Do you make a living as a wedding photographer?

"DD" wrote in message
...
In article ,
says...


Eh? How much are you paying for a print and how many prints does the
average US wedding photographer supply to the bride & groom? Based on
our local figures, if you are supplying say 120 5x7's and 10 8x12's
with an album Henzo you shouldn't be paying more than $150. Surely?

--
DD
www.dallasdahms.com
Central Scrutinizer

Get out of Wal-Mart and try a Professional Specialist lab which specialises
in Wedding work. The idea an album costs what you include is ludicrous in
the extreme.

"DD" wrote in message
...
In article .com,
says...

Well, can somebody show me the income statement and balance sheet of
the
average wedding photographer so as to justify what you are saying here?

Scraping by my ass...

I am with you one this one, at $2500 / week you should be doing a lot
more then scraping by.

I'm beginning to think its a form of subterfuge employed by wedding
photographers to dissuede more people from entering this lucrative
market!

--
DD
www.dallasdahms.com
Central Scrutinizer

Well you are part way right in that Dallas. The problem with business in
general today, is that more people are willing to jump in at the deep end
without consideration for the consequences. My studio is in a shire on the
outskirts of a significant city. Currently that shire supports 5 (lets say
reputable for want of a better word) Wedding photographers and about 40
wannabes. There are 50,000 houses in this shire.

I get about 7 requests a year to fix or reshoot a Wedding one of these
wannabes has stuffed up. That is significant when the average studio shoots
25 to 30 weddings a year. None of the wannabes accept responsibility for
their actions and all use a mini-lab to print their pictures and all of them
to a 'T', charge less than $500 AUD and provide more and more quantity and
less and less quality each year. The latest offering from my favourite
wannabe to hate is 600 pictures, posted to the Internet within 24 hours of
the shoot at a resolution I've been able to make 8" x 10" prints from for
$400 cash. Hell man, I spend 3 days working on pictures just to get a
hundred I'm satisfied with. I might spend 2 day on one picture alone if it's
to be a canvas portrait.

If these people who I look on like weeds - pull one out and two more pop up
in their place - didn't exist, I could reduce my expenses and make more
money. And like you say, this is what business is about. I won't bother with
justification of my own income, if you think 57k a year is good money for a
self employed business person, then you have no idea of a profitable
business and how to acquire wealth. This is a borderline income when one
single camera with a fixed lifespan costs $5000, not to mention the cost of
the second and third one or the lenses and other gear needed to ply your
trade with any degree of professionalism.

It is true that a single person operating a K1000 pentax (or whatever a
Leica equivalent is) and a reflection board covered in cooking foil which an
assistant having half an eye for lighting could hold, might indeed shoot a
wedding and get the films developed at Kmart or any discount lab and turn a
profit by charging $400. Ask yourself first, how many fathers borrowing
$20k for their daughter's wedding are actually interested in the uncertainty
of such a thing?

If a business is going to succeed, it has to have a target client base. If
you see your client base as those looking to pay $400 or thereabouts for
photographing their daughter's wedding, go for it mate, there must be some
around. I can sell you a hundred rolls of close dated Konica film for 50¢ a
roll to get you started too. Or maybe you think you can do it with the film
you get back every time you put one in for processing?

I payed out $23k AUD last year in advertising and event promotion alone. I
also paid out a further $18k for replacement and purchase of equipment. I'll
probably do the same next year. My rent for a 50 square metre shop I use as
a reception studio was another $8300 AUD and the electricity bill to keep it
air-conditioned was $1500 AUD. My bill last month for wedding albums (5 of
them) including photos was just a beer under $5k. although it is closer to
$2k in an average month.

My target client is a middle to upper income family with a fully owned house
who has or is about to borrow upwards of $20k for their daughter's wedding.
These clients will turn their back on you if you even suggest you can do
something cheap or cheaper. They are paying out big bucks to celebrate a
once in a lifetime occasion and they sure as hell don't want some fool
shaking a silver board around to get the light right, interfering with their
day.

But you have alerted me to something I wasn't quite aware of until you
started plucking figures out of your head. That is the method of assessment
you are using to judge people on their income. It is flawed in the extreme
and I am surprised more people haven't pulled you up on it. Maybe where you
live there is no wealth?

Get out of Wal-Mart and try a Professional Specialist lab which
specialises in Wedding work. The idea an album costs what you include is
ludicrous in the extreme.

I don't think they specialize in wedding work per se, but I use White
House Custom Color, and they're a far cry from Walmart - I *will* get
exactly what I send them, without question, and the prints are outstanding.
I've never been unhappy with a single print, and neither has a customer, and
for the prints he quoted (120 5x7, 10 8x12), the total bill would come out
to... $62. Including shipping. If I were to mess up the order and submit
them as ordinary prints, and not proofs (which are the same quality, they
just give you the bulk pricing on proofs), it would still only come out to
$148. Sure, it takes three or four days to get them back, but I'm alright
with that.

