my first wedding: horror story

[mrodgers]

I missed this thread when it started....

Congrats on the find of the card. When I read it, I felt the emotion in the post.

As for the cost of weddings, photographers, and salaries.....

My wedding cost me $3k. The photographer was $600. Some of the figures for weddings I am seeing here would be 1 to 3 years salary, just for a wedding?

I don't currently have the link, but it is being discussed right now in another forum I am on. The median salary in the US (meaning 50% of the US makes this or less) is $32,000 (2006 statistics). Hobby forums are always full of people who make substantial salaries. It is because it takes substantial salaries to do a hobby. Welcome to the real world. For most of us in this country, we aren't just entering a recession, we've been in one for the past 5 or 6 years.

 

[chrisburke]

glad to hear i'm not the only one who didnt blow the bank on a wedding.. ours cost $4000 photographer cost just the cost for printing, as it was a photographer friend who very much knew what she was doing.. gave us her time as a gift..we just paid for developing (she was a film user)

it boggles my mind to think there are people out there spending 60+k on a wedding.. even 10K boggles my mind.. my wife watches those wedding shows, and some of the budgets are ridiculous... our budget as i said was $4000 and it was a beautiful wedding.. the church was free (i'm a pastor) the minister was free (i worked with him) our ladies group did the food (it was amazing) most expensive part was the dance.. we rented a beautiful hall for it...

 

[mrodgers]

Nah, you can't go by those TV shows. I can't believe anything about them. My wife watches the "what's my house worth" shows where they have a $400k house, put $80k of work into it and it's magically worth $1.5 million!

I mean, get real! One of those episodes, they listed the cost of painting 2 rooms at $10,000. How you get $10k of cost from about 3 gallons of paint that costs $35 a gallon (that's the expensive stuff...) and half a day's worth of labor I'll never figure out.

 

[manaheim]

It has a lot to do with where you live. I live in the Boston, MA area and getting a reasonable 4BR house with some land in what I would call a "reasonable" town is going to cost a minimum of $400K. The numbers have gone down a bit recently, but average listing price for homes in my area is around $500K.

Cost of living factors a lot into all kinds of stuff... hard to buy a house, food is expensive, yadda yadda... people's salaries go up... weddings get more expensive... etc. It's all a huge mess.

I'm no economist, mind you.

EDIT: Of course, some people will tell me what I think is reasonable is completely ridiculous. There's also that horrible sliding problem of no matter how much money you happen to make, it's never enough, and all that happens is your perspective gets stupidly out of whack.

 

[KD5NRH]

it boggles my mind to think there are people out there spending 60+k on a wedding.. even 10K boggles my mind.. my wife watches those wedding shows, and some of the budgets are ridiculous... our budget as i said was $4000 and it was a beautiful wedding..

Ours was a lot less than that...the pastor got sick, so we grabbed the JP on short notice, and used the local American Legion hall.

We had originally planned to have a skeet shoot at the reception, but decided against it because it would look bad to drag out some shotguns that cost as much as or more than the wedding

 

[bigtwinky]

I'm a little late from the original thread, but I'm glad you found the card!

I'm really curious to see the pictures though, have you posted them up?

As for the wedding photographer discussion, my wife and I chose not to put too much money on our wedding. We had a 5k budget. We did want a photographer, so we had to do alot of searching to find someone that we liked and who didn't charge too much. We also had to cut on the amount of time the photographer was with us, as in he stayed for only the first hour of the reception, wasn't at the bride's house before, and so on.

It all worked out! There is something for everyone out there. I find that 5,000 for a photographer to shoot my wedding, specially seeing that there are so many local wedding photographers that aren't all that good, is totally ridiculous. Thats me, that might not be you.

Doesn't matter whether they make 20k per year or 200k per year. If they weren't able to find someone who could shoot what they wanted at the price they wanted, they have to settle for someone doing it for free.

All in all, I'm sure they had a great time, and have great pictures to boot.

 

[chrisburke]

yea OP, when do we get to see the PICS??

 

[JerryPH]

Another tap on the shoulder of the OP for some pics!

 

[15two3]

are we going to see the godamn pictures or what?

 

[Photonic Harmony]

Although I don't enjoy it, I've shot two weddings now and I was truly happy with the results.

I'm assuming you didn't have them believe you were a professional wedding photographer? I don't think you should be too hard on yourself, if you made it clear you were not. If they were not that concerned about hiring a professional photographer, you shouldn't feel overly bad about your part in this misfortune.

When I do a wedding - as a favour - I always make it clear that they should in NO WAY count on my images to depict their day. That statement puts the ball in their court and I've covered my rear end.

With all that said, it is a shame that they don't have your images of their "special" day, unfortunately that's just the way the cookie crumbled this time around.

Pick yourself up off the floor - dust off - move on. All the best.

 

[chrisburke]

...^^^ you must not have read the whole thread.. he found the card..

 

[Photonic Harmony]

Thanks for pointing that out Chris, fortunately the lost card wasn't the central point of my post. You must not have read my entire post

 

[chrisburke]

i did.... and if its the subject of your post your referring to in the "pick yourself up" i dont think that was an issue at all.. he wasnt upset about the job he had done, he was upset about loosing the card...

 

[shawnxstl]

blahhhh

sorry for the late reply guys. I havent been home for more than a couple hours in the past three weeks. Damn "lady" friend.

Ironically enough, we got in a pretty big fight about a month before this wedding and then the morning of the wedding she text me out of the blue and we started talking again. Pretty much been staying there since then.

Pictures will be coming soon. Dont be expecting anything mindblowing but yeah.


OHHHH and did i tell you that my cousin wanted me to go through all of his pictures (~700) and edit the ones worth keeping????

THERE ARE NONE.

Even in the formal shots, he still managed to cut body parts off at random places, blow the sky wayyyy out, out of focus people, just pretty much anything you can think of.

during the cake cutting, he managed to take two pictures. TWO. both of them having the door in the background in focus instead of the bride/groom.

:x:x:x:x:x

 

[chrisburke]

well i hope yours turned out good then... was your cousin paid for this wedding???