The pricing for a weddings-only photographer is largely based on the number of bookings they will do in a year and their demand. All else being equal, the $6k one is likely in more demand than the $3k one. That demand is almost entirely based on word-of-mouth referrals, which take time to build, so it ends up like any brand -- it's worth more when more known.

The deliverables are drastically different between different photographers as well. The wholesale cost difference between our upper-end album and the lower-end one is about 600%.

I don't remember the article to reference it here, but the current cost of weddings was started largely by the introduction of gift registries. It snowballed from there.

It's obviously demand-based, but when I went through this a few years ago, the least experienced people we talked to were asking in the $2k range (this is in SF). Book 30 of those a year and you're grossing $60k. You have to work weekends and there are consultations and other stuff, but it still strikes me as a lucrative job if you can pull it off.

The wedding photographers have some clever ways to sell you more stuff too. Most of them want to retain the rights to the photos that you pay them to take, so they can sell prints to your guests or license them as stock art and stuff. I actually got into a shouting match with one photographer over that -- I insisted on treating the photos as works for hire under US copyright law. One guy had "his and her iPods" that he would load up with wedding pics at the end of the reception. The cost? $1000. Yeah, no thanks.

$60k would be great if that were all income, but the majority of it isn't. After everything is accounted for (product cost, equipment depreciation, studio space, updated samples, advertising, etc), the profit amounts to 20-30% of it We spend about $1500/mo here just on studio rent and utilities.

I won't go into your second paragraph, though, because that mostly boils down to a difference of opinion.

It seems counterintuitive to simply list cost of rent and utilities when discussing photographers as if no other business suffers the same. It'd be more interesting to list expenses specific to the industry.

Yes, obvious standards costs of business, but the post above does the calculation: 2k x 30 = 60k salary. If you're arguing with someone who doesn't have the basics down, that's the place to start.

I did say "gross $60k", and I meant something more like "revenue" than "salary".

Obviously there are expenses that come out of the basic fees, but when I was doing this, the people I talked to at the lower end of the cost spectrum seemed to operate without some of the expenses that came up (ie, home studio, little/no advertising).

The point I was trying to make was, wedding photography is competitive but potentially lucrative if you can establish yourself, particularly in markets like SF.

Part of that "other stuff" would be countless hours of finishing/retouching/correcting, etc. Some photographers will spend a week P/T to work through the photos they took on one night.

I think there'd be a few people who get into wedding services expecting it to be lucrative and then find it a lot more difficult than they expect. I've mentioned on here before (check comments history) a client of mine who got married, noticed the huge prices, bought a wedding services business and then sold it within six months - more hassle than it was worth!

I had a friend take the photos for the cost of film. Years later, we look at only a handful of photos anyway. No regrets. YMMV.

This is true. But it is also true that the wedding photography business is under severe pricing pressure right now, so I would not count on those prices being sustainable for a lot of photographers.

That makes sense. I got married a few years ago and was shocked at what some of vendors were asking for. With a rough economy I can see weddings being an area that gets scaled back for a lot of people.

Never heard of a couple wanting to know if their prospective photographer had a degree before hiring them though!

Yeah, degrees don't mean much compared to real samples and references.

I'm saying that but my wedding photographer had just come out of college. We paid $750 for the photos and it was a pretty good deal, she had some shots taken during school, they were pretty good and that was all we needed to decide. I think we were her first customers of her new company. It was a risk but now days, every aunt and uncle comes with a digital camera.