Wedding Forum - How much are you paying for photography?...

ive been searching all day for photograpghy and they all seem very pricey and h2b thinks i was joking with him when i told him were looking at about £650. how much are paying and how many hours coverage do you get? x

just find one photgrapher who does all inclusive from getting ready to first dance for £495. has 26 years expearience think im gonna email him and check out his work and availability x

it says on his website that it includes an album and 30 mounted prints. One package, one price, and one day, your day for £495
Photography, choice of album's, with prints, DVDs and a copyright free CD of you photographs.
From getting ready to the first dance.

choice of albums (photographs included), two DVDs to choose your photographs from and a copyright free CD to do your own re-prints.

All for £495 no extras or hidden charges.

xx

The quotes I keep getting range from £400 up to £2,500! The prices vary so much and it's hard to narrow it down. A guy I work with who got married last summer said that the best advice he could give us was mainly to pick a budget for photography and stick with it and just approach photographers and say this is what I want to spend, what can you do for me. However, I'm yet to try this lol. I started out with about twenty websites and slowly been narrowing it down over the last few weeks and gonna contact a few in the next few months to see more of their work and go from there! Good luck, I'm sure you'll find a great photographer for a great price :-) x

were paying £800 for 60 prints and a photo album x

we are paying £450 for ours, from getting ready to first dance, that includes 2 photographers, a pre-wedding shoot, the disk with all high quality edited pics on so we can print our own, and a photobook with 30 prints in. Ive seen work he has done, and he is really good :) his leaflet is on my profile

we didnt want a photo album, as we were going to make our own photo story book, we have used a site before and it was fantastic - dont know why some photographers charge £900 just for the book, when you can buy them for £100 (i know it isnt the graphistudio or queensbury book, but for us they are just as good)

£650 is cheap! we booked our photographer yesterday, she charges £1,400 for a whole days coverage frpm
her and her husband. We get an engagement shoot a month before the wedding, 300 photos on disc, a DVD slideshow and a website.

£1250 but will end up paying more when I fall in love with the pics I know. I love her work.x

im lucky that one of my guests is a wedding photographer and is doing my wedding for nothing

Our photographer is costing us £1145.

I know it's a lot but she is with us all day and wil be doing a lot of running around. The package we have booked is the biggest one that she does, with an album and then a cd with all the prints on aswell so we can create another album if we wanted! She is also doing us a parent set of albums and other things!! She came highly recommended and is worth every penny. xx

we got the 1200 package right down due to very good timing as they were having a jan sale. We now have top package where the pics are just as good as the prof we were going to give 1500 to, top video, album storing 100 pics, copyright disk, 2 parent albulms, 2 confetti canons, a3 photo framed and a 3 tier undecorated wedding cake for 1346. whoop

ours costs £500 for a 100 page printed album and 4 large prints and CD of all images xxx

our photographers didnt want anything, but we are giving them £50 for travel costs. one of them will be with me in the morning 10am whilst getting ready and the other one with be with H2B whilst getting ready, they then doing the service, arrival at venue, photos there, cake cutting, then they are coming back and breakfast for first dance and the evening, we are getting discs with every one of the photos they take. i phoned up the unis etc.. and asked if there was any one that is finishing their courses that would love the chance/experience of doing a wedding xx

Charlz - Can you put his link on my wall please?

ours is £800, its all day but only a cd.Though i dont min as my mum and gran say, after the first few months/year you never look at the album again (and i know for me personally that will be true as well)
The package should have been £900, but i got £100 off for having a weekday wedding.

My original choice had only been £675 but he decided to take a 2 week holiday and my wedding is in the middle of his holiday :s
I personally see that as daft as the end of july/begining of August is one of the busiest wedding times, i would go at a slower period but i guess each to his own, and i am glad he did, as i love the one we have booked now.

