To not want to pay a professional photographer for my wedding photos?!

[CocoM2017]

We are getting married next Spring and have quite a strict budget for our wedding. The one thing we haven’t sorted yet is a photographer. I have contacted a few and have had quotes from all, the most expensive being £1,900 and the cheapest coming in at £850. I only want them for the ceremony and a few hours at the reception.

This is a massive chunk out of what’s left of our already fairly modest budget (compared to a lot of weddings!) and I’m sat here tonight wondering if there’s another way to go about it.

I would really like some ‘professional’ photos from the ceremony and some at the reception venue etc but the thought of shelling out at the very least, £1k for these when they’ll probably just sit there unlocked at for the next 50 years after the initial novelty has worn off.

I was thinking about getting in touch with the local art college and seeing if any photography students would like to earn a few hundred quid? But then worry that they won’t take it seriously and will go out, get drunk the night before and not turn up, argh!

AIB tight? Should I just try and find the grand from somewhere? If you had a pro photographer, do you regret it or are you glad you forked out?

We didn’t have a professional photographer and I regret it. A family friend di the photos and all of them were blurred. We had to ask family and friends for any they took and dint get many good ones at all. So disappointing. I would try and save on other things if I were you and pay for a good photographer

We didn’t have a photographer. IMO, it was more important when people didn’t have good cameras and so the professional ones were all you were going to get.
We asked everyone to take pictures and got some really lovely ones. However, we aren’t the ‘gaze into each other’s eyes for photographs’ type of people

you will pay the frilly frock premium for this.

get guests to take snaps. you will only look at them once or twice, it is just a day.

We paid £800 14 yrs ago, for a photographer who has since won national awards and now charges several thousand. We have beautiful pictures and I don't regret a penny of it. I am a good amateur and have done several weddings for friends and family who really couldn't afford to pay someone, but I am just not in the same league as the pros. I did my brother's small registry office legal wedding, then they were tied in to the venue's photographer for their big wedding party abroad, and he turned out to be awful - out of focus, telegraph poles growing out of people's heads. It is so disappointing to have no lovely photos of your wedding day. I have one photo displayed and a beautiful album we look at frequently. Find someone good and economise elsewhere.

I didn’t think it needed explaining but okay confused Professional photographers that have been doing it for years deserve to be paid more because they have experience and years of honing their technique on their side. Their photos are likely to be of an exceptionally high quality due to this.

Students, who may well be semi-professional photographers, are learning. Therefore they don’t have the necessary experience or years of technical training that warrants a high pay, and their photos will not be as good quality due to those aspects.

I completely understand rating according to skill, but she's not talking about that. She already has her low-end price£850but wants it even cheaper, talking about getting a student to do it for "a few hundred quid." So either she's okay rolling the dice on getting poor photos, or she still expects £850+ photos for £300.

Even if she does find a student to do quality pictures at that price, she (and whoever accepted the price) just dropped the low end of the local market by £550, which can screw the next photographer. (And which is why I get people wanting me to design logos for $10, full branding for $30, and websites for exposure.)

Simply put, pay out for what you want, risk getting what you pay for, or get creative on how to get it, and don't devalue a profession by offering dimes on the dollar.

flyingspaghettimonster, your dress is even more amazing than your name! (Hail his noodly goodness.)

I’m so glad we had a good photographer. There is a world of difference between the professional photos and the ones that friends with SLRs took.

Do people still video their wedding? We did, it was very much the thing when we married nearly 30 years ago and I treasure it, as with @Blobby10 there are people who are no longer with us including our parents and it’s wonderful to see them all looking their best and smiling and enjoying themselves.

Ours was £300 including a disc of the edited photos. The pictures covered the ceremony and meal and turned out great. We made an album afterwards but around half were photos taken by friends and shared on Facebook afterwards. We have one wedding photo on display on the bookcase. It really just wasn't a priority for us. Our budget was quite tight and I wanted to spend the money on the guests.

Tell them you want two hours-- pick the time of your ceremony and get one hour. Then another hour later on. They are used to selling their time in one hour slots.

Except no decent wedding photographer would do this, because in doing so they are having to take an entire day out of their calendar and lose out on a booking who would value & pay properly for their services.

I know a couple of high end wedding photographers. The experience, skill & equipment that goes into their craft is immense. Plus the time spent on the day is a small fraction of the time taken is producing a set of images that can be presented to the client. They will have taken hundreds if not thousands of images throughout the day in order to produce what is presented to the client.

It is expensive to have a proper wedding photographer. I couldn't afford it either time I got married, but that's not to say it's not worth it if you can.

The first time I got married, smart phones weren't a thing. DSLR cameras were far from common place and the only photos I have are blurry ones from poor phone cameras. Despite the way the marriage ended, I really wish we'd been able to get decent photos of the wedding.

Second time I got married, I was fortunate enough to know people who whilst not full-on wedding photographers do do some pro work in other fields, and the images we have from that day are beautiful - there are moments captured that I didn't even know had happened or were playing out.

