Feeling at a Loss - Our Current Situation

This post isn't meant to be a complaint. We're going to lay out some facts and figures and share our data based on the 2026 German Youth Artistic Gymnastics Championships.

The German Youth Championships took place in Schwäbisch Gmünd from June 25 to June 28, 2026. The two of us were there from June 24 through June 28, covering all the competitions, editing and making available a total of 22,000 photos, and distributing hundreds of photos - all without receiving a single cent in return. These photos are used on social media and elsewhere, without us getting anything out of it. Sometimes we're credited as the creators, but most of the time we aren't. But even that doesn't do us any good. To this day, we haven't generated a single commission just because we were credited as the creators somewhere.

Here are the facts...

The costs we incurred:

Travel expenses by car: approx. 180 euros for gas (2 x 600 kilometers and local commutes)
Accommodation costs: 630.00 euros (8 nights with breakfast, 2 x 315.00 euros)
Meal costs: 160.00 euros (8 dinners, 2 meals at approximately 80.00 euros each, for a total of)

Total expenses: 970.00 euros

Servers, software, cameras, storage, etc., add to these costs every month. Let’s leave those costs out of the equation for now.

How many hours of work were invested?

(Travel time to and from the location: approx. 15 hours)
Time spent on site: 2 sessions of 31 hours each, spread over several days
Photo processing time (sorting, editing, preparation): 2 sessions of approx. 140 hours each

Total time spent working: 342 working hours, excluding travel time to and from the location

How much did we earn?

The current total of all revenue from DJM 2026, as of September 8, 2026 (a record low): 1,008.62 euros

Results:

Revenue: 1,008.62 euros
– Expenses: 970.00 euros
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Profit: 38.62 euros

What is the hourly wage?

38.62 euros / 342 working hours = 0.11 euros per working hour

The results are the worst they've been in the last 15 years. We don't know why. What are we doing wrong? We have high-quality equipment, and the image quality is better than ever before. Drawing on our experience, we capture the exercises as best as possible, and our galleries feature an incredibly high percentage of great photos, all of which have been digitally edited by hand. Our prices are extremely affordable compared to other event photographers. We also offer packages where the price per photo is well under one euro.

In that case, we even delivered the first photos to organizations and clubs on the same day, while we were still on our way back. Free of charge.

Has interest simply dwindled that much? Is no one interested in good sports photos anymore? Is our work subpar? What other reasons might there be that we haven’t considered? What’s the reason? We’d love to find out.

We work Monday through Sunday and haven’t had a single free afternoon in months - or practically years.

The fact is, if nothing changes, we’ll have to give up next year. We’ve already had to cancel several events because we can no longer afford the travel expenses to get to them. Obviously, we can’t pass on the increased costs either.

Are we sharing too little information? We’re actually always available. We know that processing takes time, but as just two people, we don’t have a team behind us that can process the photos in a matter of days. And AI can’t really help with that either. By the way, we don’t use AI - our photos are 100% authentic.

We're at a loss and have run out of ideas. We don't know what to do next.

Feel free to write to us...

We'd like to know if it's our fault, if we're doing something wrong, or if there's simply no interest in our work anymore.

In a few days, we’ll be uploading the next 20,000 photos from the 2026 International Junior Team Cup, and we already suspect that sales figures for these will likely be just as poor as they were for the past events we’ve uploaded this year. After all, the 2026 DJM is just one example, things don’t look any better for other events either.