Many a time I have run a good race and wanted a commemorative photo of me crossing the finish line to add to my photo album, writes Hannah Webster.

But every time I’ve come to the point of pressing the “pay now” button for official online photos, the sheer cost of them steers my mouse to the “cancel order” button instead.

And I have done this several times. I understand there are a lot of professional photographers at these events, who need to be paid for their work. I have great respect for the job good photographers do and I work with some incredibly talented photographers who do great jobs day in day out. But we are talking about an event where 15,000 runners are snapped five times each as they run towards the photographer near the end.

Each photo is therefore a frantic two-and-a-half seconds’ work, and with the subject moving it’s near impossible to get a flattering angle with the runner (virtually obliterated after running 13 miles as fast as their legs will carry them) looking in the right direction. We are not talking about the kind of photos that take time to think through and compose.

The thing is, despite these things that inhibit the quality of the photo and which the photographers have no control over, they do a good job. I guarantee a hell of a lot more people would be spending money on their race photos if the prices were half way reasonable.

Earlier this week I added a photo of me running the Reading Half Marathon to my shopping basket at Marathon Photos. It was the cheapest available photo of a 12cm by 17cm print of me in the Madjedski stadium at the end of the race, for £9.

Now, this it itself seems a lot for a small photo. But I justified it with the fact that to download the photo would cost me a whopping £17.99, and then print it off from somewhere like Photobox would be another couple of quid, I thought it would be worth it for a hard copy of a good memory.

But having gone to my shopping cart, another £4 was whacked onto the cost for “postage and packing”. For one 12cm by 17cm photo, it would have cost me £4 for what is, essentially, an envelope. I have ordered dozens of photos of the same size from Photobox and it has cost just £1.49 for posting them all together, so how Marathon Photos can justify charging £4 is beyond me. Hence my swift cancellation of the order. If the company is charging me more than double what it should cost to send me the photo then I simply don’t trust it enough to use its services.

I think perhaps if I do a half marathon in under two hours, there may be a faint possibility of me coughing up the £13 for the smallest available photo, but at this moment I had to really weigh up which was more important to me. The cash won out pretty quickly.