When I hire a professional photographer, am I only paying for their time taking pictures?

No!!! For every one hour spent taking pictures I usually take another 3-6 hours editing. here's a look at what I spend the majority of my time doing with your pictures:

Here's the original picture, straight out of camera:

Here's after editing the eyes to add more drama, the colors and lighting and smoothing the skin:

Here's taking that same picture and applying my custom sepia:

Here's an example of what I could do with the same original and edit it with a program like picasa:

Picasa's color edit.

Picasa's sepia edit.

See the difference? The auto color in Picasa made the color one have way too much green, and you can't smooth the skin without smoothing everything, which would take sharp eyes and make them blurry. The sepia one has no contrast and looks really blah! I'm not saying there's not a place for programs like Picasa, because they can be great for editing your own pictures quickly, but they are definitely limited and you should expect much better if you hire someone to do your pictures. These are just an example of some of the touch-ups I do on pictures. This picture wasn't terrible to start with, but if she had scratches or dirt of something on her face- I could have easily taken those out, which is another thing I would do when editing pictures.