Can you explain why wedding photography is so expensive?

Your paying for a persons experience. A good wedding photographer can charge a decent fee as they are worth it and you will get a result you will want to look at forever.  Good investment. 

Wedding photography is part of the luxury item market when you think about it. However it's an unforgettable monumentous product that has a significant place within your home! The cost of being a fulltime wedding photographer for a living, and that being your only gig is expensive, and life is expensive.

- The equipement is expensive, like $12K minimum or much more we carry around with us in camera bodies, lenses, flash, lighting; divide that by the amount of weddings one might do, over 2-3 years.

- Costs for purchasing the Adobe suit of products, subscriptions, enhancement tools and effects. All cost.

- Advertising on wedding websites, local services pages, social media, running a website, google ads; it can easily add up to $4-$8,000 a year to get noticed.

- Insurance of your work, and your equipment every month all year.

- The computer and screen/s that you edit on needs replacing every so often and is usually a very expensive graphic editing machine at $3k plus.

- There's storage of your photo files using secure hard drives and services for backups, and they need replacing every  year to 2 years to be safe.

- Car expenses, insurance, fuel, wear and tear.

That's the overheads. Then there's the actual service:

@ We spend our time during the week editing all the beautiful photos, quoting, answering all questions and enquires.

@ Going on-location where your ceremony is for a 'recognisance' rehearsal.

@ We spend time to meet up with you, go out for a coffee and enjoy your company and the chat to get to know you, and you us!

@ 12 hour day of shooting time for a full day. 24-30 hours to edit a full day's worth of snaps (like 1000 of them yes), culling, correcting, fine tuning, working on the detail. That's like 36-40 hours of work split over time.

@Travel to get to your locations.

And in all this we have to make a living to sustain our lives, pay bills and match a common job, yet we do it because we love it that much more! xx

Cost of Running an affordable Wedding Photography business.

• $5,000 Advertising (easyweddings, ABIA, Google Ads, Facebook, Instagram, SA Weddings and more).
• $2,400 Camera Equipment over 3 years life of the equipment and to stay on-trend with technology.
• $2,000 Camera lenses over 3 years life of the equipment and to stay on-trend with tech.
• $500 lighting equipment, straps, cleaning gear, bag...
• $2,000 Car expenses, fuel, rego, insuarnce.
• $960 Insurance.
• *$44,000 Yearly wage (minimum wage) to shoot, edit through the week, advertise, manage and work the business.
• $1,166 Computer over 3 years life of the computer.
• $185 NAS secure network storage device  % 2 years.
• $200 (2 x) File backup Hard drives each year

For good quality work there is more involved than one would think.

First of all a photographer will typically spend an hour with you when you meet, then another hour for pre wedding images, then processing. Plus 10-12 hours on your wedding day.

After the wedding it can easily take a full week or so to process your wedding well. 

Good photographers process their images personally. Unfortunately, many cut corners and send files to India where they are batch processed. Make sure you ask your photographer WHO will process the files!

hey love!

So most people dont realise whats behind it all, but if you want good quality then your better off paying slightly higher i say.

If my clients ask i like to break it down for them so you need to include how you found out about me  (advertising cost a bit) word of mouth doesnt which is great.

i also have "extras" on my packages so

cumstom usb in a cumstom box to keep safe, 

i usually supply a couple of prints around a4 size

and even a glass print in my full day. 

and some travel allowance to cover gettting to and from.

most of us have insurance cover on our gear so that might be like 5-10 dollars a wedding to cover it over the year.

computer space to sort your memories for 5-7years incase something terrible happens

on the day and editing time added together i usually divided that by all costs 

so for example a very basic for me might be:

package price full day cover of aprox 10hrs        $ 2250

advert say $50 every client booking (added in package)

travel allowance on car depends on distance    $     250

additions in total                                                      $    350

                                  TOTAL                                      $  2850

now to divide the full day, 10 hours &        divide by 34

editing  say 24 hours over a few days.

                                TOTAL                                          $83.82

this is an estimate on a per hour charge for full day then and most of the clients  go oh ok thats really cheap! 

hope this has helpfull!

Wedding photography is expensive because you're paying for things such as:

1. Time shooting

2. consultations

3. Travel

4. Time editing

5. The professional gear they use

6. Their skill

7. Equiptment hire 

Most photographers don't do weddings everyday either, there's only a limited amount of weddings a year especially in a very competitive industry. Some really talented photographers will charge more to limit the amount of weddings they do and also limit the demand for weddings on their business. 

