Wedding Photography: When Spending More Means Spending Less
The title sounds like a bit of an oxymoron, doesn’t it? If you spend more, how can you spend less? Here’s how…
In the film days, photographers never gave out all of the negatives. It wasn’t practical or even possible. Now that most photographers have gone digital, two different types of photography packages have emerged:
1. Traditional: You pay the photographer to shoot the wedding and then you pay them to buy your prints afterwards. This is how it worked with film.
2. Contemporary: You pay them to shoot the wedding and you receive a copyright release on the images. In other words, the photographer shoots your wedding and then burns a disc with all of the images and you can print them at will.
This is where the title of this blog comes in. You typically have to spend a bit more up front to purchase the copyright release because the standard package rate will be higher. It’ll save you a bundle after the wedding though. No more picking and choosing images and then paying large markups from the photographer. You get ALL of the images and the right to print them.
As an example to show you the savings, you can get a standard 4×6 print for as little as nine cents on Snapfish.com (I highly recommend this site). Most photographers will charge you five to ten dollars. Your photographer’s prints will have a slightly higher quality than Walmart or Walgreen’s, but you won’t be able to tell the difference on a standard 4×6 or 5×7.
I speak on this not only as a photographer, but as somebody who was recently married. We had the most amazing photographers that you can imagine, but we wouldn’t have hired them if we didn’t get all of our images. Now that my
wife and I are in the photography business, we look at it the same way. We sell the copyright so that our couples can get the full enjoyment of our work without paying more.
Bob and Amanda Mackowski are the owners of Open Aperture Photography. Based in Eastern North Carolina, they’re available for travel anywhere in the US. To learn more about them and to view their work, you can visit them online at www.openapphoto.com or on Facebook at www.facebook.com/openapphoto.
Categorized In: Photography
I’m Nicole, Creator of NO Knows Weddings. My goal is to provide you with tips, ideas and tricks on how to plan a beautiful but affordable wedding!
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The problem with the “Shoot & burn” package is that most brides don’t have the time or knowledge to get amazing prints. When the artist, the photographer, creates the prints they take the time to make sure the image is retouched and printed the best it can be from a pro lab. The average consumer is not able to even go to these pro labs since they only work directly with photographers. That leads to sub-par prints & unhappy brides. Or even worse, the bride wont’ get around to doing anything with the DVD for years and when she finally does she realizes the DVD doesn’t work anymore or has corrupt images, and by then it may be too late for her to get another copy from the photographer, and yes I’ve seen this happen before. Yes, it may cost more to get your prints from the photographer then from a consumer lab, but you get what you pay for!
I also don’t understand why you would give them the “copyright.” Legally this means you are giving them full rights to the images & loosing your right to post or sell the images that you created. Instead it should simply be a “print release” or at the least a “shared copyright”
Thanks for the comment, Nicole. I see your point, however, brides who are planning a wedding on a budget or looking to cut cost, may not always care about getting amazing prints and/or quality. They are just looking to capture their special day in some way, and at a lower cost than the hundreds (sometimes even thousands) of dollars that it cost to hire and buy prints from a photographer.