By Stephanie of Stephanie Reinish Photography.
Now that you’ve figured out who you’d like to hire, you need to choose a package. Again, this can be totally and completely overwhelming. Some photographers let you pick exactly what you want while others have some best selling combinations and some don’t give you very many choices. What it comes down to is what do you need and want from the photography on your wedding day and what is your budget?
A lot of people have a lot of misconceptions about wedding photographers. They think we only work one day and think it’s a lot of money that they are paying for 8 (or so) hours of photography. Even though you only see us for the 8 hours the day of your wedding there is a lot more hours of work that go into your wedding photography. On average we spend about 25 hours on each wedding before we even think about designing an album. There are emails and phone calls to answer, preparing equipment, charging batteries, getting directions, shooting your wedding, downloading your images, editing and perfecting your images, blogging, ordering your proof album, uploading to your proofing gallery. This doesn’t include if we have the chance to get in a fabulous engagement session. Phew, I’m exuasted just writing all that …and then there is the album.
I meet with a lot of clients who don’t think that they need or want an album, and that is an option which I offer, coverage only. But then, your beautiful pictures sit on my computer and I get to enjoy them everyday until you decide if you’d like an album or just some prints or to purchase the DVD.
I always encourage people to get an album. They are the final piece of the puzzle, they tell the story of your day, this is why you hired a photographer in the first place.
The album is a large portion of the cost of your package as there is a lot of time that goes into the albums as well as the album itself being expensive. I can only speak to the amount of time I spend on an album, but here’s a bit of a breakdown…
Once all the images are culled (edited), I go through and pick out the pictures and design them to best tell the story of your wedding day, then we go through the process of approval, uploading to my album company and keeping track of the status of your album. Again, all this may not seem like that much but depending on how many images we use for your album this can take around 15 hours.
So each wedding is about 40 hours of work!
The best thing to do to figure out what package is best for you is to have an honest talk with your photographer and yourself. You need to be honest about what your looking for from your photographer and your budget.
