real time, choosing angles, handling ugly light, timing expressions, anticipating moments, and producing material that is actually usable were somehow secondary.
That, of course, is nonsense.
RAW delivery does not make the job cheap. It only means the finishing happens somewhere else. The photographer still has to reserve the slot, prepare equipment, travel, arrive on time, assess the location, adapt to whatever chaos is waiting, and produce strong material under live conditions. That is the work. That is the skill. And that is exactly the part people try to erase when they reduce photography to “just sending files”.
just one hour… It’s never just one hour.
There is also the usual fiction behind these offers: the idea that it is only one hour.
No, it is not only one hour.
It is a slot blocked in the day. It is transport, preparation, coordination, professional equipment, backup, experience, and responsibility. It is being able to work fast and think clearly when the light is poor, the room is unflattering, the timing is off, and people still expect clean, useful images. It is knowing what matters before the client can even articulate it properly.
That is what professionals bring. Not merely a camera. Judgment.
And this is where the issue becomes bigger than one bad email.
When agencies send out offers like this, they do not just insult one photographer. They help normalize a market in which professional visual work is treated like a cheap commodity. They train clients to expect serious event coverage for almost nothing. They create pressure on younger or less established photographers to accept jobs that are unsustainable from the start. And then, when the results are weak, forgettable, or unusable, people act surprised.
They should not be.
Poor budgets do not magically produce strong work. They produce compromise. They attract corner-cutting. They lower standards. And sooner or later, the client gets exactly what the budget was designed to buy: not quality, not judgment, not reliability, but the illusion of coverage.
That is the part too many buyers fail to understand. Event photography is not about owning a camera and standing in a room for an hour. It is visual decision-making under pressure. It is knowing what to shoot, what to ignore, where to stand, when to move, and how to produce images that support communication after the event is over. That value exists long before anyone opens a RAW file in post.
This is not about ego. It is not about being offended. And it is certainly not about refusing smaller assignments on principle.
It is about clarity.
If an event matters enough to be photographed, it matters enough to be budgeted properly. If an agency wants to position itself as professional, it should understand that photography is not the mechanical capture of files. It is skilled work, live, in real conditions, with no second chance.
I declined the offer, of course.
Not dramatically. Not emotionally. Just clearly.
Because saying yes to this kind of request does not make anyone flexible. It makes the next insulting offer easier to send.
That is the real problem with 100 CHF for an event. It is not merely cheap.
It is corrosive.
It chips away at standards, at respect for the craft, and at the idea that professional visual work should be treated professionally at all.
And in the end, the client loses too.
Usually just a little later.