If I go to the local "specialist" shop, then yes, it would run a few
hundred dollars more. The funny part about that is that the specialist shop
uses the same printers and same paper as White House (really!), the price
doesn't include anything but the prints, and they still take about two days
to get them back to me. I would just be giving some guy a couple of hundred
bucks extra for no benefit to myself. If that's how you like to do
business, that's fine, but it's not really my style.

steve

"Charles Self" wrote ...
"BigPix" wrote ...

How do I get into the rattler shooting business Charles? Sounds like it
might be profitable (for a change)?

Sell and write an article on venomous snakes. The pay sucks, and the
bennies
are non-existent.

Toothless rattlers then ?

In article ,
p says...

"DD" wrote in message
...
In article ,
says...


Eh? How much are you paying for a print and how many prints does the
average US wedding photographer supply to the bride & groom? Based on
our local figures, if you are supplying say 120 5x7's and 10 8x12's
with an album Henzo you shouldn't be paying more than $150. Surely?

Get out of Wal-Mart and try a Professional Specialist lab which specialises
in Wedding work. The idea an album costs what you include is ludicrous in
the extreme.

Wal-mart? I don't think so, Tim.

I use a variety of labs, a couple of which operate under the banner of
being "pro" labs, and their prices are generally cheaper than what the
average Joe pays at the supermarket.

BTW, how does a lab specialise in "Wedding work"? Do they turn away
anyone who is not printing photos that were taken at a wedding???
--
DD
www.dallasdahms.com
Central Scrutinizer

I am with you one this one, at $2500 / week you should be doing a lot
more then scraping by.

I'm beginning to think its a form of subterfuge employed by wedding
photographers to dissuede more people from entering this lucrative
market!

Here's a true story: I personally know a photographer who specializes in
photographing construction sites. He gets to fly around in a helicopter,
and take pictures - and won't even get out of bed for less than four
figures. This guy is rolling in the money, really. Just his watch
collection alone cost in the mid-six-figure range. His 10-year old wears a
Rolex. He's definitely not scraping by.

He's had so many people ask him to shoot weddings (which he doesn't like
to do), that he hired a grad student to go shoot weddings for him. He gets
a booking, he sends the grad student, prints proofs, and hands the entire
package - negatives and all - to the customer. And his prices are
definately on the "reasonable" end of the scale. He does very little work
on that side of the business, yet he's told me that he clears $70,000 a year
for himself out of it. That's AFTER paying the grad student.

Yes, there's money to be made as a wedding photographer. The trick is
that you have to be both a good photographer and a good businessman, and
sadly, most wedding photographers come up short on one or the other.

As a side note, the guy with the watch collection showed me a watch that
cost him something like $50,000. It has a transmitter in it, and if he
pulls out the antenna, it will start transmitting - and no matter where he
is in the world, someone will come to rescue him. I think that the
*minimum* bill for a "rescue" is $10,000. My first thought was that he had
some James Bond fetish or something, so I asked him "Do you really need
that?" He said that he'd been in three seperate helicopter crashes, two of
which were in the Amazon. I said "Alright, I guess you do."

steve

In article ,
p says...

Well you are part way right in that Dallas. The problem with business in
general today, is that more people are willing to jump in at the deep end
without consideration for the consequences. My studio is in a shire on the
outskirts of a significant city. Currently that shire supports 5 (lets say
reputable for want of a better word) Wedding photographers and about 40
wannabes. There are 50,000 houses in this shire.

Again, I am not interested in becoming a pro wedding photographer. I am
simply interested in it from a business perspective.

It is true that a single person operating a K1000 pentax (or whatever a
Leica equivalent is) and a reflection board covered in cooking foil which an
assistant having half an eye for lighting could hold, might indeed shoot a
wedding and get the films developed at Kmart or any discount lab and turn a
profit by charging $400. Ask yourself first, how many fathers borrowing
$20k for their daughter's wedding are actually interested in the uncertainty
of such a thing?

This is why I asked about how competitive you might find the industry.
Of course there are going to be back-yard operators cutting prices.
That's true for just about any business and part of the business
planning stage. Ever done a SWOT analysis?

I payed out $23k AUD last year in advertising and event promotion alone. I
also paid out a further $18k for replacement and purchase of equipment. I'll
probably do the same next year. My rent for a 50 square metre shop I use as
a reception studio was another $8300 AUD and the electricity bill to keep it
air-conditioned was $1500 AUD. My bill last month for wedding albums (5 of
them) including photos was just a beer under $5k. although it is closer to
$2k in an average month.

So how many weddings do you have to do to break even? What's your PPF
(production possibility frontier)?

My target client is a middle to upper income family with a fully owned house
who has or is about to borrow upwards of $20k for their daughter's wedding.
These clients will turn their back on you if you even suggest you can do
something cheap or cheaper. They are paying out big bucks to celebrate a
once in a lifetime occasion and they sure as hell don't want some fool
shaking a silver board around to get the light right, interfering with their
day.

