Weddings by Trisha

Welcome to Weddings by Trisha

First and foremost, let me start by congratulating you on your recent (or not so recent) engagement. For many of you, this is an exciting but stressful venture. Sure, telling all of your friends and family you’re getting hitched and showing off your new bling is fun but afterwards your mind starts to go full steam ahead. You find yourself obsessing over card stock, lying awake at night mentally shopping and going over guest lists. Eventually every bride to be stumbles over the eternal question; what about pictures?

Budgetary concerns are naturally on your mind. When a newly engaged couple start looking at the price tags connected to their wedding essentials they can easily become discouraged. The cake, the flowers, the dress; it all seems to add up to something meant for reality television. Some venues charge you thousands of dollars just to stand on their property. Fairytales, it seems, do not come cheap. It’s often necessary to cut corners; have Aunt Sally make your cake or have Uncle Bob take a few photos. Sometimes this is sufficient for the newly married couple. After all, it is just one day and you have the rest of your lives to be married. If you’re anything like me, you can justify spending in certain instances and scrimping in another. However, when you consider that your wedding photos and video footage are your only tangible item you can actually take away from your wedding day(besides a dress and of course the groom), you might readjust your priorities just a little. Think about it; now much are you spending on a dress you know you’ll never wear again? The cost of flowers alone is astronomical and we all know what happens to those.

So, why is it so darned expensive? In my excessive online research to find out what brides want, I always see someone who says something along the lines of “$100 an hour? Are you kidding me? I only make $10 an hour and I am not paying anywhere near that.”  Well yes, in theory, it does sound completely absurd. Cost of overhead and equipment aside, wedding photography takes time. Your photographer might only spend 8 hours at your wedding but their work has only just begun. Editing and post work can take up to two weeks or more of extra time; and that is not including the album design. Say your wedding photos took a mere 80 hours to complete (10 hours a day for 8 days); if you are paying $900, your photographer is making just over $11 an hour. Add in taxes and expenses and you’re paying your wedding shooter around minimum wage. Add in the student loans (not to mention the stress of shooting a once in a lifetime event) and you may be changing your question to “Why is wedding photography so inexpensive?” Think about your wedding pictures as an investment of memories. Sure, snapshots are memories too, there’s no debating that. Ask yourself if a handful of shots you deem ‘ok’ is really good enough or if you’ll grieve over the images that could have been. When you hire a professional photographer to photograph your wedding, you’re hiring someone who’s entire purpose is to make you look your best and to visually tell the story of your own personal fairytale…and in the end, it’s kind of priceless.