I originally posted this image almost seven years ago along with an experience I’d had with someone pertaining to the cost of wedding photographers.
(For the record, it wasn’t anyone related to the wedding image below. I just like this image and decided to use it.)
The gist of the aforementioned adventure was a woman contacting me to do a wedding and then trying to get me to drastically reduce my fee. My price was about midrange so I offered her a couple of names of locals that worked for the price that she had in mind.
She didn’t choose either of those referrals. She chose a photographer she didn’t know, without checking references, and without seeing any of their work. She just went with them on the cheap.
It didn’t go well. Not well at all. She got exactly what she paid for which was practically nothing.
And then I heard from her again wanting to know, “What can you do to fix this?”
There wasn’t really much I could do with what she had. And what I could do would cost her, again, more than she wanted to spend.
I eventually did get with her daughter and make a few suitable for framing, but pickins’ were slim.
The moral of the story really is like the saying that you get what you pay for.
The following is the mass of the original post- the same is true today. Oddly, I am still having the same conversation with photographer friends of mine all these years later. ______________________________________________________________________________
If you intend to spend thousands of dollars on any special event you should make sure to figure into your budget the fees, of a quality photographer, to insure satisfaction.
For weddings, there are no retakes or do overs. If you want to insure that you get high quality images of your special day it’s a good idea to pay for the better photographer than to have to struggle with the bad results of a poor one.
As a rule, I stopped shooting weddings several years ago because people constantly wanted to haggle over pricing, and the price of my time is not open for debate.
I DO recommend quality photographers to those who contact me to shoot weddings and I am very confident about the ability of those photographers. If I weren’t, I wouldn’t suggest them at all. Their quality is fantastic, their pricing is fair, and they are great people to work with. They have far more patience for the tedium of weddings than I.