Wedding Photography

What do you need to be a wedding photographer?

First you need to understand that wedding photography is a business first and an art form second.

How so, you might ask? Look at it this way. Let’s pretend that you’re selling your wedding photography services for $2,000 a day. That’s a lot of money for one day’s work. But is it one day? Isn’t more like 10 days by the time you’ve met with the client twice and maybe the mother of the bride another time. But that’s just the start.

The day before you assemble your equipment, charge your batteries and press your suit and polish your shoes. Maybe there’s travel involved and there sure will be if you’re thinking of doing destination weddings in exotic locations.

So it’s the wedding day. You’ve arrived at the home or hotel early to capture the tender moments of mom and the bride’s maids dressing and prepping the lucky girl or it could be the man and his groomsmen times two or two brides and assembled helpers and friends. Wedding photography has gotten a lot more fun in recent years.

Maybe you need a second shooter (who gets paid too) to shoot the groom or the other man or woman at their hotel or home?

Great. Now comes an intense day of photography including assembling a quick show of JPGs of the day to display on an electronic frame at the reception that night. This is actually a money-maker as the guests get to preview of the images shot and now have an expectation of who and what is going to be in the wedding album. You also get to leave your business cards off to the side.

And then there’s the dancing and drinking and wise wedding photographers hit the road just before the frivolities get wild.

So much fun! But now you’ve got at least a couple of days of editing ahead of you. Then, after the honeymoon, there’s a meeting to pick out the images you’re going to sell to them or put in an album. This is where your quick slide show of images at the reception comes into play as I’ve said now the guests have some expectations of what the wedding album should look like when finished. “You can’t leave out grandma!”

One well-know photographer (and I think it was Gary Fong one of several wedding photography teachers whose workshops I attended) gave away his time – said it was free and unlimited – but he wanted a significant deposit on the amazing wedding album he was going to produce. Gary’s wedding albums when completed in fine leather and brass ran into the tens of thousands of dollars and were truly works of art.

A nice touch, especially if you’re upselling the images to an expensive album like Gary’s is a big image as a gift suitable for framing of the lovely couple.

Printing a big image is at least a half day working with a printer or worse working with your own big printer downstairs LOL. Don’t ask how I know.

Ok you get the point. Ten days work at $2000 a wedding is $200 a day. Still not bad but how many weddings can you do in a year? Let’s say you’re hustling and you’re booking (remember booking and marketing days have to be paid for) two big weddings a month for 10 months that’s 20 weddings. At $2,000 a wedding that’s $40,000 annual salary.

WHAT? $40,000!! Well you do the math!

Is there a way out of this madness?

There sure is.

Start by googling “how to start a wedding photography business” and then after you get over the shock of realizing this business thing is going to take awhile to understand google “wedding photography workshops”. There are a lot of chose from whether close to home or at some destination location. After I retired I did a series of photography workshops and at least three, maybe four, were about weddings and several others covered Photoshop and Lightroom. Creativelive.com has online courses which are very good and very affordable.

It comes down to this:

A lot of wedding photographers aren’t running a wedding photography business but they do have a very nice hobby of occasionally taking some photos at a wedding and charging for them.