Why are Your Prices Higher than Other Photographers?

Every photographer charges different rates based upon experience and quality. Some wedding photographers won’t shoot a wedding for less than $10,000. Others will shoot a wedding for $500. There’s no saying that a photographer shooting for $500 is not good. However, the saying, “you get what you pay for,” is always a valid statement. A photographer who is confident in his or her ability and has the portfolio to back it up will want to charge a fair and comparable rate. To be quite honest, shooting a wedding is a lot of work and that is only the beginning. Once the wedding is over, the real work begins. All of the photos need to be processed. Digital was supposed to make everything easier because there is no more developing. What digital did was make the photographer the lab. Instead of handing a few dozen rolls of film off to a lab to process, the photographer now has to go through often over a thousand digital photos. The post processing time can easily take longer than shooting the wedding itself. This is why many wedding photographers are going back to film. When it comes to wedding photography, there are four categories of prices. Celebrity photographers command a high price because of the famous people they have taken photos of. Expect to pay tens of thousands of dollars for their time. Wedding specialists are photographers who do nothing but weddings. They are excellent at what they do and ask for several thousand to ten thousand dollars for a wedding. A standard wedding photographer will often do more than just weddings. Based on experience expect to pay a couple thousand to a few thousand for a wedding. Guys with cameras are people who think that since they have a camera, they can be a professional photographer. If your photographer will do a wedding for less than a thousand dollars, this is probably the category the person is in. Somewhere toward the higher end of this category are student photographers and new photographers working on their portfolios. These people may not be bad photographers and there’s nothing saying they will necessarily do a bad job, but they don’t have the experience of shooting weddings that a wedding specialist does. Be afraid of anyone who is willing to shoot a wedding for under $500! Remember, you get what you pay for. Professional camera equipment is not cheap. Experience and talent aren’t cheap either.

Wedding photography is typically one of the most expensive parts of a wedding budget with an average of 9% spent on the photography package. According to costofwedding.com, typical Los Angeles wedding budgets run between $18,511 and $30,852 or an average of $24,681.50. 9% of that is $2,221.34.

The saying is, “You get what you pay for.” If you want to go cheap on a photographer, you’re probably going to regret it. Don’t be tricked by photographers telling you that you don’t need to hire an expensive photographer for your wedding. The most important thing you want to do is hire a professional who is reliable.

Call Patrick with PBF Photography at (323) 309-3332 today and ask us how you’ll treasure our photos of your wedding for years to come.