This is part two of photographic fees blog to explain and justify the costs of employing a professional photographer. From previous blog continued:

There are a number of reasons why there are so many cheap photographers out there. Here are some of the most common ones:

The lack of knowledge of the market. Some amateur photographers enter the market, confident of their photographic skills; naively start trading without knowing the fundamental elements required to be a photographer. Most professional wedding photographers are running a business as do corporate and commercial ones alike. And with any type of business there are many costs involved in running it. However, due to their lack of experience and knowledge of the industry, amateur photographers do not realise how much they need to invest to start a successful photography business. The mindset is that as long as they cover their material costs they will be fine. As a result their prices are a lot less than a professional who has done it as a full-time job for years.

Low quality of work. You then have photographers who have been in the industry for a number of years but still charge very little. Less than the newcomers because their quality of photography and service are so poor that nobody sees any value in their work.

Many armature and newcomers are still trying to build a portfolio of work. If they charged as much as a professional though being extremely talented they would not get a foot in the door and therefore never gain experience.

So why is wedding photography so expensive. Not only the photos themselves, albums and other products offered photography is not a solely commodity business. It’s a mixture of many. Firstly photography is an art. A skill and a service. Then a photographer has to be a good sales person.

For a wedding photographer it’s not just a case of turning up and taking a few well composed shots and then handing you a disc. There is a lot more involvement in creating the perfect memory of your wedding day.  One of the most important things is the labour. An average wedding can be 6 to 8 hrs in length. Photographers most often arrive well before hand to capture small detail before the event. During the actual event they will be on their feet throughout the entire period, capturing those special moments and will have taken between 800 -12000 frames from the day. That is physically demanding.

A great deal of people are not aware that a photographers job does not end when the event ends. It is not uncommon for people to think that it’s a simple job of downloading images and putting to disc or uploading to a web site. In fact images from cameras need to have what is called ‘post production’. This is to sort to categories, delete shots that are not wanted and to spend time enhancing with sharpness and contrast and levels to produce the final image. This process on a large job with many images can take a good few hours per day, over say three or four days. So if you were to spend time at an event say 8 hrs also time spent with the preparation perhaps 3 hrs and then over a three day period 4 hrs a day. This photographic session is now turning into 23 hrs and then its not finished there because of archiving and other services that may need attention. So the rate assumed at 250 per hour is now decreased to 70 per hour. This is still good money to earn but its not all profit as you will read in Part Three coming soon