I was shooting a birthday event recently, when a gentleman said he had an event coming up and wanted to know what I charged. I told him my base rate for any event is $150 per hour with a one hour minimum. He didn't verbally respond, his eyes got big for a second, he gave me a dirty look, turned and walked away. I assume he felt my price was ridiculous, as I'm sure some of you do as well, after all, we're only talking an hour right??? 

Let's do the math:

Travel time to the event: 1 hour (1/2 hour each way)

The Event: 1 hour  - In that hour I would snap about 200-300 shots delivering between 100-150 photos

Here's the fun part: Digital editing and post production of 300 shots - let's say I did the bare minimum and only spent 2 minutes per shot that's 10 hours of work (I did the long math 2 minutes = 120 seconds, times 300 shots = 36000 seconds, 60 seconds in a minute, 600 minutes, 60 minutes in an hour 10 hours)

Delivering the finished product: 1 hour (1/2 hour each way)

Grand total 11 hours of labor = $13.63 per hour

It's just like the credits at the end of a movie, so much work goes into the production of it, the 2 hours you watched came about because of the months of work by a crew of hundreds. Most photographers have a crew of 1 or 2.