Why Is a Wedding Photographer So Expensive? An Honest Look Behind the Price Tag
Are you getting married soon? Amazing! You’re probably busy in planning your big day and looking for the right vendors. Whether you’re working with a wedding planner or organizing everything yourselves, the cost of a wedding is always a big factor. And let’s be honest, we totally get it, life has become expensive for all of us!
We’ve noticed there are often a lot of misconceptions about the cost of a wedding photographer..Many people are surprised when they hear what a wedding photographer actually costs. That’s why we want to shed some light on it, to help you better understand the expenses a professional wedding photographer has, and how much time truly goes into capturing and delivering a full wedding story.
Disclaimer: Everything we share here is based on our own experience and that of fellow professional photographers we work with. Just like in any industry, there are always a few “cowboys” offering rock-bottom prices, often people without a long-term vision, or those treating photography as a side hustle rather than a serious business. But that’s not what this is about. What we want to offer is transparency. A clear look at what wedding photography really costs when it’s done by photographers building a sustainable, full-time business.
The Cost of Wedding Photography: What’s Really Involved?
Let’s start with an overview of the different costs a photographer faces in order to do their job properly. We’ve broken these down into clear categories to give you a better idea of what’s actually involved. We’re keeping things simple and easy to follow. In reality, there’s even more to it, but that would make this blog post a bit too long.
1. Hardware costs
Camera system (also known as the body):
Camera bodies, along with lenses, are among the biggest investments for a wedding photographer. The camera and lenses are the foundation of our work and no, we don’t just use one camera. As wedding photographers, we typically work with two cameras during the day: one with a short lens for close-ups, and one with a longer lens for when we need a bit of distance. This allows us to switch quickly without missing any important moments because we’re changing lenses. Most photographers also bring a third camera body as a backup, because let’s be honest, the last thing you want on a wedding day is standing there with a broken camera.
Cost: A professional camera body costs anywhere between €1,700 and €7,500, depending on the brand and model. Since we usually work with two (and often three) camera bodies, that amount adds up quickly. If you go with a solid mid-range model at around €3,000 each, you’re already looking at a total of approximately €9000. And that’s without even counting lenses, batteries, or all the other gear and gadgets that come with the job.
Lenses:
Without the right lenses, a photographer simply can’t capture the images. A wedding photographer usually carries around 4 to 6 lenses, from wide-angle to telephoto. And yes, there’s a big difference between consumer-grade and professional lenses. The pro ones are built tougher, can handle a bit of rain (and the occasional bump), and deliver noticeably sharper images.
Cost: Professional lenses typically cost between €1,700 and €3,800 each. If you take an average of around €2,700 per lens, a set of five quickly adds up to an investment of about €13.500.
Luckily, these aren’t yearly investments. Lenses tend to last much longer than camera bodies. The latter usually need to be replaced roughly every 3 to 5 years either due to wear and tear or because new models come out with features that you simply can’t ignore in our line of work.
2. Software costs
A wedding photographer uses quite a bit of software to select images, edit them, create online galleries, and design albums (and trust us, that’s just the beginning!).
Cost: We took a look at our own software subscriptions, and on a yearly basis, we’re looking at around €1500 uit aan abonnementen.
3. Investing in yourself
As a photographer, you’re never really “done learning.” Every year, we want to deliver better work than the year before, whether that’s improving our photography itself, refining our editing style, or sharpening our branding and marketing to position ourselves better in the industry. To keep growing, we attend workshops, invest in education, and organize styled shoots. All with one goal: to keep improving and challenging ourselves.
Workshops:
When wedding season slows down… just kidding! It never really does. Once the busy months are behind us, we finally get the chance to focus on things like marketing and branding, tasks that often take a back seat during peak season. It’s also the perfect time to attend that one workshop that’s been sitting on our to-do list for months. These workshops are essential for learning new techniques, refining our style, and improving our business skills. From wedding-specific courses to broader topics like marketing and branding, it all comes down to one thing: growing, both creatively and professionally.
Cost: We dug into our numbers for this as well, and for 2024, we ended up spending a total of €4000 on education and workshops. That amount covers both of us (Chaima and I), and honestly, every single euro was worth it to keep growing in what we love to do.
Styled shoots:
A styled shoot is a carefully planned photoshoot designed to showcase a specific vibe, style, or concept. Everything is thoughtfully put together. From the location and models to outfits, makeup, flowers, and decor. Sometimes the photographer organizes and funds the entire shoot, and other times it’s a collaboration with other vendors. The goal? To show off creative work, create content for our portfolio and socials, and inspire future couples.
Cost: We don’t have specific numbers for this yet, since we haven’t organized one ourselves, but the cost of a styled shoot can vary a lot. If you’re planning something abroad at a dream location, you’ll need to factor in travel, accommodation, and possibly model fees. Keep it local in a Belgian studio, and your expenses might just be studio rental and a small fee for the models. It really depends on how big you decide to go.
4. Other Costs
This includes all the costs we need to run our business that aren’t directly related to taking photos. Think transport, our accountant, booking and invoicing software, website and hosting, and of course, social media advertising. These are all things happening behind the scenes, but they’re essential to keeping our business running professionally.
Cost: These costs vary greatly from one photographer to another and also depend on the chosen business structure. In our case, we run a company, and those yearly expenses can easily add up to around €15.000 to €20.000 per year. Think car lease, accounting, social media ads, website and hosting… all fixed costs that are necessary to keep everything running smoothly.
Why All This Explanation?
To keep this blog post readable, we’ve kept the cost breakdown fairly simple. In reality, there’s a lot more to it, and the actual expenses are often easily 30% higher than what we’ve outlined here.