You can save a good couple of hundred quid by not getting books done by the pro photographer- agree a digital only package with them. All of the online photo printing businesses do books far cheaper. That also means you can include photos taken by guests, honeymoon photos, whatever you want. You can also delay getting them for a few months if your finances need time to recover.

We didn't!
It's such a huge chunk of money and often the pictures are so posed and fake. I don't regret it.

I didn't have a photographer and don't regret it, but then he left me a few months later anyway so the photos aren't exactly something I want to keep! My friend took photos and they were pretty good tbh.

I'm getting married again in August and we are paying a photographer (only £350 though) so will be interesting to see the difference.

I regret not hiring a professional.

We didnt hire anyone and got everyone to share their photos (a few had very decent cameras). I don’t regret it, I take a picture exactly like Chandler from Friends so the photos I was unaware of are better and I wasn’t really worried about it. My favourite photo is us snuggled on the couch in our pjs at 9 PM when the day was over.

I know plenty of people who cut their budget by getting a friends to take photos of their wedding. They all regret it.

I loathe having my photo taken and so so DH so we bit the bullet and hired an expensive 'reportage' style photographer that were very much in fashion 15 years ago (maybe they still are?)

When we got the photographs on an old contact sheet I didn't open the package for 3 days because I was so terrified of them. I was 100% certain I'd look awful.
But WOW what photos!! Stunning. Only one or two posed photos in there, no family groups - the rest were amazing photos of my guests, the speeches, the laughter, the fun! And I was amazed to find photos that I liked myself in.

I absolutely treasure them. They're most lasting thing about the wedding.
My Dad died last year and I look at the photos of him from our wedding , caught exactly the man he was - funny, told an amazing story and was totally loved by all.

My advice is to never skimp on photos.

You are asking in the wrong place OP. You might as well turn up in a posh bridalwear shop and say that you are considering buying an eBay dress from China.

To answer you question I think it’s 10% personal preference and 90% pressure from the industry in ‘what you should do’.

Some people really love photos of themselves and put them up around the house. Some people hate them and then there are various degrees in between.

I married years ago and I couldn’t tell you where my photos are. In the attic somewhere I believe like most people who have been married more than 5 years.

It depends how natural you want the photos to be. A lot of time is spent editing with a professional, thus the cost. A close relative chose a fried who was a photographer on a local paper . The price was reasonable. They maried in a beautiful setting alongside a river. Practically every group photo was Ruined because the guest had various boat masts growing out of their heads as they posed along the river bank. There were some guests not included in the photos and some random passers by included.

Fortunately my DH is a good amateur and they ended up having mostly his photos, free of charge, in their album. He is often asked to do events but always refuses as he knows his standard is not high enough.

We had a non professional do our photos and to be honest only a handful were decent but I wasn't too fussed as like your say, they only get stuffed in an album and not looked at and you only need one or two for display (I don't know anyone who has all their wedding photos on display). It depends on how important capturing the day in photos is? Also with the amazing cameras on phones now days, you’ll find a lot of your guests will capture some great moments, perhaps consider encouraging them to take snaps and give them a place to send them to you afterwards. My Iphone has a portrait mode and I've taken some amazing photos using it.

My dd is doing a photography degree and started doing a few weddings when she was doing a btec so around 17 years old.

The bride and groom contacted her college and her tutor recommended her.

Was paid about £150.
Started the day at 8am mostly getting ready with the brides and finished about 8pm so long hours and then took about 5 hours to edit the images.

Everyone who used her has recommended her to others.

She found the hardest thing was having to direct people for formal images just after the ceremony so always asked the bride and groom to come up with a list of group photos and allocate someone to call everyone up for her, she could then just worry about getting the images right.

It can work well.

Going on the majority of replies I must be odd. We had a professional photographer - his photos were excellent, but once we had all looked through them they’ve never been really looked at again, so on ‘a cost to wear basis’ they were not really worth the expense.
To be fair coming from a family were there was a keen amateur photographer who never missed a photo opportunity I’ve always been a bit ambivalent about photographs, especially the posed ones, where everyone tries too hard to look their best. I’m also not fond of the ones where arte farte techniques and enhancements are used to ‘improve’ the pictures taken.
If I was marrying again and money was tight a professional photographer would be well down on my list of priorities.

YABU. It’s the one thing I didn’t scrimp on and I’m so pleased we didn’t. I love our photos, they’re the only lasting reminder of our wedding, and they’re even more special to me now as my mum and nan are no longer with us. We only had a couple of posed group shots, the rest were reportage. We had photos that others took and the old disposable cameras but the photos sucked in comparison

We got a work colleague's husband to do the photos - we knew he was ok because we'd seen some of his son that he'd done that liked really professional and he had a large format camera (no digital in those days). Some of the photos could have been better but we weren't that bothered. The shot we display is of us standing in the church doorway facing inwards with the guests behind us which is lovely. The video as I mentioned upthread is what we really treasure.