Just a CD of Images, Please.

There are many ways to save money on a Wedding, some better than others. One popular approach is to organize a photographer for your wedding day, but plan to do the printing yourself. This might save money upfront, but there are some pitfalls.

The advantages are obvious: you have the files in your possession and can either print your photos at home or at a local photo outlet, which are often much cheaper than the prices you might expect to pay if your photographer supplies the prints. Likewise, you can make a slideshow on your home computer at no cost beyond a blank DVD and a label - in fact, you can skip the label and just write on the disk with a felt pen.

Department stores and online outlets have many products that sound just like the ones your photographer offers, and if you go direct, there is no middleman: so you can get Canvas Prints, Albums or Coffee-Table books quite cheaply.

Your family and friends will be able to come to you for souvenirs of your wedding, saving them the cost and inconvenience of dealing with the photo studio.

Reinforcing the idea of a disk-only wedding package is the sense that there is no real need for "hard copy"; people expect to share photos on Facebook or e-mail them to family and friends.

This idea appeals to some photographers, too. Most of the work of a wedding photographer is done after the wedding. Quality printing is an art and demands high-end printers, archival papers and inks. Pros do not use $100, 2 cartridge printers or $20 packs of glossy photo paper. Getting good results is expensive and time consuming. Many of us prefer the alternative of a pro-photo lab and pay them to produce true high quality, colour corrected prints.

A part-timer earning a bit of money from their hobby still has to turn up to their real job on Monday. The essential work of editing and preparing the prints and slideshows has to be done after work - a week of staying up till midnight staring at a screen. If the client is going to take that responsibility off the photographers' shoulders, why wouldn't they be willing to let them (and they don't have to take responsibility for the standard of the final results, either). Which is why you should not use a photographer who promises the files by the next day: they have done no work on them and you will be disappointed.

But, back to the subject:

In reality, when people order a "disk only" service, the photos taken at your wedding by the Professional Wedding Photographer, or by guests, seldom see the light of day. Very few are circulated, hardly any get printed, slide shows never eventuate and the DVDs do not even get downloaded to your computer because the files take hours to transfer and fill up the hard drive very quickly. But of course, if you don't download them, you can't edit them...

Are these the only reasons disk-only weddings are rarely viewed? There are many reasons; another is the time demanded to deal with the files on the DVD. They are quite different to the sort of photos that amateur photographers are used to dealing with. A typical wedding will generate 2000 or more files. Each 24bit file is 8 to 12 megabytes in size. Being confronted with so many, often similar images, can seem overwhelming; you can't just dump them onto your iPhone or upload them to MySpace or email them around the country!

And if you have the technology and knowledge to compress and send them, how long will you invest in reviewing and choosing which files to send to different people? Let's say you spend just 3 minutes with each photo - 6000 minutes; let's see...that's 4 days and nights without a break!

A 20 minute slide show averaging 5 seconds per photo will use about 300 slides and take an experienced designer about 6 hours to produce, including music tracks, captions, custom transitions and burning, once the most appropriate slides have been decided on and the music obtained. That's assuming you have the software to make a slideshow that is more than just a progression of pictures.

You can certainly get cheap post-card prints made - as little as 30c to 50c each. Not on quality, heavy weight paper; not with a choice of finishes; not converted to sepia or B&W; not using archival inks and papers that will still be fresh and bright in 80 years time.... but they are cheap!

Of course, you can't just hand over the DVDs and expect the photo store to know which ones to print, and you can't put the DVD in one of those do-it-yourself machines and go through 2000 images, picking out which ones you want as you go. But on the other hand, even at .50cents each, you do not want 2000 odd prints made for $1000!

If you want enlargements made on quality stock, properly framed, the cheap alternative is going to cost about the same as a quality product; if you look for canvas or coffee-table photobooks, the professional equivalent will not only last longer, be better finished and truer in colour to the original, it may also be less expensive (check out my own canvas print prices, as an example). Remember, the enticingly inexpensive ads you see are for minimum sizes - you can get a magazine style album for $30, but it will only be 25cm square and hold about 20 photos. Look for an A4 with a hard cover and enough room for your essential shots and you will get no change from $250 even on-line; an A3 will probably hit $500: but you won't know that till you get to the check-out, by which time you will have spent a week or more trying to get their propriety software and templates to design the book to look as you want it, instead of the way the company wants to print it....

The highest quality prints and albums are not available to the general public: some are only available from international suppliers, for others you have to be registered as a Professional Photographer or Designer in order to access them, while others are only advertised to the professions, so the general public does not even know about them; but that's a side issue...

Obviously, I have a vested interest. As a photographer, I want to be paid for my art and my time, and I want to control the final outputs from my work. I do not want you to show someone a department store enlargement or coffee-table book and say "That is David Rich's work"; they don't know that the inks, paper or stretchers are responsible for the picture looking a bit ordinary; they don't know how different a hand-sewn, UV protected, full bleed album is from the one on your table; they cannot imagine how that First Kiss would come to life it had been printed on gold or silver tinted aluminium instead of paper - but that's my reputation sitting there, and I can do nothing about it.