How much photographers charge for weddings varies greatly. This is a guide to help you know how to approach wedding-service pricing. You won’t walk away with a hard number, but you will walk away with everything you need to consider to find where you fit in the market right now.
Beginners may charge $100 (which I would liken to slave labor), and experienced pros can charge upwards of $10,000. It is hard to know where you fall when you’re getting started, so this guide will lay out a few key considerations for photographers who are starting to price themselves for weddings or feel its time for an overhaul of their pricing, or even for brides who are looking to try to estimate if the photographers they are looking at are worth the dough. Since I am mainly addressing photographers, I’ll direct it to that group.
I will break down the whole shebang into 4 categories; Time, Deliverables, Risk and Appeal.
TIME:
Time is money, as the saying goes, and the longer you’re on the clock, the more you ought to be worth. Some wedding days are 3 hours, some are 14, I’ve done them both and when you add hours, net gains are fiercely subdivided. For example, if you got paid $1000 for a 3 hour wedding day, you’d be making about $333/hour for the day. Not bad. That same price for a 14 hour day makes you about $71/hour for the day. Not great. So keeping that at the front of your pricing models will be priority 1.
As is true with all business, supply and demand are hard at work. If you’ve got a client base of 0 couples and you want it to become 1 couple, you are not currently in demand. That is ok because everyone starts with 0, but you’re going to have a hard time charging like a photographer who is in demand until there is more demand for your time. If you want to move that needle from 0 to 1, check out these two posts I’ve already written on how to get clients fast, and how to earn money with photography.
One way a highly professional photographer can make it known to future clients that they are in high demand is to keep a public calendar of their other bookings. If a visitor can see that other people are booking a 18 months out, that’s a good sign of demand, and a good reason for asking for higher compensation. On the flip side, if you’ve got a wide open calendar, it might be a good idea to keep that info to yourself so as not to give the impression that you’ve got a big, empty calendar and thus are not in demand. This doesn’t mean that every photographer who doesn’t keep a public calendar isn’t in high demand, but if you’ve got a full calendar, you should probably make it known.
Another way I have gone about showing how in-demand I am as a photographer has been to keep a map on my website of places I’ve photographed. I had a very diverse network very early on, mostly from college contacts, so I kept a map for a few years with little pins on it of where I’d shot and there were pins on both coasts and a bunch scattered in between. Giving my viewers the information that I have been trusted to shoot all over the country is an indication that my time is in demand.
Turning our attention back to that hourly-rate thing, let’s not forget that that wedding-day time is just a piece of the process. There is a considerable amount of time spent culling photos (weeding out duplicates and errors) and then editing the keepers to their desired state. Say for the sake of the math we started up there that you spend 30 hours editing. Now your $71/hr, which maybe didn’t seem all that bad to you, is now about $23/hr, only marginally better than what you can get working a night shift.
So how I approach pricing for time is strictly hourly – I did the package thing for a while and didn’t like how it benefitted some people and not others, I moved away from it because I wanted everyone to have exactly what they needed and nothing more or less. I give clients an event-day rate and I do not factor time spent editing into my hourly rate, strictly speaking. Of course I know there will be time spent on it and that I need to be compensated for it, but whether the editing takes me 10 hours or 20, that’s on me, and it it motivates me to get my clients their images faster because the faster I turn it around, the I made more per hour. Also, having a good workflow and knowledge of what needs to be done helps trim down turnaround time.
Another variable to the time consideration are if there are multiple photographers, or assistants. An assistant can be a minimal addition to the cost, but a second (or third!) photographer will require fair compensation for their time as well, possibly equal to that of the main photographer, if their skills are commensurate.
Additionally, think about how many photos come out of an 8 hour wedding day with one photographer (say 1,000 for the sake of argument). Additional photographers multiply the amount of photos that are being pushed through the editing workflow, which might well double the amount of processing time. These are all big considerations for calculating the value of time in wedding pricing.
DELIVERABLES
Deliverables are things that, when all is said and done with your service, the couple gets to walk away with. This was embarrassingly one of the last things I thought about when I was getting started trying to figure out what my work was worth. I was thinking about my own time, work, and self. As a client, I would want to know “What am I paying for? What am I getting out of this?” A good business keeps the needs and wants of its clients as a first priority and then meets them, or better, exceeds them. Keeping in mind what your client is walking away with is just good business.
Prints or print credits are one simple thing for a client to be able to have after all is said and done. This, I see as more of a way to over-deliver. They are small and not terribly expensive. A very small portion of my income from a wedding is a result of print sales, so I think it’s something that people want, but also something that I’m not working hard at up-selling them into, so giving a handful of them away is a welcome “thank you” for working with me.
The much higher in-demand deliverables for wedding photography are albums and digital rights.
