Cheap Wedding Photographers: The Definitive Guide

Summary: There is no such thing as a cheap traditional wedding photographer because you have to pay for time, prints, and rights. There is a new service that doesn’t charge for any of these and makes cheap wedding photography possible.

Read This If: You do not have an unlimited wedding budget but want to own and share your wedding pictures.

Introduction

How do I find a cheap wedding photographer? Stop looking. There is no such thing. Why? Three little known reasons:

1. Time: Wedding photographers can only photograph two weddings in a weekend, so they increase their income by charging more per wedding (i.e. their goal is to not be cheap).
2. Prints: Wedding photographers charge $10 to $50 per physical print in addition to charging for their time. Multiply $50 by one hundred prints, and that’s $5,000 right there without considering the cost of the wedding photographer’s time or the rights to share your wedding photos.
3. Rights: Wedding photographers can charge hundreds of dollars per picture for the rights to share your wedding pictures freely. What good are wedding pictures if you cannot share them with friends and family?

If you do not have an unlimited wedding budget, then it is very important to understand the costs of wedding photographers’ time, prints, and rights. Millions of brides and grooms who do not understand the costs of their wedding photographer's time, prints, and rights end up spending more money than they can afford on wedding photography and are unable to own or share their wedding pictures.

Fortunately, by reading this guide you will avoid this fate and totally understand the true costs for the time, prints, and rights of all your wedding photography options.

But I See Ads for Cheap Wedding Photographers?

When you are done reading this guide, go to your favorite search engine and type in “cheap wedding photographer.” You will notice that there are a lot of results. So how can I say that there is no such thing as cheap wedding photographers?

The results you see are not wedding photographers! They are for people who own nice cameras and like to take pictures at weddings. These folks are known as "photography hobbyists."

This little known secret is the reason there is so much confusion around cheap wedding photography. You have a bunch of people who enjoy taking pictures and spending thousands of dollars on cameras the size of a football helmet saying that they are wedding photographers. But enjoying something and spending a lot of money on it does not make you a professional! I enjoy watching Grey’s Anatomy on a 60" high definition plasma TV but that does not mean that you should save a few bucks by having me perform your next surgery.

Wedding photographers are professionally trained artists. Photography is their paint and brush. Your wedding is their canvas. And if you have ever been to an art show, then you know that art is not cheap. So can you even imagine how much custom art would cost?

Well get those imagination juices flowing because hiring a wedding photographer is hiring a professional artist to create custom works of art for you. In fact, if the word “cheap” and the word “wedding photography” are both in a piece of marketing material, then you know you are not dealing with a professional since “cheap” is the last word any professional artist would ever want associated with their artwork.

But what if you search in Google and find a photographer who markets themselves as cheap? You’ve found a photography hobbyist, not a wedding photographer. And there is nothing wrong with a photography hobbyist. It is just important to know that they are very different than wedding photographers in some ways (such as skill), but not different in others (such as cost, since they still charge for time, prints, and rights). In fact, unless you understand the difference between wedding photographers and photography hobbyists, you may hire a “cheap” photography hobbyist, still go over budget on your wedding photography, still be unable to own or share all of your wedding pictures, and still never get the artistic photos you hoped for.

So is there any hope for cheap wedding photography? Yes, if you can find a wedding photography service that does not charge you for time, prints, or rights.

All of Your Wedding Photography Options and Their Real Costs

Your three wedding photography options are:

1. A wedding photographer
2. A photography hobbyist
3. A digital wedding camera rental service

The best way to think about the real cost of each of your wedding photography options is in terms of how much each will charge you for time, prints, and rights.

Time

Wedding Photographers charge hundreds if not thousands of dollars to take beautiful artistic photos for four to eight hours the day of your wedding. And it is critical to remember that paying a wedding photographer for their time does not mean that you get the pictures they took. It is also important to keep in mind that a wedding photographer can only be one place at a time and will not be there the day before or the day after your wedding. That is, you pay a lot to get a few (relatively speaking) memories captured beautifully.

Photography hobbyists work the same way except their time costs less, and their pictures are not as good.

Digital wedding camera rental services use a totally different model. You get a set of fully insured digital wedding cameras in the mail and give the cameras to trusted friends and family who serve as your photographers. After your wedding, the wedding cameras are returned via the prepaid case they came in and a free wedding photo and video sharing website is created for you and your friends and family.

Video: How Digital Wedding Camera Rental Works

Digital wedding camera rental services' approach is very promising in “time” department of wedding photography if you're looking for truly cheap wedding photography. With ten to thirty digital wedding cameras around the day before, the day of, and the day after your wedding, and each of the cameras taking over 450 pictures, your guests have a lot of time to capture all the memories before, during, and after your wedding...and all that extra time costs you nothing extra.

That being said, if you use a digital wedding camera rental service for your wedding photography, then it is important to give your digital wedding cameras to friends and family who will take good pictures. While the digital wedding cameras come with instructions attached and are easy to use, there is room for error. If you give Uncle Steve a wedding camera and all the time in the world, but he insists on shaking the camera while taking pictures in the dark, those pictures may not end up on your mantel. The moral is to give your digital wedding cameras to folks who will take good pictures.

