Budget math, plainly
The in-house option isn't free. It's just billed somewhere you don't look.
Someone on your team has a good camera and has offered. That's a real option and sometimes it's the right one — I'll say where. But it has a price, it's larger than people expect, and it lands on a salary line instead of an invoice line, which is the only reason it feels like zero.
Where the cost actually hides
Not in the hours of the event itself. Almost nobody objects to those. The cost is in the tail: culling a few thousand frames down to a usable set, editing them, then the fortnight of Slack messages asking where the photos are.
The one industry figure I can point to is from wedding work rather than corporate — a full-day shoot running roughly two hours of culling and fourteen hours of editing to get from a few thousand frames to about eight hundred delivered. A corporate event is smaller than a wedding, so scale that down. But scale it down from something, rather than from zero, because zero is the number people quietly use.
Editing and culling ratio: Narrative, citing the Wedissimo wedding photography industry report. Per-image editing time of 2–15 minutes depending on treatment: Imagen AI. Both are photography-industry sources, and neither is corporate-event-specific — I couldn't find one that is.
Run it on your own numbers
Salary is the only input you need to look up. Everything else has a sensible default you can drag.
NYC medians: marketing coordinator roughly $61,000–$72,000, social media manager roughly $71,000–$86,000, marketing manager roughly $119,000–$140,000.
Including setup and the bit at the end where nobody leaves.
This is the number people guess lowest on. At 2–15 minutes an image, 200 keepers is 7 to 50 hours.
A second body, a fast lens, and a light for a room that's darker than it looks.
Why the number is bigger than salary divided by 2,080
Because an employee costs more than their salary. The Bureau of Labor Statistics measures this directly: across private industry, wages averaged $32.37 an hour and benefits added $13.68 on top — a 42.3% loading. That's the multiplier in the calculator above. It's a national private-industry average, not an NYC figure and not your company's, so treat it as the floor.
What it doesn't include is the thing that actually costs you: those hours came out of a week that was already full. Whatever your marketing coordinator was going to ship that fortnight, they shipped it late or didn't. I have no way to price that and I'm not going to pretend otherwise — but it's the reason the calculator's number is conservative rather than generous.
Loading multiplier: BLS Employer Costs for Employee Compensation, September 2025. Salary ranges: Glassdoor NYC, PayScale NYC. Crowdsourced, so wide — which is why it's a slider and not a fixed figure.
The part I can't put a number on, and won't
The obvious next claim is that a professional gets more usable frames per hour than someone borrowing a camera for the afternoon. I believe that, I've watched it, and every photographer's website asserts it with a percentage attached.
I went looking for a study. There isn't one. What exists is forum self-reports with no method and no sample size, which is not evidence, it's photographers agreeing with each other. So there's no keeper-rate multiplier in the calculator above, and if you see one on a competitor's page, ask them where it came from.
Where in-house is genuinely the right call
Three cases, and I'd rather say them than have you find out after paying me.
The photos are going in Slack and nowhere else. An internal all-hands, a team lunch, a birthday. If nothing leaves the building, hire nobody. A phone is fine and I mean that.
You need forty frames of a small thing. A product on a table, a new sign, a partner visiting for an hour. That's a job, not a shoot.
Someone on the team is actually a photographer. Not "good at photos" — a person with a portfolio who'd rather be doing this. Then the only question is whether their week has room, and you can answer that better than I can.
What tips it the other way is fairly narrow: the images are going somewhere external, the room is dark, the schedule has moments that happen once, or the person you'd otherwise ask has a job to do that day.
What the market charges, for context
So you can see where the internal number lands rather than taking my word for where it lands.
| Option | Typical NYC cost | What you're carrying |
|---|---|---|
| Someone on your team | Calculated above — typically $800–$3,500 of loaded time for a one-day event, though the sliders reach either side of that | Their week, the editing, and the risk that the one shot you needed isn't there |
| NYC freelance photographer | $300–$500/hr, two-hour minimum · $1,500–$2,500 half day · $2,500–$4,500 full day | Scheduling, briefing, and usage terms that are usually narrower than you assume |
| Core Visuals package | $850/hr with a two-hour minimum · $3,500 Essential · $6,000 Professional · from $9,500 Premium | Nothing on shoot day. Same person from the first email to delivery, and full commercial usage rights included |
NYC rate ranges: James Maher Photography, Strata Booth. Both are photographer-published rate guides rather than independent survey data — directional, not authoritative. I'd rather label them that way than dress them up.
You'll have noticed my hourly rate is above that freelance range. It is, by a fair margin, and I'd rather point at it than hope you don't. Two reasons, and you can decide whether they're worth it: hourly is deliberately my worst-value option because most events aren't priced well by the hour, and the packages include the editing, the delivery, and usage rights that a lower hourly number usually doesn't. If you need two hours of straightforward coverage and nothing else, a freelancer at $350 an hour is a better buy than me and I'll say so on the phone too.
If it's the usage terms that surprise you there, that's a whole separate piece of arithmetic and I wrote it out: what you actually pay per photo you're allowed to use.
Get the number for your actual event
Tell me what you're running and I'll come back with a fixed price for it. It's me reading this and me writing back — no account manager, and no discovery call before you get a number.