I have been asked this so many times... does the wedding industry inflate prices when they hear it's a wedding?
Here is my honest answer (as a former wedding photographer)... NO. Did I charge more for a wedding than a 50th birthday party or a family portrait session? Yes, absolutely. I charged A LOT more for a wedding.
Was I taking advantage of the emotional sell? Absolutely not.
The main reasons I charged more for a wedding were: the unseen amount of work involved in the 12+ months leading up to the wedding, the skill level needed on the day, the INTENSE pressure to create perfect "portfolio level work" no matter what the reality of the situation- but mostly it is to compensate for the time AFTER the wedding in post production.
Little known fact about wedding photography - the real job is sitting at a computer editing photos. Photographers spend many hours behind the computer carefully selecting and editing photos. They make adjustments, crop, and adjust colors to ensure each image it's best. Don't forget the time it takes for batching, renaming, importing, exporting and uploading the photos and preparing them for delivery.
Do you think this justifies why photographers charge more for weddings than for other types of shoots?
2 comments
My husbands mom is Catholic and assumed her son would be married in a Catholic church. He went to church with her as a kid, he had little choice. By the time we got married it never crossed our minds to have Catholic or religious wedding. Our work-around was to have his mom and my Grandma do readings about love (from the bible), it made them happy and it was something we believed in. Are you dealing with anything like this?
When writing your Wedding ceremony , it’s important to remember that the focus should be on the love the two of you have, the life you’re creating together, and the future that you hope to share together. If you are religious, you should absolutely include religious aspects of the ceremony that make the most sense for you. If you the couple are not religious, then you don’t have to include anything religious within the ceremony. If you’d like to make a small nod to religion, in order to appease your family members, there is definitely way to do that with a generic nondenominational blessing at the beginning of the ceremony. Maybe ask that family member to come up and do a reading from the Bible for you . But your whole Ceremony does not have to revolve around religion.