Why A Wedding Photographer's Prices Aren't As Shocking As You Might Think!

One of the things we often hear remarked about, online and off, is how expensive wedding photography is. There does seem to be some disconnect between what people think wedding photographers charge based on their day rate, and the actual amount of work that goes into producing a set of wedding photos.

Average prices for wedding photography in the UK & Ireland are pretty much the same, although they vary by region, the South of England being the most expensive. According to www.yourperfectweddingphotographer.co.uk the average cost of a wedding photographer is

2020 All UK Wedding Photographer Prices Average:
£1590/€1900/$2055.

2020 UK - South-East UK Region Wedding Photographer Prices
£1600/€1913/$2066

2020 UK - South-East UK Region Wedding Photographer Prices
£1000/€1195/$1290.

2019 Republic of Ireland Wedding Photographer Prices
£1399/€1570/$1807.

Aside from region, the other things that can affect wedding photography prices depend on what the photographer’s fees cover:
- how many hours photography are expected from start to finish
- is there one photographer or two
- is there an album included or just image files
- are travel expenses included
- is the wedding photographer experienced or relatively new
- is VAT included

The above fees are averages, so there will be plenty of photographers charging less and a lot who charge much more. Like anything else, demand and supply determine prices … well, that and professional ego, or maybe a smidgen of cowboyism from chancers who will undercut everyone and not care about quality. Let’s stick with something along the lines of a trusted wedding photographer with good reviews charging a price of £1500/€1700/$1900 to shoot from Bride’s prep to first dances.

For us, we begin 2 hours before the bride leaves for the ceremony. Jill would go to the bride and I would go to the groom. Typically that can mean we’re photographing from 11.00am in the morning up until 10.00pm in the evening, sometimes later. So, an 11 hours of wedding photography, which most photographers tend to shoot on their own, although a growing number of wedding photographers shoot as a couple. Throw in 2 hours hour’s travel time there and back on the day.

That doesn’t sound so bad: 
£1500/€1700/$1900 divided by 13hours = £115/€130/$146 per hour

Except, wedding photographers know that actual photography is probably the least amount of work they have to do with a wedding, even if it is the most enjoyable part of their work.

First, you have to get the work, which invariably means having a website at the very least and spending on average about a day a week either updating it, promoting it, doing SEO, or working on social media and various other marketing endeavours, like wedding fares, advertising, promotional work, etc. This is all either time that doesn’t get paid for or it is money going out on marketing.

Now your 11 hour wedding shoot is actually 11 hours photography, 2 hours travel, and 7 hours of marketing:
£1500/€1700/$1900 divided by 20 = £75/€85/$95 per hour

Wedding photographers will probably shot anywhere between 2,000 and 6,000 images, depending on the number of photographers on the day, and the number of hours they’ve worked. These images won’t sort themselves out. It takes me a day, sometimes two days (usually towards the end of the season, when I’m crushed), to edit 5,000 down to maybe a working selection 400/500. Let’s say a day and a half (12 hr) on average.

So, that one day 11 hour wedding shoot has grown to 32 hours:
£1500/€1700/$1900 divided by 32 = £46/€53/$59 per hour

Once a wedding photographer has selected the best images from the day they have two options: process all the images themselves, or farm them out to a third party to be processed. Lots of photographers send out camera RAW files to be processed, and there is a cost to this. We don’t, so our cost is in time. Again, like editing, it takes me at least a day to process a wedding and longer weddings are certainly two days or more of making corrections, but we’ll go with two days on average.

I’ll also devote half a day or so to tweaks, going over images one at at time to get rid of anything that really annoys me, and then convert a selection to black and white — I always leave this until last. Then, because there’s two of us, I’ll also take the images from both cameras and sequence them so that couples get all images in one timeline rather than two separate ones. Between making clean-up tweaks, BW conversion, and sequencing, that’s easily a day’s work.

Now for the incidentals. Typically we will met couples either here at our studio or at the wedding venue, just to chat about their wedding day and walk through things with them. That’s about 30 minutes, plus any travel time. Later, once everything is done, we’ll meet them again so they can view their wedding photographs, and that usually is an hour here at the studio. Let’s call it 2 hours all in for both meetings.

So, our one day 11 hour wedding shoot is now at 58 hours:
£1500/€1700/$1900 divided by 58 = £26/€29/$33 per hour

In Ireland if your photographer makes more than €37,500 they have to register for VAT and charge a standard rate of 23% on digital files, and/or a reduced rate of 13.5% on prints/albums/etc. So, up to almost a quarter of their perceived income may be made up of a government tax that doesn’t go to them at all. That €1700 average might include a government tax of €400 which the photographer never sees

€1700 - 23% VAT = €1309 divided by 58 = €23 per hour

So, your 11 hour wedding photography actual works out at nearly a week and a half’s actual work; less than 20% of your wedding photographer’s time is devoted to taking photographs, probably even less.

Other deductions:

Travel
most photographers don’t charge travel expenses, but fuel still has to be paid for and cars still have running costs.

Equipment
Wedding photographers shoot more frames at one wedding than most people shoot in a year. Shutters in cameras do fail, which is why most photographers carry a back up body. We buy one new body every two years, and a 5Dmkiv costs €3000. So, €1500 per year comes out of any profits. We look after our lenses too, they last longer than bodies for sure, but there’s still costs associated with maintenance. We use L series Canon lenses for the most part, and they start at around €1500. Quality isn’t cheap.

Insurance / Indemnity
All working photographers should have insurance and indemnity, wedding venues won’t let you work on site without it and nor will the OPW if you want permission to shoot in their parks. It’s a necessity, and it’s not getting any cheaper.

Put aside a couple of thousand for advertising/marketing, not to mention software fees, website/domain/email fees, membership fees to various organisations, courses, insurance and professional indemnity, etc. And this is all before getting into the costs associated with albums, prints, computers, or have a premises/studio.

According to payscale.com the median salary for a photographer in Ireland is €30,000 (£25,064/$32,411), which is on a par with estimates of the median salary in Ireland nationally . The CSO (Central Statistics Office) prefers to give out national salaries in ‘averages’ rather than the ‘median’. Average salaries are always distorted towards to higher end due to high salaries, while the norm for most people is more accurately reflected by the median; the median of 49 people earning €25,000 and 1 person earning €1,000,000 is €25,000, while the average of the same is €44,500 - so you can see why politicians like quoting averages rather than the median. Source

So, all in, it seems that wedding photographers in general are pretty much middle of the road in terms of salary medians across the board, even though their work might be seasonal. While £1500/€1700/$1900 can seem like a lot for one day’s work, in reality it’s more like 5-7 working days of actual effort to produce a finished set of wedding photographs to a professional standard.

If we were getting paid €1700 for just a day’s work all the moaning about how much photographers cost would be understandable. Most of us know weddings are expensive, we’ve been there ourselves (mostly), but if wedding photography is a priority on your wedding day then what it actually costs is good value considering it’s one of the few things you will have from your wedding day that you can take away with you and treasure for the rest of your lives.

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