[flipper35]

Originally Posted by GH85Carrera

The reason a real photographer charged you a grand, he is a professional, with expensive equipment, lots of training, and knowledge.

You will be able to reproduce it with several thousand dollars worth of equipment, and several years of practice. Most likely you will get to a point it is "good enough" and you will be using that on your web site.

If you have lots of items to photograph, you might get the actual cost of each photo to a few dozen bucks each. Learning photography, especially studio photography is not something one picks up overnight.

The best example of that is look at any menu. Photographing food takes real talent to make it look really good. The menu at large restaurants the food looks great. At virtually all small single family owned restaurants the food photos look horrid. That is the difference a professional makes.

Good luck on you new learning experience. I have done for a living what millions of people rush home from work to do as a hobby.

A lot of the food photos for chain restaurants are not entirely edible food either since they use or add stuff that looks like fresh food but is not food or food products. The local places take pics of real food and print them in crappy menus.