Costs and Cost Control
The Marketplace
The cost of hiring a wedding photographer can range from a mere couple of hundred dollars for a whole day's work from an up and coming gambling student, all the way to $50K for top rated celebrity photographers. Such a huge disparity must be deciphered in a realistic and logical manner....
My Recommendation 
Choose a wedding photographer based on experience, artistic and technical abilities as well as ethics and consistency in their work quality. Consider the benefits of their predictability. Pay special attention to the chemistry of your personalities. The whole ensemble should project confidence. This strategy will increase your odds of getting what you want and lowers the risk factor for any problems.
The Alternative (Not Recommended)
In order to gain experience, students of the business can offer to do the job at low cost and eventually be in a better financial position to acquire the appropriate equipment. We all understand the need for people to start somewhere! They'll have many opportunities to improve their craft, however, your wedding is a one time only event so, this arrangement is clearly not in your favor!
Price Contributing Factors You Should Know!
Wedding photography pricing is based on unusual factors distinguishing this business from most others by virtue of the fact that its practice is dominated by season (Canadian weather no doubt) and primarily confined to Saturdays!
Over 2/3 of all Canadian weddings occur between June and September and over 90% are held on Saturdays! All long weekends are typically busy from Friday through Sunday. This obviously creates a highly unbalanced demand. In fact, if you've been looking for a reception hall, you know it!
Then, there's the actual amount of time required to see the entire project to its completion. This is an important aspect of wedding photography because when done properly, over 90% of the workload is done out of sight!.
Production Costs - A Reality Check
Considerable time is involved in downloading, sorting and evaluating the hundreds of captures from a single wedding shoot. Then there's the actual manipulation of each image to be finished as well as the burning of disks for various uses. An average of 8 to 10 minutes per image is easily attributable to these processes. In my case, an average of 75 finished high quality images per hour of coverage are produced, so you can do the math! 10 hours of meticulous processing work is required for every hour spent shooting. Add overhead for professional grade equipment, hardware, software, endless upgrading and maintenance, continuing training, advertising and you've got the required ingredients that make up a realistic asking price. If the asking price is low, logically, something has to give!!!
The tricky part is for consumers to decipher
whether they're buying quality or fluff!
Considering that over 90% of your money should be paying for work behind a computer, it would be an understatement to say that it represents a substantial amount of hidden value or hidden trickery! That's because the tools and processes used vary wildly from one photographer to another. I suggest that you pay a lot more attention to this "iceberg"! The technology page is explicit in this regard.
Comparison shopping!
Comparing the sea of packages on the market is a true hodgepodge of numbers and is unnecessarily confusing! In my opinion, packages are best when you can control exactly what they contain vs going along with what someone else thinks is suitable for you. One size does not fit all! In addition, unless you're ordering an album, where the size and crop of the image is crucial, you can print your own much more economically at any reputable lab. Paying for a package which includes prints of all shots taken is not only wasteful, but an inevitable remnant of the film technology era! It defeats logic because it negates the efficiencies of digital captures!
I'd rather invest my time, money and energy in processing for the highest image quality available and leave selective printing and print size for clients to decide! We discuss your needs and put together a package accordingly! It's a logical approach. No waste, no force feeding and no sales pressure! It's more efficient, cost effective and as a result, 4 immediate benefits emerge:
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You don't need to know exactly what you'll need in advance.
- You only spend on options specifically useful to you at this time!
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If your budget is too limited at this particular time, you can purchase extra items later, when your finances permit it
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Prevents you from mistakenly overspending on acquisitions that in time, could prove to be useless and wasteful.
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Albums being offered on the market vary tremendously in quality and durability, making pricing erratic. After looking around the market for the best value, I've chosen to go with albums from Art Leather because of their market leading superior quality construction, durability and timeless elegance. These albums are preferred by the most renowned and top rated wedding photographers for good reason. On your 50th wedding anniversary, you'll be able to go through the album with your grand-children and the pages are going to be functional as intended! I urge you to be cautious! Durability and reliability are the key ingredients to the real value of this heirloom.
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Coffee table books are trendier but unfortunately nowhere near as durable as traditional albums. The very nature of their construction makes that inevitable. High quality in this format is substantially costlier to produce vs the traditional high quality album. Given these facts, I have reservations! I have samples for you to judge. For those who's mind is set, I can only recommend the world's leader in the business, Graphi Studio from Italy.
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An audio-visual slide show of your finished images on DVD is the future of the wedding album. -- It animates the art of wedding photography with motion and sound, bringing back it's life and emotion. Technology has reached such a high quality level for producing these that, it's simply impossible to ignore. The monetary and practical advantages are overwhelming and the convenience alone, too good to pass up! Consider this: they're the lowest cost of all display options, will outlast any album ever made and you can make endless copies for everyone to conveniently watch on their TV...... Hello!
My recommendation : The Animated Album -
It combines an endless variety of layout options, surpassing even the trendiest of coffee table books while priced at less than half their cost.
- Special effects, transitions, pans, zooms and captions animate your love story to the timing of romantic music. This package delivers ambiance and captivates the viewers like no other method can.
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Image quality and durability surpasses anything previously available and will outlast anything else.
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Convenience, portability are unrivaled and the incomparable impact it delivers, especially when viewed on the ever increasing large screen TVs, makes it an obvious winner!!!
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Made for viewing in 16:9 ratio (wide screen)
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It's readable with DVD players & PC.
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Even though it'll take me roughly 40 hours or more to produce, you'll have the ability to burn unlimited copies of it in minutes, for the mere cost of blank disks!
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You'll easily and quickly be able to give your relatives and friends their personal copy of your finished wedding album!
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No need for 2 sets of parents albums and extra prints. Ditto for the wedding party and any others. These time and money savings alone already surpass it's purchase price by a large margin!
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Distributing copies to friends/relatives already provides a safety factor built-in but, If you wisely keep a back up copy in a bank's safety deposit box, you've truly rendered it disaster proof! A benefit that no album or coffee table book solution could ever offer, regardless of it's price or quality!
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Because the image quality is very high with this product, as technology changes through future decades, you only need to copy it onto whatever the medium of the day is, keeping it endlessly usable and your love story looking as if it happened only yesterday!
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It replaces the rapidly dying wedding videos caused by their cost vs their utility = poor value. The audio-visual show is both an animated album and video combined at a much more affordable price. Making it the best value amongst all currently available solutions.
It's the clear winner by a country mile !!
