Could not agree more. I know it first hand that wedding photographers are probably the most underpaid kind: even though I love photography, but sitting in a quiet cubicle writing 5 lines of Java a day and hacking on your own stuff for fun at average "corporate IT Job" is by FAR easier money.

Even if you charge $3K per wedding, you still (most probably) won't be able to book every single weekend, pay shitload to private medical insurance (like $1.5K/mo), work your ass off post-processing 2-3 thousand photos you take per wedding, and yes - deal with hysterical bitchez who had absolutely no life for a whole year planning this "day of their life".

Wedding photographers are either: bored housewifes making little money on a side, producing mediocre results, or talented people who are unable to find any other way to make money on photography: they work really hard and get paid well, but that money is hard earned.

And this is how you do it: http://juliabailey.com/

This is an old article (2003) and the wedding photographer claim has already been rebutted many times over. Most wedding photographers are BROKE.

http://photo.net/columns/mjohnston/column32/index.html

note the link probably doesn't work as the reliability of photo.net has taken a nosedive over the past year.

His point seemed to be that bad wedding photographers were grossly overpaid. I agree not on the same level as mutual fund managers and bad CEOs, but probably on the same level as the West Coasters he mentions.

I am a photographer myself. I don't do it professionally -- I don't try to do it professionaly -- because I enjoy it as a hobby, and don't like the pressure of doing photographic work for others. I did photograph a wedding for a friend because they asked me to, and it was very very stressful and complicated. Wedding photography is not easy.

Good wedding photography is even harder. I am getting married this fall, and was shocked at the mediocrity of most local wedding photographers. I could hardly believe some of them claimed to run a wedding photography business. Not necessarily "bad" photos, but, photos lacking character and interest to the degree that they might as well have been taken by random people at the wedding than by a "professional" photographer.

But this is also true in other fields. There are mediocre software engineers who hide in the bureaucracy of large companies and get the same salary, plus or minus 5%, as really good software engineers at the company.

Hmmm - perhaps the best advice to anyone getting married might be: buy a dozen digital camers and give them to friends and family to use at the wedding and have a good chance of getting more good photos than the median wedding photographer.

We did just this. It worked out wonderfully. 200 disposable cameras (hey, it was 1999), 27 pictures each. This is a @#$%load of photos folks. 90% of them were total crap. 7% of them were way-cool novelties, 3% of them were pure gold that no wedding photographer could have captured. We had a traditional wedding potog take the usual pictures that no one looks at as well.

Pictures were taken at the wedding, the reception, and the after-party. At the end of it all, we mailed out cd-roms of the best pictures to everyone who attended. (These cd's had, incidentally, also been the invitations. Bring your invitation along, get photos of the event!)

I highly recommend it to one and all. Crowd-sourced photos rock.

He mentioned that anyone who did mediocre work just to get to the job they really wanted was overpaid. I'd say that's true all they way down the line... including journalists who slap together worse top 10 lists than most bloggers.

if you reverse that math, you're looking at a job that, if you worked the normal 9-5, you'd be making in the neighborhood of $250k/yr.

i'd love to work 2 days a week and still make six figures.

The thing is, you don't just work two days a week as a wedding photographer. As the article mentions, there's almost 20 hours of work for a single client, given the initial consultation and any other legwork you have to do. If I remember correctly, my wedding photographer, who we paid $2K, also included engagement photos in the package, which were taken on a different weekend.

Anyway, not trying to make this into a photography thread, but just pointing out that the original article is a bit strange.

i stand corrected. two and a half days a week for six figures. hell, i'd be happy with two and a half days a week for a mid to high five figures. leaves me plenty of spare days a week to work on my bootstrapped projects

And, as other people have noted, hours upon hours of photo processing, consultations and contracts, and dealing with potentially high-string couples and their families.

My fiancee did a wedding and it was probably about three weeks of work, overall, along with several meetings beforehand. (That was as a freelance wedding videographer, not photographer, though. A photographer would probably have less editing time, but not significantly less.)

I think part of the issue is that so many people think that photography is easy, just because digital cameras these days are so capable.

The reality is that even excluding the pressure associated with photographing something that may well be a once-in-a-lifetime event for the couple who hired you, good photography requires skill, talent, and experience.

He also ignores the fact that aside from hours of shooting, the wedding photographer also has to process the photos and create the albums, all told its many more hours of work. It's a grind.