We were getting ours done for free by a brother of my h2bs close mates. But now I am not sure if it will go ahead, as my h2b posted some comments on fb that were a bit offensive towards Japanese people, which was really stupid especially as they are going through a horrible ordeal at the moment. Anyway this guy and his wife read the comments and I don't think they appreciated it, not many did including me, and now I just don't know if he will be willing to do us that favour. Wish h2b would think before he acts sometimes. I know his grandfather was a POW held by the Japanese, but he fails to see that it isn't todays generation that is to blame *sigh*.
You are right though, it is expensive, but if you have the funds it is worth it to have those memories captured forever. xx

aww thats brilliant Nuttynonnie :) i dont want to be spending to much as on a really tight budget but i know if i want a decent photographer you have to pay the price. x

We got ours for nothing. xx

We'll be paying £800.
That's from preparation for me and my attendents as well as the grooms lunch which is going on in the bar in the hotel where we'll be married until midnight.
We're not going for any prints or albums but instead have asked for a copyright free CD of all the images. It's so easy to arrange those things yourself through various websites.
I'm fortunate that I book photographers through my job so knew exactly who I wanted.
xx

ours was in dollars so cant comment hun but £650 sounds a good price if you can get what u want for that

From Faeth:

"I was musing to myself about the cost of photography for weddings, and how in some cases it did appear to be pretty pricey, and there was a good explanation for this from one of the suppliers on here. Basically a Wedding Photographer is not going to get work every day of the year. In fact chances are, they are mostly only going to get work in and around weekends, but they have to make enough money to survive, so the prices need to reflect that."

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Yes, I think one of the misconceptions a lot of people have is that a wedding photographer earns outright what they charge you - for a days work.
There of course is far more to it than that. A fairly good average for time spent by the photographer on your wedding photos is around 45hours - so roughly a working week per wedding.

Out of what your photographer charges you has to come various things like equipment, product, insurance, travel etc.

Most photographers I know will shoot on average between 20 and 30 weddings a year. From those 20 or 30, they need to make enough money to pay all the bills and associated costs with the business - and still have an salary..

A lot of photographers in the £500 bracket and under will be earning barely enough to survive on (even if they were doing 26 weddings a year at £500 a pop they would still only be bringing in £1083pcm before tax. If we assume each wedding costs them £100 for travel, insurance, prints or an album etc, that figure drops to £866pcm before tax )

So while you may go - OMG £500 this guy is great and cheap! That guy you're booking for your wedding next year or the year after that - may not be around any more when you try to get hold of him again.
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"But then you see others getting deals as low as £300-£500, so how is it they can do the same thing for so little? Then it occurred to me that perhaps (and I don't know this for a fact) there is a difference between "Wedding Photographer" and "Photographer who does weddings"? I know my deal was one of the cheapest I have read about on here, but I know that my photographer does alot of work photographing sports events, and also doing pictures for use in advertising, so maybe because he gets other income this way, he can afford to be cheaper for weddings?"


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A lot of the photographers in the £300 -£500 (or even lower) bracket either have another source of income (i.e full time job), or do weddings as a side line from their usual photography work (although these types of shooters are very rare).

Typically they are mostly people who want to earn some extra money - have gone to a few weddings as a guest and decided that buying a cheap DSLR is an easy way to make £300 on a weekend. They may have done a few photography courses, or taken pictures as a hobby for years - but wouldn't you rather pay a bit extra and have the peace of mind that hiring a proper professional will give you?

I know brides sometimes feel like everyone is just out to make a buck from them - but in the photography world, the real scam merchants are not the people who will charge you £1500/£2000/£4000 for photography, but the people who are just out to make a quick £300 from playing at being a photographer for a day.

Go and see the work and albums of a £300 photographer and then go and see a £1500 photographer and tell me who gives you the best value.
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I guess the decision is then, do you want someone whose expertise and experience is focussed (oh the terrible pun!) solely on weddings, or are you happy with someone who has wedding experience but also does other types of photography?"


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Ultimately the only person who can decide what figure suits your budget is you. All I want people to do is look at bit further than the bottom line figure and remember:

If it looks too good to be true, it probably is and caveat emptor

HTH
Alex

we've budgeted £1500-2000 for our photography! but we do want a video as well xxx

Nothing???? WOW!!! x

We are very lucky, my mate is student photographer outside of work, he's charging us £200 to do all the photo's. His pictures are really good xx

Nothing lol. My fathers a photographer and my cousin is a budding photographer. so between them they are doing it. lucky for me i guess. lol