The cost of photography
Why do photographers charge so much?
One of the biggest issues that we professional photographers face is why do we charge so much, when we’re only there for 10 hours taking photos. So i’m hoping to write this note to hopefully better educate clients on why we charge what we charge. The same also applies to pretty much every vendor that you hire for your wedding, but more specifically to your wedding photographer/videographer.
Here is how a typical wedding goes for a professional photographer from start to finish, but before I start, let me define the parameters for the wedding:
- 10 hours of coverage
- Engagement Session
- Enlargement from the session
- Bridal Session
- Enlargement from the session
- Framing
- Album Design and Production
- Shipping of various products
- Consultations
As you will see when we go through this list that the 10 hours are actually the smallest part, but let’s dive in:
The initial consultation
For a good photographer who really wants to get to know you and wants to get to know your day, this consultation can take anywhere from 45 minutes to an hour to sometimes 2 hours. After all how can a photographer really cover your day if they don’t know who you and your fiance are as people and as a couple. A good consultation often goes over what you like, your time spent together as a couple, interests, dislikes and places that mean something to you. To be conservative we’ll factor in 1 hour for this process.
The Contract Process
Nowadays it is rare for a client to simply sign on the dotted line at the initial meeting. This is actually good, because it shows that clients are savvy and want to get the best vendor for their event. A photographer will typically spend over two hours, maybe more going over the contract, generating the invoices, processing payments and the back end book keeping. To be conservative we will factor in 1 hour for these tasks.
The Engagement and Bridal sessions
We will combine these as they are fairly similar but once the consultations are done a typical bridal and engagment session, each will last around 2hours of actual photography time and an equal amount of time in processing the photos and retouching the enlargements for final production. So we take 8 hours for the total time spent on the engagement and bridal sessions and the production of the prints.
The actual wedding shoot
We will typically for a full day spent 10 hours on a regular church wedding and the reception. This includes 2 hours of getting ready, one hour for ceremony and formals another hour for location portraits of couples and 6 hours at the reception. However for each hour we spend at the event, we are spending 2hours behind the computer.
This includes the time to download the files, sort the keepers from the rejected photos, process the proofs, which typically involves fixing the color, the brightness, cropping and also time spent backing up files, creating web galleries and also burning DVDs for shipping. So a typical 10 hour shoot results in over 30 hours of work, the majority of which the client never sees.
Sure there are photographers that can have your photos online within 24 hours and of all the galleries that i’ve seen that were put online the day after the wedding, there was only one photographer who did a GREAT job and currently he is wanted by 30 brides because he is out of business.
The Album Design Process
The album design process can typically take anywhere between 10 minutes to 20 minutes to design one layout in the album. A layout is two sides in your wedding album and often photos have to be cropped, retouched, put on the actual canvas and moved around to create a harmonious design.
The designs can be simple or complex but at the basic level the photos have to be pulled from the master gallery, sorted, categorized according to the time of the event, then put together on the layouts and then when the client approves the album, fully retouched. If the client comes back with changes that also adds additional time to the entire design process. So with that in mind let’s say a typical layout will take anywhere between 20 to 30 minutes, given that no album is approved without some changes being done.
With the above numbers a typical 15 layout album will take approximately 450 minutes to completely design, from start to finish and including changes. That’s roughly 7.5 hours, we’ll drop the 30 minutes because the computer is running really fast, so we got done in 7.
Shipping
We’ll factor in an hour of shipping over the course of the entire event and this includes, packaging and shipping, proof DVDS, contracts, receipts and the actual album.
So where do we stand?
Looking at the time we have the following:
Consultation – 2 hours
Contract – 1 hour
Engagement and Bridal – 8 hours
The wedding shoot and processing – 30 hours
The album design and approval – 7 hours
That’s a total of 48 hours worth of actual work that a good photographer has to do without cutting any corners (and the album design process is VERY conservative) to produce a good product.
But I found XYZ photographer who is only charging 50% of what you are charging.
The wedding photography market currently is diluted with thousands upon thousands of photographers entering the industry on a yearly basis. Some of these new photographers are really good, while others are really really bad.
We have seen some photographers charge $600.00 for an entire wedding with albums and a year later, they are gone. We have also seen Groupons for ridiculously low session fees and the photographer ends up selling hundreds upon hundreds of sessions. They have no idea how they will work them all but they do so.
A good photographer knows that in order to give their client time, process the photos in a good way and actually come up with a great album and not rush through the whole process takes time. They also charge for their time to cover taxes, insurance and health care.
Sure you can always find that diamond in the rough that has not figured out their value, but do you want to take chances with your wedding day and someone just discovering their calling?
So hopefully this will shed some light on why photographers or your wedding professionals charge what they do. There is just too much work on the back end that the client never sees.