Wedding Photography

Hi all,

I'm just new to all this (recently engaged)...and I am wondering what is your experience with wedding photographers? I live in Northern Ireland and have been getting prices in and around £1300 up to £1800. It feels like an awful lot..but maybe you get what you pay for?

Clueless!

Nikki xx

 

I think that is probably slightly above average, but it depends what you are getting... what have they told you is included for that?

 

Is that for a package deal? What is included? Photographers offer so many different things it can be tricky to compare prices.

We got married abroad and had an 'elopement' package from our Canadian photographer. That included photos and transport to three locations of our choice and a disk of images (over 100 photos and there were only 5 people there so plenty to choose from). For our UK reception I booked a photographer for three hours on an hourly rate with a disk of copyright free pictures (we had 300 photos on the disk). Both added together they were under £1000. Even printing off about 600 photos afterwards and making up our own albums didn't push it over the £1000 mark.

Many photographers include much more than what we had, albums, engagement shoots, extra photographers etc.

I cannot fault the service or quality of either of our photographers, they were both wonderful.

 

N.B. I'm a wedding photographer so I'm writing this from the perspective of the other side of the fence as it were.

It might seem like a lot, but you have to think about whether the service that's being provided is what you want.
Reputable photographers should be able to give you an idea of what you can expect from them in terms of pre-wedding consultations, amount of time on the day, editing of the images, number of pictures you can expect and finally any albums or prints. If they do all this then you're paying for somewhere in the region of 40 hours of work.
Add to that turning up with (in my case anyway) around £8000 worth of gear, insurance and travel costs it all adds up.

I have seen adverts in the UK for photographers who will do your whole day wedding for £250 (or less), burn you a disk of all the images on the day and leave.
I've seen some of their pictures and... well if it were my wedding I wouldn't be happy with them.
If you pay the higher prices you have every right to expect some serious quality; the lower end, maybe not so much.

I do know of a lot of people who went with cheap options and really regretted it. Remember, you won't have the chance to re-take the pictures.
When I got married we hired the best photographer we could afford, talked to him about what we wanted and (despite having a whole day where I wasn't allowed to take the pictures) we were really happy with the results.
He absolutely nailed a couple of pictures that I had in my head and I'm glad we did it.