Prints

Physically getting your wedding photos from a wedding photographer is number one wedding photography budget breaker. And this is not surprising as we are not talking about $0.25 per picture. We are talking $10 to $50 per picture.

This wedding photography budget math gets ugly fast as most brides and grooms want at least 150 wedding pictures. 150 wedding pictures at, let’s be conservative and say $30 a picture, is $4,500. Remember, custom art isn’t cheap.

It’s also important to note that custom art takes a long time to make. A good wedding photographer will take four to twelve weeks to get you your wedding pictures. The delay is because wedding photographers touch-up and edit many if not all of the photos manually. This is worth the wait if you can stand it and can afford to buy the photos once they are ready.

Again, photography hobbyists use the same basic model as wedding photographers: they charge a lot per print.

And again, digital wedding camera rental services have a much different take on your wedding prints. In short, digital wedding camera rental services make all of your digital wedding prints free to you and all of your friends and family. You get all of your wedding pictures and videos for free on CDs in the mail and on a wedding photo sharing website. There are no per picture fees for digital prints and you own the rights to all of your wedding pictures. This means that you and all of your friends and family can print all of your pictures at home or at the drugstore, and even email out copies at no additional cost.

Video: How Digital Wedding Camera Photo Sharing Websites Work

Not paying anything per picture can easily save you thousands of dollars, and since digital wedding camera rental services don’t modify your pictures, you get them very quickly (about a week after you ship the cameras back).

Rights

Sharing your wedding pictures is painful with wedding photographers as they charge you for every copy of each of your wedding photos...and even more for the rights to share the photos with friends and family. Put differently, if you want to give ten of your wedding photos to everyone in your twenty-person wedding party, you will need to buy two hundred additional copies (thousands of dollars) or the rights to distribute the ten photos (thousands of dollars). Point being, that if you choose to work with a wedding photographer, once you are done buying photos for yourself, you still have to buy copies for each of your guests and/or the rights to share your wedding photos.

No surprises for photography hobbyists or digital camera rental services: photography hobbyists work like wedding photographers and digital camera rental services don’t at all.

With digital camera rental services, your family and friends can view, download, print, and share your photos and videos from your photo and video sharing website for free. Nobody pays anything for digital prints.

If your friends and family want physical prints, they can print them at home for free or have glossy versions delivered for $0.19 a piece.

You and your guests can even upload additional photos and videos to your website and comment on all of your wedding photos for no additional charge. The ability to upload additional photos to your website is great for the guests who used their own digital cameras as we all know how well "email me a copy of all those photos" works out.

Video: Corina and Lincoln`s Experience With Digital Wedding Cameras

Summary

There is no such thing as a cheap wedding photographer because you are charged not only for the time spent the day of your wedding, but also for each of your wedding pictures and the rights to share the pictures you purchase from the photographer. Forced to buy wedding pictures and distribution rights one by one, most brides and grooms go over budget on their wedding photography and cannot own or share all of their wedding pictures.

A wedding photography service could only offer truly cheap wedding photography if it did not charged for time, prints, or rights. At the end of this article we'll introduce the only wedding photography service that does not charged for time, prints, or rights, and is therefore truly cheap wedding photography.

Choosing the Right Wedding Photography Option

But now what? With all this knowledge of the real costs of your wedding photography options, which is the best for you?

If you want artistic wedding pictures and can afford to buy and share them, then go with at least a wedding photographer. If you want wedding pictures but cannot afford paying a wedding photographer $5,000 to $15,000 when everything is said and done, then you have to choose between a photography hobbyist (Total cost = $2,000 to $5,000) or CameraRenter (Total cost = $495).

In my experience, the best overall wedding photography option is to use both a wedding photographer and a digital wedding camera rental service. This option gives you the best of both worlds. However, if you cannot afford both a wedding photographer and a digital wedding camera rental service, then a digital wedding camera rental service is your safest bet.

While a digital wedding camera rental services is not technically a cheap wedding photographer (since cheap wedding photographers don’t exist), it does give you a whole crew of “insider” photographers, all of your wedding photos, and a free and easy way to share them for at least $5,000 less than wedding photographers. In the words of About.com’s wedding expert Nina Callaway: “…if the high cost of wedding photography is simply out of your reach, getting friends and family to take digital pictures is a good alternative.”

Remember that thanks to the cost of time, prints, and rights there is no such thing as a cheap wedding photographer if you hire an actual wedding photographer and want to own or share your wedding photos.

- Jonathan Bailor

PS You may also want to check out the handy Wedding Photography Quiz which helps you easily pick the best photography option for your wedding.

 

About the Author: Jonathan Bailor is the Managing Partner of the premier affordable wedding photography service CameraRenter.

© 2009 CameraRenter®, all rights reserved. Feel free to distribute this article exactly as presented here. You are welcome to quote the article if you link back to the original so that your readers can get more information if they would like to.