pricing for time/digital images:wedding

[japmula]

hi there!!

i'm writing to find out what the going rate is for doing a wedding (approx. 8 hrs) where you hand over digital images on cd and all rights to images?

hoping to hear back soon!

thanks!

 

[Big Mike]

That is a loaded question.

Prices will be different depending on where you live and what the market can stand. In NYC or LA...the sky is the limit...but in a small rural community, you might have to keep the price lower.

Are you doing any post processing? Some people do none, just burn to CD and hand them over. Some people spend a few hours or even as much time editing as they do shooting. Some people spend more than that. Just yesterday I read somewhere that a lady would spend up to 30 hours editing wedding photos.

If you do edit the images, you will want to get paid for that time & expertise.

I think a lot of photographers are struggling with this same question. It used to be fairly simple. We kept the negatives and made money by charging for selling prints, reprints & albums etc. Now a lot of people want the digital files. I think the common thing to do is to charge as much for the files as you would have previously made selling the prints.

One big problem with this, is the final outcome of your images. When we sold prints...we could make sure that they looked their best before the got to the customer. Now if we sell the files and the customer does a poor job of printing (cheap lab or does it themselves etc.)...the images my not look their best. Other people may see these poor prints and it will reflect badly on us...even though we did our part very well.

 

[japmula]

thanks mike! i won't be doing any editing, but i've never done a wedding on digital before and never handed over rights to all images. i just didn't want to sell myself short, you know? but i think i came up with a reasonable #, given what ya' said. thanks a bunch!