Although we’ve only been offering weddings for a fairly short amount of time, trust us, we have done our research on all things wedding photography related. One of the ways we keep up with the new trends when it comes to weddings is to put ourselves in a bride’s shoes and act like we are searching for a wedding photographer. We scour google and social media platforms like Facebook and Instagram to see what’s out there in our community and what kind of issues that brides are having. We also survey our own brides so we can get a feel for what worked for them and what didn’t, what stressed them out and what made their lives easier. 

And here are some of the comments that we’ve heard the most when it comes to money: 

“Wedding photography is SO unbelievably expensive!!”

“Why do you charge so much? You don’t really have any overhead costs!”

“I can’t believe you make $1,500 in an 8 hour wedding day! That’s over $150 hour! You must be doing really well.”

Trust us, we know that planning your dream wedding comes with a very hefty price tag. Heck, planning a very small, not so dream wedding, costs a boat load of cash! That’s no surprise. With social media in our faces constantly, and as websites like Pinterest and Style Me Pretty continue to take over the wedding industry, there’s a lot of pressure to have the most detailed, picture perfect wedding day. What do you need to capture all of those picture perfect moments? A kick-butt wedding photographer.

See if this sounds familiar…

You just got engaged (YAY!) so you start asking around to see if you can find any great recommendations for an affordable, yet incredible wedding photographer. Then you start searching Facebook, Instagram, and wedding inspiration websites to find the best one in your area. You click on your state and hundreds of photography websites pop up. You choose the prettiest photo on the page, click it, and it leads you to a beautifully curated wedding photography website. You click over to their investment page and find out that you have to contact the photographer directly for the prices. Ugh, that’s annoying… but ok, it can’t hurt just to see. A day or two later, you get an email in your inbox and your stomach plummets when you read that their pricing begins at $3,500. Are you kidding me?! That’s half my wedding budget! There’s no way I can afford that just for pictures! Sound familiar? 

Ok. Let’s slow down. I want to break down a few reasons why wedding photography costs thousands when you wish it was only hundreds. Ready?

Let me begin by addressing myth number one… other than our cameras, we don’t have any overhead costs. Gosh, I wish that were true! If you’ve ever been guilty of this train of thought, don’t feel too bad. You’re right! The main tool we need to photograph a wedding is, of course, a camera, but have you ever googled how much a professional camera costs? (Cough, Cough $2,500- 3,000) Have you ever thought about other things like lenses ($800- 2,000 each)?

One of the first things we learned when we began photography around 4 years ago, was that the lens is really what makes the camera special. There are lenses for so many different types of photography situations, all of which are needed at weddings, which are the triathlon of photography jobs. Cameras and lenses aside, there’s lots of other equipment we need to serve our clients in the best way possible like camera bags, memory cards, batteries, chargers, flashes, and reflectors. We also have to pay for things like editing software, websites, online galleries for our clients, everyday business costs, taxes, the list just goes on and on and that’s all before we actually get to pay ourselves!

I don’t tell you all of this  so you will feel sorry for us! We just want to be honest with everyone with the fact that taking photos for fun and running a photography business are two different things, and the wedding investment options that we offer must reflect that if we want to stay in business (which we do!). 

Another common misconception is that you can divide our overall wedding package price by the number of hours that we are at your wedding (8 hours for us) and come up with what we make per hour. This is another thing I wish was true! I’ll give you a for instance, let’s say you book a wedding photographer for $1,500 for 8 hours of coverage on your wedding day. If you divide that out, you get $187.5/ hour. That would be nice, right? But like I said, that is NOT how it works. Let’s take a look at our wedding packages. 

If you look at our first package above, not only do you receive the 8 hour wedding coverage, you are also getting a 2 hour engagement session, an engagement session style guide, a personalized wedding timeline, and an online gallery with fully edited high-resolution images. Adding in the engagement session brings us to 10 hours of work then we have to add in the time it takes us to create your timeline and edit all of your engagement and wedding photos. If you’ve never edited images before, let me tell you, it can take a whole heck of a lot of time (like DAYS)! We take thousands of images on wedding day, and we go through each one so we can pick the best of the best to edit and deliver to our clients, which ends up being around 850-1000 images! Can you imagine editing that many photos?

If you ask any business owner to tell you three of the most valuable things to them, I guarantee you, their TIME would be on the top of the list. It’s certainly on mine! No matter what type of work that you’re in, you get paid by the time it takes you to do your job. Wouldn’t it make you mad if your boss told you that they had to pay you less but asked you to work more?!

I don’t want to sound like I’m complaining because it’s my job, and I absolutely love it, but many people don’t know that not only are you paying for your wedding photographer to show up on the day of your wedding, you are also paying for them to adequately prepare for your big day, and then perform all of the post processing on your photos. Now I hope that $1,500 is starting to make a little bit more sense!

So now that you know some of the behind the scenes of photography on a finance level, I hope you can understand why photography costs a pretty penny. You might have a better understanding of the price, but maybe you still don’t really know if you want to (or can) invest that much money into your photographer. All I will tell you is this… your wedding day is going to be SO special, and you are not wrong to want for it to be captured perfectly. This big day that you have likely been planning for months is going to go by incredibly fast! By the time you get back from your honeymoon, the chairs and tablecloths will have been sent back to the vendors, the flowers you expertly chose will be wilted, and the sole piece of wedding cake left will be in your freezer to eat on your anniversary, but the photo gallery and the heirloom wedding album that we create for you will last forever. Choose to spend the budget that you have wisely and don’t be afraid to invest in a great wedding photographer. 

In our post-wedding survey, we ask our brides if they would share any advice to new brides, and one of them took the words right out of our mouths,

“It may seem like a lot of money, but the pictures from your special day will last a lifetime. It’s definitely worth the investment!” 

If you need more advice on finding the perfect wedding photographer for you, join our email list. You’ll get 7 emails in 7 days that break down what to value when it comes to wedding photography! And it’s FREE, which I bet sounds really good after you’ve read all amount money! You’ll stop receiving emails from us after the last one hits your inbox, and we never spam you because we hate that!

I hope I didn’t overwhelm you too much with money talk! 

-Chelsea