Why are we telling you all this?
- As you can see, the costs a professional wedding photographer carries goes far beyond just charging an hourly rate for the wedding day itself. There’s so much more happening behind the scenes.
- We also want people to understand what it really means to choose a professional photographer. Someone reliable, who doesn’t miss a moment because of faulty gear, who invests in quality, and who’s fully committed to giving couples a smooth, stress-free experience.
We invest and take on these costs with one clear goal, to offer our services at the highest possible level, to earn back those investments, and to be fairly compensated for the many hours we put in, so we can continue doing this work with the same passion and quality.
To truly understand the price of a wedding photographer, you first need to see the costs and investments that lie behind it.
Now we finally get to our services and the price that comes with them. There are different ways photographers structure their offerings, but most of our colleagues, and we do the same, choose to work with packages. It keeps things clear and straightforward, both for us and for you.
What’s Included in a Package, and What Determines the Price?
Most wedding photographers offer between 2 and 4 packages, making it easy for couples to choose what suits them best. We work the same way. All three of our packages include a number of fixed elements:
With us, the main difference between packages is the number of hours we’re there to photograph your day, and the number of fully edited images you’re guaranteed to receive.
That way, you know exactly what to expect and can choose what fits your day best.
The price varies depending on how many hours of photography you need and how many edited photos are included.
The Big Misconception:
After a long, but necessary detour, we’ve arrived at the biggest misconception around wedding photography, and that’s the cost of hiring a wedding photographer.
Imagine: Studio Jan offers his wedding photography services for €2500 for a 8-hourwedding. What we hear so often from people who aren’t in the industry, is:
“Wow, that’s a nice paycheck for just 8 hours of work!”
And that’s where the problem lies. Because that €2500 isn’t for 8 hours of work. It’s the price for fully capturing, editing, and delivering an entire wedding. And even that doesn’t tell the full story, since that amount also includes our fixed business costs and long-term investments. So, it’s time to clear up that misconception once and for all!
Let’s break it down, very simply, from shoot to delivery:
- Preparing and checking gear: 1 to 2 hours
- Photographing the wedding: 8-hour (in our case, that’s x2 since we always work as a duo)
- Transferring and backing up the photos: 1 to 2 hours
- Selecting the best shots from an average of 10,000 images: 5 to 8 hours
- Editing the selected photos (for example, 900 final images): 20 to 40 hours, depending on how much retouching and color correction is needed
- Creating and preparing the online gallery: 2 to 3 hours
And that’s not even counting:
travel time, communication with the couple, designing the mini album, admin work, invoicing, and so on…
In short, even in a simplified estimate, you’re easily looking at 50 hours of work. In reality, it often creeps closer to 60 hours. And trust us, we’ve timed it more than once.
What does that actually mean?
If you look purely at the hours of work involved:
€2500 divided by 60 hours = €41,66/hour.
And that’s without factoring in all the investments and fixed costs we talked about earlier: cameras, lenses, software, workshops, accounting, car lease, and so on…
The reality is, if you want to build a healthy photography business and maintain a livable work-life balance, you really have to factor in everything — your work hours, investments, fixed costs, and the fact that there’s a physical limit to how many weddings you can shoot in a year. Because - believe it or not - shooting weddings weekend after weekend, standing for 8 to 16 hours straight… you definitely feel that.
Some amazing fellow photographers, and we really mean amazing because they constantly inspire and motivate us, created a pricing calculator for photographers. It helps you calculate your real real price based on all your costs, investments, and the number of weddings you want to shoot per year. And trust us, it’s confronting. If you start with all the costs we mentioned in this blog and aim to shoot around 18 weddings per year (which works out to 3 weddings a month during the season, already quite a lot), the calculator quickly shows that your price per wedding should start at minimum €4000!
The harsh reality? Many photographers don’t dare to charge that price, out of fear they won’t get booked. But that leads to an industry where so many are working below their true value, putting themselves under increasing financial pressure.
So, what now?
Recently, we asked for a quote to replace a toilet. The plumber estimated around 4 to 5 hours of work and sent us an invoice for €2500At first, that sounded a bit absurd, so we asked around in our friend group if that was normal. To our surprise, everyone found it completely reasonable. It was just socially accepted, so no one really questions it.
But when a photographer charges €2500 for 50 hours of work, which is actually well below a fair rate — suddenly, a lot of people are in shock.
And that’s exactly where things go wrong.
Changing perceptions takes time. The only thing we can do is be open and honest, and give you a real look behind the scenes of our profession, in the hope of creating more understanding, respect, and appreciation for the work we do.
So the next time you think: “Can you do anything on the price?” or “We truly love your photos!”, just remember how much time, energy, and investment went into making that result possible.
And finally, we want to end with this:
For many, their wedding day is one of the most special moments of their lives. You pour your time, energy, and money into making it unforgettable. So wouldn’t you want your memories to be captured by someone professional, someone who puts their heart and soul into telling the story of your day in the most beautiful way possible?
Wedding Photography in Belgium and Beyond
Whether you’re getting married in Belgium or planning a destination wedding abroad, we capture your day with love and an eye for detail. Thanks to our experience as professional wedding photographers, and the fact that we always work as a team, we’re able to document every moment, from the official ceremony to the intimate moments shared with family and friends.
📸 Curious about our style and approach as wedding photographers in Belgium? Take a look at our portfolio filled with love stories we’ve had the honor of capturing.
📩Want to know if we’re still available for your wedding day? Feel free to reach out to us through our contact form, we’d love to hear from you!
