In Germany, 370.000 couples get married each year. There is no other event where more money is spent on than a wedding, and wedding photographers are the best-paid segment in the private end customer sector.
The Berliner image service provider XXLPIX has published a report on market prices, trends, and communication in wedding photography – which we would like to have a closer look at.
In a study from 2015, data from 250 professional wedding photographers have been analyzed. The report shows, as expected, that the prices for wedding shoots vary extremely based on the different services included in the package prices of photographers.
With the big wedding packages over half of the photographers offer their service for up to 600 EUR, the prices of the remaining suppliers have very diversified rates up to 2.000 EUR and above.
At least 20% of photographers offer their packages for over 1.500 EUR. According to the report, they can estimate between 800-1.000 EUR for a big wedding shooting.
The average price for a big wedding shooting increased slightly in comparison to the previous year by 1,69%.
Optimizing costs and effort
This pricing construct shows how important it is for wedding photographers to optimize costs and efforts and to generate further profit by offering additional products.
Because after taking pictures for 8-12 hours – the work is far from being done. Additionally, you will have multiple hours of culling and image editing, which many photographers underestimate or completely forget when doing their base calculations for their wedding shoots.
For example, if you have a 12-hour wedding reportage where you shoot 2000 photos, and the couple is expecting 600 images edited, it quickly adds up to double the hours or even more for photo selection and editing.
Through outsourcing your image editing to ProImageEditors, the photographer can minimize their effort and optimize their profit. Apart from the fact that many photographers enjoy taking photos more than image editing, the costs for outsourcing are much lower than the hourly rate of the wedding photographer.
Therefore, through outsourcing, the photographer keeps more net profit from their shooting price – has more time for client acquisition and support, marketing, or other hobbies as well as friends and family.
Additional services and product sales
Further possibilities to optimize your profit margin are to offer additional services around the wedding. According to the study engagement, after-wedding, bride boudoir, or even trash-the-dress shooting, as well as photo booths, are only a few of the trends with which photographers can generate more profit.
Additional profits can be generated by offering e.g., photo albums, canvas prints, and other high-quality print products. In this segment, especially photo albums and canvas prints are the top sellers.
In it is not mentioned in the report, but another opportunity can be offering wedding videos to the clients. ProImageEditors offers exceptional services for video editing, album design, and retouching that can unburden photographers financially as well as timely.
Conclusion:
At first glance, prices for wedding photographers seem high. However, if you take the hours for image editing into account, it quickly is revitalized. Possibilities to optimize the profit for your shoots are e.g., outsourcing your image editing and culling, offering additional shootings before and after the wedding, selling print products or photo albums, or even the production of wedding videos. Great examples are Anne, Riccardo, and Valerie from „Kreativ Wedding“ with fantastic photos and videos.
The whole report can be found here (German only):
www.xxlpix.net/profi-wissen/hochzeitsfotografen-im-vergleich
For more information about our workflow and how you can get started working with us have a look at our FAQ section.
