Costs & Cost Control
The Marketplace
The cost of hiring a wedding photographer can range from under 1K all the way to 50K for top rated celebrity photographers. Such a huge disparity must be deciphered....
My Recommendation 
The wedding day is the culmination of months spent researching, planning and scheduling. Brides not only pour their heart and soul, but also a little blood, sweat and tears, into creating the event they hope to remember for a lifetime. Wedding planners agree that photography is one area of your wedding where quality should come before budget. Photographers capture unique, memorable moments, giving the bride and groom and their family keepsakes of their momentous celebration. Choose a wedding photographer based on his/her experience, artistic and technical abilities as well as ethic and workmanship. Consider the benefits of predictability. Pay special attention to the chemistry of your personalities. The whole ensemble should project confidence. This strategy pays dividends in long term satisfaction and lowers the risk factors.
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 right 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 ethically, 90% of the workload is actually done out of the client's sight!
Production Costs - A Reality Check
Considerable time is involved in downloading, sorting and evaluating the hundreds of captures from a wedding shoot. Then there's the actual manipulation of each image. An average of 8 to 10 minutes per image is easily attributable to various fine tuning processes. In my case, an average of 75 finished high quality images per hour of coverage are typically produced, so you can do the math! Roughly 10 hours of meticulous processing work is required for every hour spent shooting. As with any other business, there's overhead! Countless professional grade tools, endless upgrading and maintenance, advertising, training and conventions. All of these constitute legitimate ingredients that make up a fair asking price. Logically, the lower the the asking price, the more short cuts are necessary to compensate! There's no magic bullet! Considering that 90% of your money should be paying for crucial work behind a computer, it's an understatement to say that it represents a huge amount of hidden value or hidden trickery! Tools and processes are not trivial subjects in this industry. They unfortunately vary wildly from one photographer to another!
The tricky part is for consumers to decipher
whether they're buying quality or fluff!
Comparison shopping!
Comparing the sea of packages in the marketplace is a true hodgepodge of numbers and is unnecessarily confusing! In my experience, 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 cropping and materials used are crucial, it's far more economical to print your own at any reputable lab. The key is for the finished digital negatives to have been processed to the highest professional standards otherwise, garbage in = garbage out!
Prioritize the quality of your digital negatives!
Everyone has their own preferences and needs in regards to prints, albums and other issues. These are discussed in depth when we meet so that a customized package can be put together accordingly! No waste, no force feeding and no sales pressure! All of my packages are custom built from the options listed on the pricing page. Here are some immediate benefits from this logical approach:
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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 have the option of purchasing extra items later, when your finances permit it.
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Prevents you from mistakenly overspending on acquisitions that may prove to be wasteful.
When we meet in person, you'll get the opportunity to see and feel the differences between the items discussed.
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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 recommend Art Leather albums because of their market leading superior quality construction, durability and timeless elegance. Over the years, many companies have unsuccessfully tried to emulate this classic! Shopping based on price for this important heirloom is a mistake, I guarantee it!
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Coffee table books are trendy but unfortunately nowhere near as durable as an Art Leather album; and this is true even of the most expensive models that I've seen on the market. Some are better built than others, however, they all fail the most important criteria for an heirloom: DURABILITY. They're costlier to produce vs traditional albums (at all price points) I should also warn you about a disturbing trend lately: packages already suspiciously low in price now also include coffee table books with unusually high numbers of pages. Too good to be true? You bet it is! It's an illusion of the first order - Quantity is no match for quality!
A digital album is most likely to become the future of the wedding album as we've known it. This product lights up emotion like no traditional album can. Digital technology allows for quality to last endlessly! The monetary savings can't be ignored: everyone can have a copy of your finished wedding album to watch on their TV, computer, web and hand-held device. That's amazing portability that can never be damaged by everyday risks applicable to any typical one of a kind single album!
Note: Assuming you're willing to spend a substantial amount of your time, you could use any do-it-yourself software to produce your own crude version of a digital album but, given the importance of this unique event and the impact sought, it doesn't make sense. Professional production software and expertise is the way to go, besides, the end results are simply not comparable. I carefully work on the effects and transitions with each individual image to suit the intended mood. (Unlike most cheap packages where the whole thing is automated by software) It takes 50 hours to bring this type of project to professional standards. As it should be, you get what you pay for!
My recommendation : The Digital 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' takes me roughly 50 hours 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's a multi purpose solution at an affordable price: audio-visual show, finished album and video combined.
It replaces a wedding video, saving you money towards other expenses.
