Why Wedding Photography is So Expensive

After the last bridal show in Austin Tx, we got together with some friends for dinner and the conversation shifted to the cost of wedding photography and why it can be so expensive. When someone books a 5-6 hour wedding with us they may not be aware that our true time commitiment to our customer is about 30 hours.

We want our customers to understand that a professional photographer does more than “just shoot and burn a disk”. The wedding day is just the beginning. As professional photographers we always photograph in camera RAW format. This means that our workflow after the wedding is a day or so to process the 800-1500 images. Yes, we do check/adjust each image for color balance, exposure, composition etc as part of our processing. Then, we upload the entire wedding to the internet so family and friends can enjoy the photos. It takes quite a bit of time even with page templates and upload scripts to create/upload the 800-1500 thumbnail images, larger images and web proof pages.

A few months after the wedding, our happily married couple contacts us to go over their initial selection(s) for inclusion into their album and for prints. Many times we meet again and go over the 1st draft list, then select album covers, inserts or work up album page layouts. The images then go “off to the lab” for printing/processing. The appointments, lab transportation, phone calls, emails, etc add a significant amount of time to a wedding client.

Anyway, as you go about selecting your photographer or vidographer, please consider how much time and commitment your photographer is including in the “5 hour job” as you look at the cost for capturing your most special day – your wedding.