Wedding Cost up for 2012
 

Interesting article on CNN today. Obviously location plays a factor in what people charge for different services, but interesting none-the-less.

Average wedding cost $28,400 last year - Mar. 10, 2013

Re: Wedding Cost up for 2012
 

What irks me is that the average price paid to photographers is nearly double what we get yet we work longer and harder!! TSK!! TSK!!

Our "median" price over here has also risen over the years and last year was around the $25K mark but we are in the West and on the East Coast you would pay a good $10K or more extra!!

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!! I keep seeing posts here about $8K to $10K charges for "wedding films" so they are obviously people who are dragging down the average by doing "Your complete wedding to $299" prices or the high end people are not getting much slice of the cake??

Over here that is quite a close average too .... sorta around $1500 - $2000 is normal and seldom any weddings are done professionally under $1200. There are just a sprinkling of videographers that go a lot higher (sort of $4K and above) I wonder if Adrian here knows what the average East Coast wedding prices are?? certainly higher than us in the West!!

Chris

Re: Wedding Cost up for 2012
 

I wonder how they take into account someone who doesn't get a wedding videographer. That's $0 spent on video - that could also drag the average price down. It seems like someone would be more willing to not have a video than not have a photographer.

Re: Wedding Cost up for 2012
 

The article states that the average cost of a wedding is going up, but fails to mention whether the number of weddings is going up, down, or staying the same. My feeling in the UK is that less people are getting married at the moment, or delaying the wedding while there is a recession on. This means that those with less money will perhaps be getting married later, whilst those for whom money is less of a problem will be carrying on with their plans. If you take the cheaper weddings out of the equation, then the remaining ones will give a higher average, but for less weddings, so the figures really show nothing.

As for the costs of photography versus video, if a photographer is supplying prints and albums, rather than just a disc, then I can see why the photographers costs would include considerable extra outlay compared with the videographer. Editing video is a time rather than cost consumer, and the photographer would probably spend a similar ammount of time collating and editing several hundred pics, before having them printed and bound/ framed etc. I find as a videographer I usually spent much longer on the day at the wedding, but overall, the hours put in can't be that much different.

Roger

Re: Wedding Cost up for 2012
 

I get very frustrated when I see averages quoted because they make people see things totally incorrectly and are hopelessly misleading!

Lets take 10 weddings, 9 of which have a photographer who charges £1000, but one wedding has a bigger budget and they want a very classy stylish photographer who charges £10000. When the photographers look at the figures, 9 of them get pissed off when they see that the average for photography was £2000. In fact nobody got £2000 except the top paid guy, but they all think they are under pricing.

As I said statistics show absolutely nothing!!!!

Roger

Re: Wedding Cost up for 2012
 

In your example you're absolutely right, but that's a tiny sample size. Of course location (and other variables) is part of the equation of what someone would charge as well, but the outliers (the person charging $10,000 and the person charging $299) aren't going to impact the average very much when the sample size is as large as this one probably was. It was from The Knot, so it probably had a very large sample size.

If nothing else these statistics do show about what percentage brides tend to budget for different products since it's fairly save to assume that the person paying $10,000 for a wedding video also had a higher total budget than the person buying a $299 wedding video.

Re: Wedding Cost up for 2012
 

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

Back in 2000 and something a typical wedding photog shot for 5 hours and raked in $4000 AND although they supplied a basic album the bride only got the images on DVD after they had satisfied the "minimum print order" ..They could get the DVD with no prints but that cost them an extra $1000!!!

In the last few years full time photogs are shooting for a mere $1500 and they stay for 8 hours too and the bride gets the DVD's with no conditions and no copyright restrictions so competition must be tougher!! The photog I work with on quite a regular basis (he is full time and his wife shoots too) does an 8 hour shoot for just over $1000...the bride gets a pile of 8"x10"'s and the DVD's and that's for two photogs!!!

As you guys must have we also have the idiots that become "pros" when Daddy buys them a camera and they advertise way, way below the $1000 mark ... I even saw a videographer last week advertising .".Your entire wedding video from start to finish on DVD for $299 " (That's where I plucked the $299 figure from)

Chris

Re: Wedding Cost up for 2012
 

That is a ridiculously low price. Obviously that's not sustainable. That videographer may have just been trying to get experience and wanted to get paid something.

I'll preface this by saying that this isn't my full time gig, so I don't do nearly the volume that a lot of you do, so take it for what it's worth. I started doing weddings two years ago and I had a relatively low introductory price just to get into the market. I really did not get many calls for weddings.

When I increased my price (not my packages and sample videos were the same) I started getting many more calls. I say this because I think when your packages are priced that low, $299, brides won't take your product serious. Sometimes there is a perceived quality that comes with a higher price.

Re: Wedding Cost up for 2012
 

You may find this very hard to believe but I have heard this said by future brides three times now..."We're not getting married in a year that ends with 13". Seriously, there are a quite a few superstitious people out there.
Multiply that across the country and there's a reason why weddings may be a bit quiet right now.
I bet if you told one of them that you would do their wedding for $1,300 instaed of $1,400, they'd bite your hand off.

Re: Wedding Cost up for 2012
 

Interesting Chris, I've had this so many times too. Maybe I'm wrong, but the combination of the recession and the number 13 in the year seems to be depressing things just a little!

Re: Wedding Cost up for 2012
 

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.

Re: Wedding Cost up for 2012
 

I'm not the least bit concerned with averages or surveys. Why does this matter? What matters is what I get paid, not what's average.
BIll

Re: Wedding Cost up for 2012
 

Good insight and you're right this won't change how I change, but for me it's still interesting to read.

Re: Wedding Cost up for 2012
 

Plus of course it never gives you even a price average! A plush wedding in Manhattan is going to cost out somewhat higher than a country wedding in a rural town.

I'm sure it's the same all over the world ... I wouldn't like to do weddings in Asia however..I was told that they not only last all day (or days) but there are so many people willing to shoot weddings that the end price is a mere pittance compared to prices we expect to get.

An Afgab bride told me once her sister's videographer started and 7am and finished in the wee hours of the next morning and received the equivalent of US$360.00 for the entire job ... she expected the same in Australia but it never happened of course!

I too take survey's and averages with a pinch of salt!

Chris

Re: Wedding Cost up for 2012
 

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.

Re: Wedding Cost up for 2012
 

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.

Re: Wedding Cost up for 2012
 

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

Re: Wedding Cost up for 2012
 

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.

Re: Wedding Cost up for 2012
 

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

Re: Wedding Cost up for 2012
 

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.

Re: Wedding Cost up for 2012
 

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.