Figuring how much to charge for photos is probably the worst part of photography. Part of me wishes I could photograph just a few things a year, for free, give them everything I have and call it a day. But, right now, that’s not reality. The income keeps the train moving, so to speak.
Part of the frustration with pricing is hearing from clients, “you’re out of our price range”. I get it. Not everyone has an unlimited budget, but I beg you to look at wedding photography (and video for that matter) near the top of your priority list.
Think about it this way: What if you lost your wedding photos?
This has happened to many people. In fact, an artist we follow, Sean McCabe, had this exact thing happen to him and his wife. They hired an amateur photographer because as he admits, “we were being cheap”, and they paid the ultimate price.
Their photographer was a friend and she edited about 20 photos after the wedding, sent them off to Sean and his wife, and then disappeared. She was dodging messages/phone calls. They feared the worst and the worst came true. She formatted the card by accident and the photos were gone. There was actually nothing they could do.
Guess how much he and his wife would pay for those photos now? Thousands. But, that opportunity is lost because they hired an amateur. This moment, it would be gone:
As professionals, we have a very serious process for making sure we don’t lose any photos. It starts with backing up photos in 3 places – 1 copy on the SD card, 1 copy on a hard drive, another backed up to a cloud service like Google Drive/Dropbox, and for good measure we have Backblaze and a 4 TB MyCloud backing up the computers and hard drives.
That costs money. It also took time to develop that process and work out the kinks. That’s part of what clients are paying for when they hire professionals.
Here’s our professional process.
Does this process mean we will never lose a photo? 99.9% sure we won’t. But, there are those times where an SD card could fail before it’s backed up to a computer/server. It hasn’t happened so far and it’s extremely rare, but shit does happen. The point is we are doing everything humanly possible to ensure it doesn’t happen.
All of the stuff I just mentioned doesn’t even have anything to do with photography. And I think that’s why people balk at the price of wedding photography. They think photographers just show up, snap pictures for 8 hours and that’s it. But, trust me. There’s so much more. We are mentally, physically, and creatively exhausted after shooting a wedding, or any full day shoot for that matter. We call it the “wedding hangover”. Being constantly on, thinking carefully about every shot as we take it, what we’ve missed, what we’ve already got, the wedding timeline, the bride’s specific requests, and more.
If you aren’t hiring someone who’s done it before, you simply can’t get a product you’re going to be happy sharing with your friends, family, kids, and grandkids.
It’s once in a lifetime – don’t be cheap – and I’m only saying that because I care.
