Weddings: A Place to Begin

I've been married 20 odd years, and at the beginning, Jean and I weren't all that financially secure. We started out with 6 kids between us, and two of those were handicapped. Then there was the mortgage, and all the usual costs of setting up a new home amidst the wreckage of the failed ones we had left behind. We may not have been in poverty, but the wiff of it was in the air...

And what has this to do with photography? A little: with not much cash in the household, we had to make a few ... call them "compromises"... with our wedding day.

Some things that you might expect to "have done" we simply did ourselves: Jean baked and decorated the cake; we catered the wedding ourselves, with great help from the local Salvation Army; I was still up on a ladder decorating the reception hall at 5 am on the Big Day. Couldn't afford a wedding dress or fancy suit (we married in Salvation Army Uniform "under the Flag" as Sallies like to say); and our children provided the music, songs and readings and acted as ushers.....

But one thing we could not do for ourselves was take the Wedding Photos and we sure couldn't afford a photographer.

What did we do? We told every guest who owned a camera to bring it along! Those were the days of film, of course, and it was an agonizing wait to see what - if anything - came back. We couldn't really chase people up and ask "what about our wedding photos?"

Well, we did get back some quite nice photos. We treasure them! They may be really simple pictures of family and friends standing a bit awkwardly and grinning at the camera, but they are OUR wedding pictures and they mean the world to us.

Does that mean that I would recommend the "d0-it-yourself" approach to wedding photography? Of course not; it can be done, but it is chancy and stressful.

What it does mean is that I am very conscious of two things when I photograph a wedding: the obvious one is the cost. Weddings have become very expensive undertakings, and a big part of the cost is the photography.

O.K., so it isn't a large expense compared with the catering or the hall or even the dress/shoes/car hire and so on. But how does a photographer justify up to $5000 for one day's work? Except it isn't one day's work to them.

For every hour taking photographs, there is another 3 hours editing, classifying, sorting, selecting, uploading to websites, building albums... it is worse for film photographers!

It isn't all profit, either: the taxes, maintenance costs, travel and insurance (I carry about $6,000 worth of cameras, lenses and other equipment on a wedding shoot - you bet it's insured; and so is the computer I store and edit it on) - they all eat into that fee. J

Just about every wedding happens on a Saturday, so there are only about 50 jobs per year maximum from which to earn a living. At $2500, a photographer with one assistant to pay will just about break even.

So how come there are people out there offering to do the job for under $1000? Often they are offered by part-time photographers who are not relying on their photography to earn a living: they have a "real" job. But yes, full-time pros have budget packages too.

I certainly have packages for under $1000, partly because I remember what it was like when I got married, and I don't ever want to price my services out of the reach of any couple. But I can only afford it because most people want more than the budget package, and it is the average return that determines whether I go broke or not, and besides, it generates good word-of-mouth referrals

Weddings also generate alternative income steams which let's us run "break-even" packages - for instance, when I contract a $950 wedding, my I know I can count on extra income from sales to guests; and then there are relatives who couldn't get to the wedding. Even though I give all of the opictures to the bride and groom on DVD, a lot people prefer to buy prints direct from my website - it's cheap and the couple don't have to part with their precious CDs.

The other thing I an very conscious of is that leaving the photos to the goodwill of friends might get you a record of the bits of the wedding as they went to - the service and the reception- but that is only a tiny part of your experience as a Bride or Groom. That is where the real value of a professional photography shines out.

My friends took pictures of us standing with family or friends, but there is no record of the day as a whole, and while the photos stir our memories, they can't convey our emotions and our love and sense of the day to anyone else, not even to the other participants.

When you place yourself in the hands of a Wedding Photographer they will meet with you, discuss your plans, come to understand how you see this day, and work with you to create something very special that encapsulates all that this means to you. And they will have the skill, experience, technical ability and the equipment to ensure you wedding memories last a lifetime.

When the wedding cake has been eaten, the guests have gone home, and the Gown has been put in mothballs it will be your Rings and your Photographs that stay fresh through all the years of your marriage.