Because I want every couple I work with to walk away with an album, I include a modest one in my hourly rate quote. It is up to them if they would like to upgrade it in either number of pages, cover material/options, or page thickness. Most are happy with the base album but it is good to have the option for those who want the more extravagant album. Including an album does raise my rate to account for the cost to me of the album, but it also raises the value to the client. If I’m just out of someone’s budget, I have dropped the album at times to help work with people who it may not be as important to as it is to me. The key is keeping in mind what is valuable to my client, my opinions don’t matter because I’m not paying myself to shoot.
The last main deliverable is the most controversial one, digital rights. Digital rights are basically the ownership of image files. Many photographers do not like to release digital rights because that means they lose future possibilities of income from them, such as print sales. This is a matter of strategy in my mind. To me, now that I’m better at seeing a client’s point of view, it seems a little like holding photos hostage to not give rights away. If I kept the rights and a client was unhappy they could only own the photos by buying the prints they wanted, but they were forced into it, they might spend an extra $200 buying prints, but even if they ordered $500 worth, it’s still not as valuable to me as a client who walks away happy because they didn’t feel like they were getting squeezed out of more money, and goes and tells 10 friends that working with me was so easy and they could do whatever they wanted with their files after the event.
This is the nature of the evolution of this industry – many photographers who came up through the film days see developments like this as drastic change in a negative direction, and photographers who embrace the changes and jump on the bus for the way things are now benefit because they gain that value and grow their network because of a better client experience. Thinking big picture and helping out your clients will always pay back dividends, so if I were you, I’d deliver as much as I can, which includes digital rights to raise value.
RISK
Wedding photography is a high-stakes game, at least one of the higher stakes games in the photography industry. Most of the time, you get one chance to nail a shot, and you have to do it perfectly. First kiss? Gone in a flash. Boquet toss? Over before you know it. A fleeting expression at the altar? Hesitate and it’s a phantom. This is the nature of wedding day. Sure, there are times for formal portraits that are more laid back, but to really nail the day, you’ve got to be sharp all day.
Risk is something that couples take into consideration when they are looking for a photographer, the question they are looking to answer is: who can I hire who isn’t going to screw up my wedding photos.
Because wedding day is one of the most momentous occasions in people’s lives, trusting in a photographer’s ability to deliver is a very big player as people estimate your value. This can be built by a number of things, the primary of which is the last topic of this post, so I’ll get back to that, but another big indication that a couple might be taking on a small amount of risk is a photographer’s ability to sign themselves to a contract that they will adhere to. Make a clear contract and that will help all parties involved to know what is expected for the interaction.
Age can also be an indicator of risk. Not always, of course, because many young photographers have not had to unlearn old habits and acclimate themselves to ever changing technologies like older photographers may have had to do, but there is hardly a replacement for experience, and it usually comes with age. If you don’t have physical age or a “ripened” business, it would be important to showcase any times that you’ve done something that proves you’re no slouch. For example, the biggest bridal party I ever worked with was 31 people, including the flower girl. It was intense. After that, I am confident I can handle just about any bridal party, and showcasing a photo of them might be a good indicator that I can hang with even the hardest groups. Showing off other fleeting moments like I mentioned earlier can accomplish the same thing.
If you prefer to make this idea less personal, the age of a business could be an equal indication. Probably the two in conjunction would give a client an idea of how much risk they are taking on. If you can convey that you are low risk, that adds a lot of value because people don’t want risk when the event is very important to them, they want stable, tried experience.
APPEAL
Last on my list is about portfolio power. It’s about how much people like your look, and how much they want it. Obviously, the biggest differentiator of your value and subsequent pricing is what your images look like. If they look like one in a million, that would be very good for business. If they look like one in ten, you might have to be more competitive (cheap!) in your pricing. Rarity is your friend if you want to raise your rate.
As I just avoided mentioning, it’s also an indicator of being low-risk, probably the primary indicator. If you’ve got a portfolio of 10 images that look great, it’s not as compelling as a portfolio of 1000 images that look great. A robust portfolio is not only an example of what you’re capable of, but it also mitigates risk in the proof that you can deliver over and over again. If you need tips on building a portfolio online, I wrote an article on that recently. Case in point, making high quality images will get you in demand and keep you there.
One last thought on risk and portfolio together, if your portfolio is full of a random mess of images (some commercial, some wedding, some portrait, some sports, some concert, etc.) EVEN IF THEY ARE GOOD, it may be hard to your viewers to believe that your primary concern is their event. A highly focused portfolio is better than a broad one.
IN SUMMARY:
As is the case with a lot of things, if you’re in demand, you will become more in demand, and be able to charge more for your time, too. Do all of these things and you will have a better sense of where your rates should fall:
Have a powerful portfolio with a long line of great images in it
Have a thorough contract for clarity
Stay in the game, the longer the better
Deliver, deliver, deliver
Keep time in mind and do the math.
If you can check off all the boxes, you will be in a good place. If you can’t because you lack experience, a good contract, a strong portfolio, or the ability to deliver big, you will have to be a more budget option until you can get those things squared away. There is nothing wrong with being a budget option for a time, you just don’t want to live there forever.