What price do you think it would cost to replace your one special day? There is only one shot to capture everything that happens in a day that dissapears in the blink of an eye. This is why you hire a professional photographer, we not only capture everything we possibly can but also offer our unique artist view. This can not be taught and takes a long time to master ( even though we continue to evolve constantly). Add to this the cost of the equipment that we use, try to hire what we carry, plus the extra batteries and high end memory cards, then try to use this equipment on manual mode ( which is the only mode a professional uses). Like any trade there is a huge cost and a lot of learning often at the professionals great expense. 

You don't hire a photographer for a few hours as you may think, we 

1. Meet via phone or in person numerous times to plan your day

2. We offer advise and knowledge to help your day run smoothly

3. If we havent visisted the said venue prior to your wedding we will inspect and take test photos at the time of day you are planning to be married to make sure we can adjust quickly to weather conditions and light, and also find unqiue places to shoot from.

4. We attend before  ceremony, Ceremony and reception quite often with a second photographer( more often this is a weekend which removes us from our families)

5. We have countless hours choosing and editing the presious moments from your special day and selecting for you.

6. We then send or meet with you to arrange your first viewing and offer any other servies you may need

7. We will follow up on your anniversary to make sure you are still looking at the images we captured and see how you are.

8. Marketing, Branding, upgrading equipment & transport, 

This is why we charge a fair price for our services 

I hope this helps

It's expensive because that is what the market is paying, and a few other factors that boil down to metaphorically looking at a duck. On the surface, it's serene and moving around without effort on the water, but below the surface, those webbed feet are working super hard! 

It's a job that works like that, except it's all the work behind the scenes, learning and the biggest thing which cant be learnt - caring about the outcome. Its there or it's not.

I hope that makes sense.

If you are looking for the highest quality professional service, who know what they are doing, with professional equiment and friendly attitude, price is what you pay for all the great values.

A lot of bride doesn't understand why some photographers charge so much for "just a few hours to take some photos", let me explain to you our work flow:

Time:

1. - You found us on google? Because we have spent time on blogging and updating social media for each past wedding (5 hours)
2. - Enquiry, quoting, meeting, design your timeline & booking stage - not all enquiry will end up as a booking (10 hours)
3. - Once you are our client, we will start planning your wedding, giving you tips & support until your wedding day (10 hours)
4. - Photographing your wedding day with 2x photographers (10 hours)
5. - Post productions - look through all photos, select the best 1,000 for editing, photoshop each of them, savings, transfering to USB, uploading online (40 hours)
6. - Delivery - mail out or meet up to drop off your USB box set; send you all the online links, after care customer service email to ensure you are happy (5 hours)
7. - We spend an average 80-100 hours on each client (extra 50 hours to add videography)

Cost:
Our equipment, editing software, marketing material & advertising, insurance, travel, data storage, USB, prints & albums, postage tax (lots of taxes)...

Numbers of weddings per year:

Most wedding photographers doesn't shoot wedding everyday.
Wedding photography specialist will only photographing weddings, there's a limit of number a year we can work, because they want to focus purely on weddings to master their skills and give you their 100% full attentions. Weddings is all they do.
There's only 6-8 months of good weather in Melbourne, there's a limited amount of weekends a year, roughly 32 good days.

Some photographers also offer other photography services such as portraits, family, maternity, babies, pets, commercial head shots, events and products photography during off seasons, their price can be lower but they may not be able to spend that much time on customer service or wedding planning.

At the end of the day, it all comes down to what is your priority.
What is your choice on how you want to spend your budget to what you think it's most important.

If you want a cheap photographer to capture your wedding, you can get a cheap photographer to capture your wedding.
But something must compromise for a cheaper price, you can get a burger from McDonald or from Jamie Oliver's restuarant, both can ease your hunger.

There's always someone who can match with your budget, if you are lucky, you could get a great photographer who doesn't know their worth and under charge you. But the old saying "You get what you paid for" is still true in most cases.

You only get married once, hiring a dude with a camera who likes to as a hobby could ruin your speical day, so make sure you ask lots of questions to find the right fit to do this important job.

Same goes to most professional photographers, it's our honoured to be invited to capture one of the most important day of someone's life, creating long lasting memories via our lenses, these images will be share for the next generation to come, we do not take this task lightly.

I hope this will give you some insight on why wedding photography is so expensive!
Good luck on finding your right fit! :) 

Lowina from Black Avenue Productions (Melbourne)

You can find wedding photograhers from $500 - $5000 Your choice on quality.

I can get Sunglasses from $20 - $2000.

Dont forget the govt take 1/3! ;)

Good luck 

There is a lot more to photography than most people think, it's not as simple as turning up to a location, pressing a button & handing the images over.  There is a huge amount of behind the scenes hours that take place after a shoot is complete.  Also, you need to factor in, cameras & equipment being kept up to date, purchasing USB's, hard drives & presentation materials for delivery.

Hope this helps, Bec