Reviewing our first wedding photography year

Having shot our last wedding of 2012 it was time to look back and assess how it had gone and where I wanted to go with my wedding photography. We’d gone into the year with about 50% of the weddings we worked on booked, the other 50% were late or short notice bookings. Going into 2013 I hadn’t advertised anywhere other than the work intranet. I was still getting regular enquiries, via word of mouth or being booked on recommendations by my clients from 2012. That was really nice, and encouraging.

I was still working for the Police, full time, and the weddings in the last year had taken up a lot of my spare time. The weddings themselves, pre venue visits, pre wedding meetings and pre wedding shoots ate into my time. The biggy though was post processing the images following a wedding, that could take me up to a week. I was always busy. My plan had been to go all out in that first year, to see if I enjoyed it, and if becoming a full time wedding photographer was something I really wanted to do. The answer to both questions was a resounding yes.

So now I had decide if I wanted to risk giving up my full time, secure job, with the police (which I still enjoyed). However, I couldn’t make any monumental decisions at that point because I was still a novice wedding photographer learning my trade. I needed to build up a reputation and client base that was large enough to sustain me, and Lin, and pay the mortgage.

Advice I’d been given from the various training sites I was still using was that wedding photography prices move in bands for regular pro’s. So if you’re shooting £1000 weddings, most of the guests attending that wedding would expect to pay a wedding photographer £1000. That was based on a Bride and Groom budgeting to pay 10% of her wedding budget on her photographer. So a £10,000 total wedding day budget. Therefore the aim was to move up the bands to either earn more money or, as it seemed was the aim of some pro’s, earn more money and shoot less weddings.

Based on the reasoning in the previous paragraph it’s a simple question of maths working out your minimum price point to make a living from your wedding business. You can discount income from incidentals such as print sales to guests because social media as all but killed that revenue stream. It really just comes down to your fee and what’s got to be taken out of that. So, to earn £30,000 you had to work 30 weddings charging £1000. Incredibly hard work. It’s not quite as simple as that either. Working for myself I would have a lot more expenses. Cameras to maintain and replace (the Canon 5D’s we were using were £2,500 each and they were hammered shooting weddings). Travel costs, Insurances, money set aside to cover unforeseen circumstances stopping you working (the guide was to have at least the equivalent of six months pay set aside). You could probably add another ten to fifteen weddings a year to cover those expenses.

There was a lot to consider but I’d enjoyed working as a wedding photographer so much I decided I would work towards taking the leap to working full time. I’d discussed it with Lin and had her full support. My very basic business plan was to try to get there in four years from that point. So with that in mind I decided to carry on taking bookings, whilst still working for the police, with a view to taking on as many weddings as I could around my full time job. Building my client base, increasing our prices and then reviewing everything again at the end of 2013. We were soon back at work as we had a wedding booked in for January 2013.

All images: ©Stephen Hyde 2007-2025 – All rights reserved.