Statistical Analysis of Professional Photographer’s Estimated Return on Investment (ROI) Turnaround Time
Professional photography relies heavily on engaging audiences and delivering to a diverse range of clients on a schedule. The business requires an initial investment of time to be on-site, shoot photographs, and conduct image processing before delivering the final product. The time required in this workflow is difficult for humans to gauge, meaning an unknown duration before a return on investment (ROI) between the time that money is spent to take the photograph and the time the photographs can be licensed or sold. Statistical techniques can be used to extract, analyze, and visualize how a professional photographer can estimate how many days, on average, pass between when a photograph is taken and when the photograph gets uploaded. Since each client requires a specific image category, such as “Landscapes” or “Journalism”, a more accurate estimate can be calculated on a categorical basis.
500px.com is a large social networking site for photography professionals to share and sell images. Unlike most social networking sites, a large majority of images are posted to 500px after an extensive process of transferring large image files from a DSLR to a computer and performing time intensive image touchups. Additionally, professional photography requires a great deal of travel therefore the time between taking a photo and uploading it is significantly longer than other websites. 500px.com/popular is a section that lists the top photographs from the website’s population of professional photographers.
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