Let me just tell you right now: hiring a good wedding photographer, on the Outer Banks or anywhere, is going to set you back some cash. Many couples, when researching wedding photographers, are often surprised, even shocked, when the photographers they are interested in send them price lists. Why does it cost $2-3K — or more — for six or seven hours of coverage? That’s like $400 an hour!
In this post, I’m not going to discuss how much you should spend on wedding photography or why. I’m instead going to let you in on why skilled and experienced photographers charge as much as they do. Having been in this business for over a decade, and having seen its highs and lows, I know that one thing that hasn’t changed over the years is the cost of doing business from a photographer’s perspective. I will also tell you that if you think today’s prices are high, just have a little talk with anyone who got married 2006, when the average price of a wedding photography package was about 30-40% higher than it is today. Market saturation has brought prices down, but there is still quite a lot of back-end investment on the photographer’s side, both soft and hard, that has remained the same. This is why, if you are looking for a good photographer, you are going to have to spend a little money. Here’s a bit of a breakdown, a look behind the lens if you will, at what makes wedding photography as costly as it is:
1) Running a photography business requires a lot of capital. A good wedding photographer will usually own two or three top-of-the-line DSLR or mirrorless cameras, each worth anywhere from $2-5K or more. They will also own an assortment of lenses, whose total value will be somewhere around $5-20K. And then there are flashes, transmitters, strobes, light modifiers, computers, hard drives. Photography is a gear-hungry enterprise, and good photographers are always investing in equipment. Most photographers’ insured business assets run between $40k and $100k, sometimes even more.
These tools of the trade are not only expensive, but they require constant maintenance and upgrading. I can easily spend at least two thousand dollars a year on gear repair, and every few years I need to buy new equipment to keep up with the technology.
Additionally, there are licenses, advertisements, fees to professional associations and online portals such as WeddingWire and the Knot, entry fees for wedding shows; and items such as banners, albums, and booth decor. Some of us also have employees we must pay, and we all have office costs. Add all this together (plus a few other costs enumerated below) and a photographer’s expenses can easily add up to half of their gross income. Which means if you are paying, say, $3k for a wedding photographer, they will probably be taking home about $1500 after all their other expenses are paid.
2) Running a photography business is time-consuming. The amount of time a photographer spends on your wedding can easily run to 5-6 times the amount of time they spend at your wedding. There is the initial correspondence, either by email or phone. There is the preparation of the contract. There is the time spent beforehand working up a timeline and coordinating the final details. The night before your wedding, your photographer will likely spend an hour or two cleaning gear, syncing cameras, charging batteries, et cetera. In some cases, there might be long commutes to your destination. The two to eight hours that the photographer spends at your wedding is just the tip of the iceberg, but it is easily the most stressful and strenuous part of the process. We lensfolk know that there are no do-overs, and that we only get one chance to get it right. And in the pursuit of that goal, we will expend quite a great deal of physical energy running, squatting, standing, and getting down on all fours to get the perfect shot.
Then, of course, there is the editing. Hours of culling thousands of shots into hundreds, and then fine-tuning and enhancing those hundreds into works of art. And then exporting, burning, uploading, posting, delivering, et cetera.
But over and above the amount of time spent on any particular wedding, a great deal of a wedding photographer’s time these days is spent on marketing: blogging, posting to Instagram, attending wedding expos and designing print ads for magazines (which is also expensive). In order to stay visible in a competitive market, today’s wedding photographer spends more time than ever before on social media, SEO, and networking.
And then of course there are the day-to-day tasks of paying bills, managing email correspondence, and just cleaning the office. Believe me, we’d rather spend all our time just taking photos, but in order to live the dream of being professional photographers, we have to pay for it by hours in the office just keeping things running.
3) Running a photography business requires education, experience, and skill. You can’t just pick up a camera and decide you’re going to be a wedding photographer without investing a great deal of time educating yourself. Most wedding photographers start out by learning online, but at some point in the course of their education, they will probably attend workshops and conventions to hone their craft and learn new skills. This is an investment in time and money that can’t be underestimated. A typical week-long photography workshop will run over $2k, before transportation and accommodation. But the skills we learn at these events are invaluable, and you the client are the beneficiary of the hard work we put into learning how to become better at what we do.
Over time, a good wedding photographer will accumulate two other high-value assets: experience and skill. An experienced photographer knows how to anticipate action, knows how to read the light, knows when to use a flash and when not to, knows how to direct and pose, knows how to keep to a timeline, knows how to draw out subjects who claim to be “unphotogenic”, knows how to keep calm and smiling through most any kind of situation. We can do this because we developed an arsenal of skills over many years, giving us confidence, and because we have plenty of experience to draw upon. We’ve seen a lot over the course of our careers, and that enables us to anticipate and respond to a multitude of situations.
Hopefully, reading this will give you a better idea of the invisible costs behind your wedding photographer’s price list. If you have any questions, please do not hesitate to email me or send an inquiry through the “contact” page. I’m always happy to talk shop, and it won’t cost you anything!