What is the average price of a good wedding photographer?
The value of a competent wedding photographer cannot be overstated. A wedding is a strange occasion, it’s perhaps the only event which might seem like an ephemeral glimpse in the grand scheme of things and also in complete contrast, it also oozes a majestic, eternal tranquility and contentment which keeps the bride and groom united in the sacred bond of marriage. While the decor, catering, venue, and other aspects of a wedding ceremony are temporary in nature, the power of professional wedding photography captures these moments of celebration where 2 people and 2 families become one and makes these moments permanent. The wedding album, a digital archive of the wedding would act as a memento for generations to come. This makes photography probably the most important aspect of a wedding ceremony because after a while people might forget that one bad dish in the buffet, the odd-looking decoration and flower arrangement but a bad wedding album would act as a permanent reminder and source of great regret for what might’ve been if you’d chosen the local or destination wedding photographer properly instead of scrambling for one at the last moment.
Now that we’ve established the unquestionable importance of professional wedding photography, we should also talk about how much hiring a professional wedding photographer could/would set you back. Here we have to be careful because “good” is a subjective term. What’s good for one person might not be good enough for someone else. The same thing goes for the price as well. What some people might consider cheap others might consider super expensive. So, keeping the subjective nature of the problem statement in mind we’ve decided to break all the expenses a “good” photographer generally incurs in pursuit of an ideal day at the office (in this case it means an ideal day in covering a wedding ceremony in its entirety). With that being said let’s look at a few of the expenses a photographer or a team of photographers has to bear in order to achieve their objectives with a high level of proficiency, competency, and efficiency.
- Equipment cost: - Professional cameras are expensive, this observation is no secret. Wedding photographers don’t have to deal with just cameras; there’s lighting, processing large volumes of data quickly, editing software, and a plethora of other expenses for various equipment and tools. Many professional cameras used in professional wedding photography could cost more than a small family car. If there’s a rule of thumb here it’d be if the photographer, you’re hiring is on top of his gear game then it’s almost certain the amount of money they’d charge would be substantially greater than a photographer with average/ below average equipment.
- Number of people in the photography team: - Perhaps this one doesn’t need much explanation as everyone knows if the number of people for a particular job would increase then the cost would go up accordingly as well. So, it’s extremely important that you authorize just the right amount of people (you don’t want very few photographers which would cause a loss of many picture-worthy moments. We also don’t want too many photographers who’d be paid to stand around and do nothing).
- Venue size: - This is perhaps the most important factor which gets left out of most discussions regarding the budget for professional wedding photography. This might seem counterintuitive especially when the last 2 points had no ambiguity about them. Many of you might be thinking “what has the size of the venue got to do with photography”? To answer that simply a small wedding hall would have much lower photography costs if compared with a large open lawn. In other words, if both the couple who’s getting married in the small hall and the couple who’s getting married in a large lawn hire the same photographer, the photographer would charge more from the latter couple simply because more area means more equipment and more manpower.
Keeping all these things in mind we decided to survey thousands of people in India who recently got married and we found out that people generally paid between Rs 50,000 to Rs 1,50,000 for professional wedding photography services. We must say there could be some inherent bias in our sampling technique as most of the people we surveyed mostly belonged to either lower-middle, middle or upper-middle classes. So, we’d advise you to take these numbers with a grain of salt as the super-rich and the super-poor aren’t represented in the survey dataset. We also found out almost everyone hired a professional wedding photographer and around half of the married couples and their families allocated more money in their professional wedding photography budget than they had intended in their original budget.
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