But you have alerted me to something I wasn't quite aware of until you
started plucking figures out of your head. That is the method of assessment
you are using to judge people on their income. It is flawed in the extreme
and I am surprised more people haven't pulled you up on it. Maybe where you
live there is no wealth?

I'm not plucking figures out of anywhere, Doug. I know how much cameras
& lenses cost and how long they last if you're good to them. I know how
much prints and albums cost and I know exactly what sort of man-hours
are involved in preparing photos for clients if you're going the digital
route.

Wedding photographers don't need a studio that costs AU$10k to ply their
trade. As far as I'm concerned it appears to be a very lucrative
business option for photographers and it also comes with apparently
small barriers to entry. This latter point is what I am trying to
determine.

Assuming a photographer is already at a level of acceptable creative
talent and he/she already has all the equipment that they need, what
obstacles do they have to overcome in order to make a decent living
doing just wedding photography?

As far as your comments about wealth are concerned, what do you want to
know? In the past 12 months in my business I have turned over just under
US$250k at 26% profitability. I do okay, but I could be doing a LOT
better if I spent less bloody time on this forum and more time working!
;-)

--
DD
www.dallasdahms.com
Central Scrutinizer

In article ,
says...
DD wrote:

Charge $2500 for a wedding, and do it well, and you're barely scraping by.

Well, can somebody show me the income statement and balance sheet of the
average wedding photographer so as to justify what you are saying here?

Scraping by my ass...

Yeah, a lot of business fail because of such assumptions.

You might as well be interested in the financial aspects of being a plumber,
if you're going to compare what they charge to what a person makes in a
normal salary. That has very little to do with running a business.

What's your point, Jeremy?

That "charging $2500" is not the same thing as "making $2500".

So how much DO you make if you are charging $2,500 per event? Nobody
seems to be willing to come out and say exactly what it is.

--
DD
www.dallasdahms.com
Central Scrutinizer

DD wrote:

Show me a business, any business, where there are no initial capital
investments or overheads? You don't need an office or a studio to be a
wedding photographer. You need a computer and a desk at home. Most
people have those already.

You can start with that, sure, but if you want to get out of the low end
of the market, you'll need a bit more.

I don't mean any disrespect to wedding photographers who look at things
the way you have just described here, but $52k p.a. sounds like a good
deal to me.

So let's say you manage to get $52k for yourself out of the business
(once you figure out that there's a little more to it than you first
thought). That's like making, what, about $40k in a regular salaried
job? That doesn't sound like the American Dream to me. And, what if
that $52k didn't take into account all your expenses, which is the big
mistake a lot of people make? What if you want to do higher-end gigs
where you need to pay an assistant (at least)? What happens when you
realize you suck at being a salesman and need to hire one, or else you
won't get enough weddings to hit that $52k?

You can make more than that, sure, but only once you realize it's a
business like any other and not just some scam for photographers to get
rich quick. And it's got very little to do with photography, really.

But if $52k/yr sounds good to you, and you think you can pull it off,
well, go for it. People do it, after all; it's more than possible.

--
Jeremy |

In article , says...
I am with you one this one, at $2500 / week you should be doing a lot
more then scraping by.

I'm beginning to think its a form of subterfuge employed by wedding
photographers to dissuede more people from entering this lucrative
market!

Here's a true story: I personally know a photographer who specializes in
photographing construction sites. He gets to fly around in a helicopter,
and take pictures - and won't even get out of bed for less than four
figures. This guy is rolling in the money, really. Just his watch
collection alone cost in the mid-six-figure range. His 10-year old wears a
Rolex. He's definitely not scraping by.

He's had so many people ask him to shoot weddings (which he doesn't like
to do), that he hired a grad student to go shoot weddings for him. He gets
a booking, he sends the grad student, prints proofs, and hands the entire
package - negatives and all - to the customer. And his prices are
definately on the "reasonable" end of the scale. He does very little work
on that side of the business, yet he's told me that he clears $70,000 a year
for himself out of it. That's AFTER paying the grad student.

Yes, there's money to be made as a wedding photographer. The trick is
that you have to be both a good photographer and a good businessman, and
sadly, most wedding photographers come up short on one or the other.

As a side note, the guy with the watch collection showed me a watch that
cost him something like $50,000. It has a transmitter in it, and if he
pulls out the antenna, it will start transmitting - and no matter where he
is in the world, someone will come to rescue him. I think that the
*minimum* bill for a "rescue" is $10,000. My first thought was that he had
some James Bond fetish or something, so I asked him "Do you really need
that?" He said that he'd been in three seperate helicopter crashes, two of
which were in the Amazon. I said "Alright, I guess you do."

Interesting story. Thanks for sharing, Steve.

Yeah, I think the good photographers who know a bit about business don't
have anything to worry about. This pretty much sums up what the barriers
to success are in pro wedding photography.

--
DD
www.dallasdahms.com
Central Scrutinizer