Wedding Cost up for 2012

[Nigel Barker]

Originally Posted by Chris Harding

Something I have noticed here over the last 10 or so years has been the dramatic drop in photogs pricing!

Photography has got much easier since digital replaced film. With modern cameras you have got to be pretty incompetent not to produce acceptable pictures. They may not be stunning creative or wonderful but they will be good enough. When you were using film you needed a certain amount of skill to ensure that the prints that you got back from the lab were OK whereas it's perfectly possible to put the modern camera in P mode & shoot decent pictures.

Photography has been deskilled & there has been a vast influx of part-timers happy to earn beer money. Ironically nowadays there is also much more good creative & stunning photography being produced as digital has allowed photographers to experiment & be creative at zero cost or risk. Much wedding photography in the days of film was safe & boring so it was only high end weddings that got the creative treatment from skilled photographers.

[Chris Harding]

Hi Nigel

Very true. I have a friend here with just about zero skills and he shoots on a Canon 40D on full auto...his theory is bash out 3000 exposures in as many hours and you just have to get some good shots... He did a wedding for me..(thankfully only one) and the bridal group was in a little hollow with overhanging tree branches and the AF dutifully focussed every shot on the branch and leaves in front of him leaving the bridal party nicely blurred. Luckily he had to take full responsibility for his actions and didn't come recommended by me either.

A couple of hundred for a few hours work makes good beer money, regardless of results! Trouble is that you can buy a fairly good DSLR now for less than $1K and you get a twin lens set and that to some constitutes a wedding kit.

Chris

[Stevan Ostojic]

Originally Posted by Adrian Tan

Hmm... I can only really go on pretty limited experience -- I don't have the full picture. And my world is basically the world of DSLR and two-videographer-minimum weddings. So, I really don't know what one-shooter documentary weddings are priced at. And, in the scheme of things, I don't think there are many DSLR companies in Sydney, to be honest. The serious ones -- maybe 30-40 companies? Something like that. Hundreds of wedding videographers throughout NSW, though, judging by the wedding directories.

If Bernard or Allan is reading this, perhaps they could chime in?

I know from experience that if you price a two videographer wedding at $2000 or below, DSLR or no DSLR, they sell like hotcakes if you've got word of mouth. And to all sorts of clients. Simple weddings. Lavish weddings. And the couple's expectations are not for a high quality video. They sort of just want to be filmed discreetly, and want something fun and happy that preserves their memories.

$2500: if the quality is good, and you've got advertising, you'll get a wedding every weekend. There are plenty of non-DSLR companies operating around this level as well, but usually with at least two videographers.

$2900: there's one company I know of that has far more work than they can handle for one videographer DSLR weddings at this price. They've got great quality and very good reputation going for them.

$4000: just depends. One company I know only gets maybe a dozen or so jobs a year at this price. Another company gets 25 jobs a year. Another company gets just three or four.

$5400: one company I can think of seems to be doing very well at this price, but there really wouldn't be many who successfully do it. In terms of quality... everyone who's offering weddings from $3000-$5000 basically has pretty similar-looking work, to be honest! In my opinion anyway.

$7000+: at least one company I can think of that operates around here. No idea how well they're doing, but, hey, they haven't dropped their prices yet.

$8000+: no idea! Got a feeling it's fairly untested waters. But there might well be a market for it.

So... don't know what all of that tells you. My gut feeling is that $2000 is cheap here for two videographers, $2000-$3000 is median. No idea what "average" is. Lots of DSLR cowboys straight-out-of-film-school willing to film your wedding for a song.

I'd be very curious, actually, to know what the situation is like in Melbourne. Seems to be a very healthy film culture there, so I imagine that weddings are much the same as in Sydney. Shame that there don't seem to be any Melbourne people on this forum.

No idea what pricing is like in Brisbane.

Hi Adrian,

I'm a Melbourne guy and it's a mixed bag down here - high price doesn't always equal quality work. I will agree with you that if you're at a certain price point (within the median somewhere) and provide good work, there are plenty of bookings to be made. An experienced photographer with X-thousand weddings under his belt told me at a recent wedding that I "got in at the wrong time" (I started up about 3 years ago). I tend to disagree with that, now is good a time as any depending on what your business goals are, your skill set, the way you market yourself, and naturally your pricing etc.

I can't really comment on the median price of weddings in general, at a guess I would say that people are balancing things out by having weddings outside of the peak season to save money.

Re video: Some of the highest priced videographers in Melbourne do not advertise on any of the mainstream bridal websites as far as I can tell. There are other well established businesses who I assume get plenty of word of mouth work and also advertise and their prices vary and the quality of their work varies. Lots of people have jumped on the dslr bandwagon, but I would say few do it well, and that there's probably more stiff competition in Sydney.

From what I can see, "Cinematic" is still the "it" word down here, everybody is doing "cinematic" weddings. Unfortunately however, only maybe a handful that I've seen do really nice work and maybe one or two of those can actually claim to do any kind of cinematic story telling. I have seen a couple of companies quote $4000+ on their web sites for a two shooter setup. One of those does really nice work and tell me they're booked out, the other is atrocious and I doubt they're busy.

[Roger Gunkel]

Originally Posted by Nigel Barker

Roger, you don't understand statistics. In your example the numbers are too small while if the sample size is large enough then the average will indeed be accurate. There are other techniques that can be used to have even more accurate figures e.g. discount the outliers (the £10K wedding in your example) or use the median rather than the average. Not saying that this particular report is accurate but there is no intrinsic reason why if the calculations are done correctly that the results shouldn't be accurate & meaningful.

But Nigel I do understand statistics and that is precisely why I used the example that I did. You are quite correct in saying that if you take out the extremes, then you can come up with a reasonable average, but then of course it's not a real average, but an average of the average range that you have chosen. The problem with statistics is that they are very easily manipulated, for example in advertising where a very limited number of people in a particular user range are sampled to show that '89% of 295 women agreed that ...........'.

It's all purely academic anyway, as I am not the slightest bit worried by what statistics say, only that I am having my best year so far out of the last 27 :-)

Roger

[Kevin McRoberts]

So how much of that is simply inflation? Food and fuel are up almost 2x their cost in 2008 (yet are two things they don't factor into inflation statistics... weird). Health insurance costs are way up, etc... all that has to be passed along somewhere.

[Tim Bakland]

Originally Posted by Chris Harding

Based on the fact that there seem to be a lot of high end videographers on this forum then there must be a lot of guys and girls working below $1K as well for the average to be only $1600!!

That average probably has a lot more to do with thousands of videographers being around and below that -- and a (relative) few being in the $4000+ category. That would be my guess, at least, if you're talking globally for wedding videographers.