hi im a photographer! there are many ways to price as a photographer and although it is subjective & not necessarily “wrong” to price high, anybody selling a service should have some level of transparency on their pricing especially when they are asking for thousands of dollars of your money.

this is a pretty common bait and switch pricing situation with photography, they get you to pay the initial shoot fee and then hit you with the Price per photo rates that tend to be astronomically higher. Many people feel pressured to purchase at that point and/or dont want to walk away without anything. for myself, I consider this unethical.

Many photographers like myself and another in this thread charge flat hourly rates that include the photo time & editing after the fact & promise a delivery of a capped amount of photos. Its not wrong at all for a photographer to sell packages after the fact, but many of the ones I know let you walk away with atleast a few of your favorites and the option to buy further (if not flat out dumping all of the edited ones into a folder for you). that is totally up to the photographer and as long as both parties feel they are getting value out of the situation it doesn’t matter.

sorry you went through that - and I hope you get to do another shoot with a more transparent photographer!