the value of your photos
Is wedding photography worth it?
Is your partner budget focused? Would you like me to present you with some other options? Here’s a collection of available bridesmaids and groomsmen. Lol, just kidding.
Okay, jokes aside. Wedding photography costs money. Quite a lot of it, actually, and I’m not going to sit here and pretend otherwise or tell you that you simply can’t put a price on memories. You absolutely can put a price on photography. That’s the cost. But cost and value aren’t the same thing.
And if you’re currently comparing photographers, packages and numbers at the bottom of PDFs, I think that difference is worth talking about.
Let's talk about the number first
Wedding photography is expensive.
There. I said it.
Depending on who you hire, where you get married and how much of the day you want documented, photography can take a pretty significant chunk out of your wedding budget. That money is real, and pretending otherwise doesn’t make anyone feel better about spending it.
I’m also not going to tell you to “just invest in your memories” as if budgets magically disappear when something is emotional.
Cost is what you pay before the wedding. Value is what you’re left with after it.
Those two things are connected, but they are not the same thing.
Have you ever thought about how memories work?
Most memories don’t just appear out of nowhere. Something kickstarts them.
A song comes on and suddenly you’re seventeen again. You smell a particular perfume and think of someone you haven’t seen in years. You walk past a place and remember an entire conversation you thought you had forgotten.
Photographs do the same thing.
You look at a photo of your dad during dinner and suddenly you remember his speech. Then you remember the exact thing he said that made his voice crack. You remember who was sitting next to you, how hard you were trying not to cry and what it felt like to look around that room and realize that all of these people were there for you.
Images are kickstarters of memories. The photograph isn’t the memory. It’s the thing that unlocks it.
You don't need photos to remember that you got married
You’re probably not going to wake up in twenty years, look at your wedding photos and go, “OH RIGHT. We got married!”
You’ll know. You’ll remember the venue, what you wore, who was there and probably quite a few of the big moments.
That isn’t really what the photographs are for. They’re there to bring back the things you didn’t know you’d want to remember. Like your mom’s face when she saw you all dressed up, your friend’s hand on your shoulder, the way your grandparents looked that year, your dog in a ridiculous bow tie. Someone laughing in the middle of the ceremony and the expression on your partner’s face when they thought nobody was watching.
All the tiny, completely ordinary things that don’t necessarily feel important while they’re happening. Until one day they are the most important things to remember.
Most of your wedding budget is designed to disappear
The food gets eaten, the champagne gets drunk, the flowers eventually wilt. The DJ plays the last song and the candles burn down and everyone goes home leaving the venue in a wonderful state of chaos.
And that is not an argument against spending money on any of those things.
That’s their job. You’re paying for incredible food because you want to eat incredible food. You’re paying for flowers because they make the room look and smell fucking fantastic. You’re paying a DJ because you want everyone screaming on a dance floor at midnight. They create the experience of the wedding day, and that experience matters.
Photography is just a little weird in comparison, because you pay for it before the wedding, it gets created during the wedding, but most of its life happens after the wedding.
The party ends. The photographs don’t.
Some things get less valuable. Photos tend to do the opposite.
The day after your wedding, your photographs are exciting. A year later, they’re memories. Ten years later, they’re a version of your life that doesn’t exist anymore.
People change, families change, kids arrive, relationships evolve and eventually there will be people in those photographs who aren’t around anymore. That sounds slightly darker than the average wedding blog, I know, but it’s also true.
You have absolutely no idea which photograph will become the most valuable one you own.
And neither do I. It might not be the spectacular golden-hour portrait that ends up on your wall. It might be the slightly chaotic photo of your grandma laughing during dinner, your dad fixing your dress or your best friend looking at you from the other side of the room.
Value has a funny habit of changing with time.
Expensive doesn't automatically mean good
This is not me telling you that the most expensive photographer is automatically the best photographer.
They’re not. And if photography sits somewhere around number seventeen on your personal wedding priority list, I genuinely don’t think you should throw half your budget at it because a photographer on the internet told you that memories are priceless. Value is personal.
But if photographs are one of the things you know you’ll care about long after the wedding, compare more than the numbers at the bottom of the price list.
Look at the work. Look at full wedding galleries, not just twenty spectacular Instagram photos. Think about style, experience, consistency and what you actually receive. Think about whether you trust this person, and whether you want them around you, your family and your closest friends for a very large part of one of the biggest days of your life.
The cheapest option isn’t automatically the best value. Neither is the most expensive one.
What are you actually paying for?
You’re obviously paying for photographs, but you’re also paying for everything required to make those photographs happen.
Years of experience, knowing where to stand before something happens, knowing when to step in and when to shut up and let the moment unfold. Knowing how to work in pouring rain, a dark church, blazing sunshine and a dinner room where somebody has decided that three tiny candles count as lighting.
You’re paying for the work before the wedding, the hours spent with you on the day, the backups, the equipment, the editing and the thousands of decisions that happen between pressing the shutter and delivering your finished gallery. (Have a look at my calculator to pick the moments most valuable to you and see how the cost changes!)
None of that automatically makes a photograph emotionally valuable. But it creates the conditions for the photographs that might become valuable later.
The value isn't only in the big photographs
Of course you want the photo where you both look incredible. I want that too. I want the portraits, the light, the ridiculous landscape and the photo you immediately send to everyone you know because holy shit, look at us.
But a wedding gallery shouldn’t only be a collection of hero images. It’s your people, the room, the nervous hands, the ugly laugh, the hugs you didn’t see, the table your friends destroyed during a song. Your parents together in one photograph, the little pieces of your life that happened around you while you were busy getting married.
Some photos I make happen. Some photos I see happen. You’re getting both.
Because twenty years from now, you might be surprised which ones you keep coming back to.
So, is wedding photography worth it?
That depends entirely on what photographs are worth to you.
If you’d rather spend the money on a better band, another course at dinner, an open bar or three weeks in Japan afterwards, that doesn’t make you wrong. It means you know what matters to you.
But if photographs matter, don’t only ask what they cost. Ask what it would mean to have the day documented properly. To see moments you missed, to remember people exactly as they were. To show the day to people who aren’t even part of your life yet.
And ask yourself how you think those photographs might feel in ten, twenty or forty years. Showing them to your grandkids one day. That’s a very different question from “How much is the package?”
Cost and value are two different questions
When you compare photographers, the cost is easy to put in a spreadsheet. One number is higher, one is lower, one package has more hours and another includes an album. Value is harder to calculate because you don’t really know it yet.
You’re trying to put today’s price on something you’ll still own when the wedding is no longer recent, when the people in the photographs have changed and when tiny moments you barely noticed have become part of your family history.
So yes, look at the number. You should. Just don’t mistake the number for the whole answer.
The cost ends.
The value doesn't.
Your wedding photos won’t become valuable because they cost a lot of money.
They’ll become valuable because of who is in them, what happened around them and everything they bring back when you look at them again. They are what you are saving if the house is on fire. It’s your history.
In a world that turns more and more artificial every passing day, this is what truly matters. At some point, they stop being photographs of one very expensive, very brilliant day. Instead they become photographs of your life.