The short of it is that there’s no money in photography, compared to videography.

Movies routinely have 8 or 9 digit budgets, with teams of hundreds of people who have to collaborate to make footage coming from dozens of different cameras look seamless and consistent. Meanwhile, $1M would be an insane budget for a photo shoot.

You can see this in the actual skills of people working in the field as well. Anyone working in video has a solid understanding of the technical underpinnings of their craft. On the other hand, it’s not uncommon for working photographers to not understand some really basic stuff about color science/data formats/etc.

Fundamental misunderstanding of the market dynamics here.

There are at least an order of magnitude more people making a professional salary as photographers (ie.: enough to justify a software purchase) than professional videographers.

Outside of film, videographers are generally paid a day rate about half as high as photographers, with enormously higher equipment costs.

Film - hollywood, streaming, TV etc, combined actually employ a relatively small number of people. Sure there's enormously more budget for any given TV show than say a wedding photoshoot, but think about how many people get married, how many corporate photo sessions there are etc etc.

Basically by conflating videography and cinematography you've obscured the issue. Source - I'm a videographer that also works as a cinematographer / director on smaller budget projects.

Also on anything bigger than a very low budget short, it's editors and post people who are using the editing software not the videographers / camera operators / DOP. Bare in mind DaVinci does not own the film industry. It's very much still Avid's game, with Nuke for colour, and a small percentage of Adobe Suite.

>The short of it is that there’s no money in photography, compared to videography.Movies routinely have 8 or 9 digit budgets, with teams of hundreds of people who have to collaborate to make footage coming from dozens of different cameras look seamless and consistent.

Movies are not where BlackMagic makes their money. It's from the millions and millions of small videographers, news teams, ad teams, and content creators.

Same for photos.

> Anyone working in video has a solid understanding of the technical underpinnings of their craft.

Lol. That's the funniest thing I've read in a long time. I've been on so many sets where there was not a single person that knew how to read a waveform. After the Canon 5Dmkii came out where "the producer's nephew could shoot this for $500" became a thing, the skill set dropped dramatically. There are people that can frame a pretty picture while at the same time have zero understanding of what's happening between the lens and the sensor to the recording medium. When video cameras started shooting flat expecting the user to know what to do with that, it became a trend of sending the flat look out because people didn't know what to do with it. When DV cameras were shooting 24 but still recording to tape with pulldown applied so it still recorded to a 29.97 tape, people had no idea how to get rid of the interlacing properly and just edited 29.97 instead of the 24/23.976.

You are giving way too much credit to people in the industry. It would be nice if everyone on the production crew and in post knew everything they should to be competent, but there are many many people fakin' it 'til they make it.

Counterpoint most of the Movies budgets is usualy spent on the actors and on the filming. Not on the editing team. There is also copious amounts of money in photography Alot of advertising is still static images and print.

But there's a couple orders of magnitude more photo shoots than movies and since once you write software once, you can copy it for free, investing in creating photo editing software still makes sense.

> Meanwhile, $1M would be an insane budget for a photo shoot.

Photo shoots for automotive advertising regularly are around that pricepoint.

those big productions are production design and above the line heavy. Most people on shoots are paid well. However, if you look at the other side of the coin, hardware and software supporting the industry, it's actually "laughable". ARRI which is the biggest name in the game on shoots is ~$1b, RED was sold of for $85m, BMD could fetch as high as $3b, Autodesk's Media & Entertainment is <%5 of its revenue which would, if it were standalone, also bring it to around $1b valuation. Avid the same at ~$1.5, Grass Valley the same ~$1b-1.5, Sony's ET&S is hard to gauge since it includes everything, but an estimate is ~$1.5b, Maxon ~$1.5, all of Nikon $4b, Canon's camera division ~$15b...

and then you have Adobe which has ~%65 of its revenue coming from Creative segment ($14-15b over $23.77 for 2025), which would put it at ~$70b - $100b valuation if it were standalone (5x-7x revenue).

That's how big Adobe is compared to literally everything else. Its creative division is 3x-4x more than the entire industry combined.

You do have new contenders now with Epic (~$22b), Canva ($26b), Figma ($20b), but I'm not convinced.. in certain segments for sure, but still not confident based on stock performance or revenue.

> The short of it is that there’s no money in photography

Oh dear...

I'd better go tell all the gear manufacturers, especially the higher-end kit like PhaseOne cameras and the Profoto flashes. Guess I should also tell the pro departments of Canon and Nikon they no longer have a job either.

There's TONS of money washing around photography.

From the wedding and sports photographers, to the paparazzi to the household-name fashion / landscape /architectural photographers.

There's then all the semi-pros and the amateurs with deep pockets.

Most of them will spend more money on insurance ALONE than the $295 asking price of DaVinci Resolve - Photo.

Hell, most of them will already have an Adobe subscription that they won't be cancelling any time soon. :)