People always talk about the high cost of wedding photography. I’ve even been told that I charge too much by friends who didn’t understand what it costs to do wedding photography. The big difference is that as wedding photographers, we are business owners. As such, we both have to cover the expenses of the business and pay our wages. As you read, consider your employer. You get your paycheck, you have taxes taken out, or maybe you are 1099 and you set aside your own taxes. It’s simple. You work, you get paid. Running a company is a little different.

COST OF DOING BUSINESS
As both the show runner and the employee, we have to consider the costs of doing business. This includes the cost of software, insurance, government fees, marketing and advertising, rent, utilities (yes, even if you work from home), and website, etc. On top of that, we have equipment: camera, back up camera, memory cards, batteries and backup batteries, computer, cell phone, flash units, light stands, light modifiers, and even more. It’s not just the purchasing of those things, it’s the maintaining and upgrading of those things, and it’s the time it takes to run to the camera store, the gas it takes to run to the camera store. It’s the time and gas it takes to get to the wedding an hour away for which the client isn’t getting charged for travel. In addition, for weddings, we may have to pay a second shooter an adequate wage. When it comes to your employer, you don’t have to cover the cost of your desk, computer, phone line, the software or any of that. You don’t pay for the cost of running the company you work for. If your job was the company and you had to pay your share of utilities, equipment, rent and so forth, you would probably be demanding a raise, or you’d be getting compensated to pay for your usage of company property.

TAXES
If you are 1099, you understand this, as you have to set aside your own taxes. If you are a W2 employee, your employer pays part of your taxes. As a 1099 or a small business owner, you have to cover all of your taxes, i.e., what your employer pays as well as your part. For many people, this amounts to about 30% of their paycheck. To put it mathematically, if you’re a W2 employee, and I’m 1099, and we both receive a $1200 paycheck, I’m only going to see $800 of that. You might see closer to $900 – $1000 of that, maybe more. To make sure we can put food on our tables, we make sure we charge enough where we can still make enough after setting money aside for taxes.

TIME COSTS
I mentioned this a bit earlier. My business runs on client work, but I invest a lot of time in doing things for my business that I don’t get paid for if I don’t have clients. That’s things like writing a blog, designing the cover image, shooting the photos, keeping social media up to date, planning blogs, running errands, continuing education and networking. The company you work for had to do a lot of this to get to the point that they could hire you. We price ourselves to get paid for that work when we do have enough clients.

INCOME
So now that we’ve covered what kind of expenses it takes to run a business, we can talk about what we actually take home. Minus taxes, and business expenses, we don’t actually take home that much. Let’s say you charge $3400 for a wedding. $1200 of that goes to taxes, and another $200–$300 goes to the second shooter. That leaves $1900 to cover business expenses and income. Assuming you have cheap rent and someone to split it with, you put away about $450 into your business, and you take home about what’s left over. This doesn’t cover things like going on vacations, or buying the latest iPad for funsies. It’s paying the bills. In addition, you have a slow season. So you have to shoot at least about 13 weddings a year, to be able to survive the slow season. In your busy season, you’re making your entire year’s salary.

WEDDING DAY PLUS
When we set our rates for a wedding day, we set our rates to account for the time it takes to shoot, edit, upload and deliver your images. It’s not just a few grand for 8-10 hours. It’s a few grand for 40-50 hours of work, plus the cost of running the business. What we are able to pay ourselves is about half of what we actually charge, and when you stack that up against more expensive rent, living expenses, and/or being the sole earner in the household, it’s easy to see that we aren’t charging a pretty penny just to line our pockets.

WHAT’S IN IT FOR YOU?
When you pay that hefty chunk of change, you’re paying at the very least for a professionally run business: a registered, tax-paying business. This is what it takes for a business to survive, to even be marginally profitable. A business that is charging a lot of money regularly and is not registered, nor paying taxes, is not a legally run business. When you pay more money, you pay a legally run business that isn’t skirting the law.

Your wedding is a once in a lifetime event. We only get one chance to capture it. Your photos will last a lifetime. Not only do you get the chance to relive the day, we also catch the little moments that you are too busy to catch: you and your partner getting ready, sweet candids of little children, the intricate details of the ceremony and the reception, the emotional glances, the tears swept away. These are things that you are too wrapped up in the day to notice more than in passing. We catch what you can’t always notice, but that you don’t want to miss. It’s okay to miss things in the moment. That’s why you hire us. It’s expensive because we capture a whole day full of moments that once they’re gone, you can’t get back.

As you can see, we take on the responsibility of running a profitable, legal business. To frame it in terms of traditional employment, we pay for both the employer’s part and the employees part because we are both the employer and the employee. There is a lot of joy in it, and that’s why we choose to do it. We want to preserve those memories as badly as you want them preserved, and in order to do that, we have to do business right. In short, just like you, we like having jobs, eating food, having a roof over our heads and your investment is as important to us as it is to you.