Recently a small debate broke out on a few sites and I wanted to offer up my opinion from the side it seems a small majority really dislike. It was a discussion about how professional photographers can offer a $500 wedding package, and honestly it’s simple. First let me start by saying that I agree if people are giving an 8 hour wedding, a proof book, albums and prints for $500 then yes, that is a great injustice to the entire photography community. There are a ton of external factors here that determine the price of photography, for some reason there is this illusion that photography has to be extremely expensive, and can’t be had on a budget it seems this cry is coming from the elitist crowd, but nothing could be further from the truth.

They assume that if you’re getting photographs for $500, than automatically the photographs are total shit, they take no factors in to consideration, they don’t take how many hours, what they get, nothing, they automatically assume you’re service is crap. The reason for this is that they are threatened by your very existence. They’ll spread lies and smear your service every chance they get, that’s why I always recommend placing your photographs in an online gallery, so clients can decide if your service is worth it.

Lets examine a few different generic scenarios where a $500 wedding package will be a huge success;

  • Economically deprived area’s. Area’s with a history of poverty, and poor people who are raised on a nickel. I know it’s hard to comprehend for these elitists that weddings exists in the sub 20k per year salary demographics, and that people do get married who make less per year, than their expensive suit but it happens. It’s called a niche market that virtually every photographer looks over! I’m not talking about area’s that are just starting to suffer from the recent collapse, but ones that have had problems dating back 20+ years.
  • You have virtually no overhead as a business. For some reason, it’s beyond the realm of possibility to these people that smaller photography studios might not have a huge over head. Maybe they own their own studio, the ground its on, the building it’s housed in, and all the equipment inside has paid for itself time and time again. You don’t always need the newest and best camera or lighting to get the best pictures, so rushing out and getting the latest craze is only doing your clients harm by increasing their costs
  • You want to target that low-income market by offering a simple package, and count on doing 3-4 weddings per month from it. Money is money and it all spends after all right? And if you love what you’re doing, than it shouldn’t be an issue working on a Saturday or Sunday.

There are probably plenty of other instances where the market helps determine the price, and guess what your services are only worth what people are willing to pay for them. So if you live in an area where no one wants to pay $995 for three hours of photography, than you’re going to be out of business rather quick, you have to adapt to your surroundings and the market.

Lets examine what a $500 wedding package should consist of:

  • 3-4 hours of photography at max (about $125 per hour at first glance)
  • A proof CD & online proofs (if you’re using a 3rd party service and paying more than $7 a month you’re being robbed for being a noob and not hosting it yourself)
  • A list of items that really cost you no additional charges but you include with the service description (like free 30 minutes travel time, black and white, selective coloring pictures.)

So you have 3-4 hours of photography assuming you take 1 picture a minute that’s usable it will give you 240 images to process. Assuming my average processing time of 30 seconds per image, that’s an additional 2 hours. So now the actual wedding time is 6 hours. (Slight decrease to sub $100/hr). But that’s your final cost, it doesn’t cost you a single dollar more after this and you can now add items to their service. Now for the package itself, $500 is a nice amount of change for a lot of people and assuming you get 20 weddings per year, thats going to be $10,000 alone on just the weddings with virtually no overhead.

So based off $10k per year a lone in just 120 hours of work you’re looking at about $83.34 per hour. Not real shabby, but $10k per year is chump change. The real money maker is now in pushing the sale of a few prints and addons to their package. Throw a proof book priced at $150, and assume half your customers by that, (+1,500) add in the 10×10 leather bound albums for $350 and assume half your customers by those (+3,500), throw in lets say an additional $20k worth of prints from these weddings total, which at most should cost you $893.34 cents to print. (+19106.66) because lets face it, the newly weds still have money to order after getting the budget photography service.

That brings your grand total of sales off weddings $34,106.66 alone. Thats almost $35k per year for doing something you love on the weekends most likely do you know how many people would die for a job like that? Figure in if you do family portraits and seniors your total income should clear well over $50k per year on under probably 1000 hours per year. So that’s $50k per year in what I’ll assume a low income area (hence the reason to offer the package).

To wrap it all up, off our $50k per year assumption lets assume $20k of that went to expenses for advertising, utilities, business insurance, and misc costs. That’ll be a business profit of $30k per year, and if you can’t run a photography studio on $30k per year in a low income area, you shouldn’t have one to begin with. The best part about targeting this demographic is that they don’t seem to complain, and are generally extremely content with the service they’ve been given, that’s priceless to me right there not having to do with some bridezilla and her lunatic diva mother who just can’t seem to be satisfied.

Oh and btw in case anyone is wondering how exactly I got these figures, they were taken from our 2009 income figures for a photography studio I work at, that offers the “Budget” plan (yes the very one that “sucks”). 2009 was the year we introduced this plan after 3 consecutive years of falling income, and it has saved the photography studio. In conclusion, each photographer is different and if they are lucky enough live in the USA where they’re free to set their prices as they see fit. People who bash the “budget” photographer without taking circumstances into consideration are probably egocentric, manically self-centered, lunatics who no one wants to be around any way.