Your Wedding Photo Budget

I totally agree with everyone here... Jonathan you included. I selected 2k-5k since we are bringing our photographer down, but that was an unconventional deal. She's shooting the welcome dinner and wedding. To have that type of coverage from even a Cabo photographer would have been comparable in price.

 

Truth of the matter, for all professional photographers, when I see rates starting at $2k+ I get a bit hesitent. As a bride you are conditioned to think that is such an insane markup on Wedding related items and this is no different. Even when I thought of a traditional wedding, I never imagined spending more than $3k.

 

With photography and videography there is a very fine line between what is too much and what is reasonable. So it becomes a matter of defining that line.

 

Jonathan, thanks so much for starting this thread. It's so interesting to read each opinion. What part of Michigan are you from? How'd you hear about the forum?

It all boils down to where people want to spend their money. Everyone is different so everyone is going to put more money into different things.

Many DW photographers that I know, myself included, are dealing with couples who are flying us in to shoot their wedding so they have larger photography budgets.

When hiring a photographer, local or not you really have to compare rates and what is included. Many times, if you are wanting 8+ hours of shooting it may be more economical to fly someone in and hire the person you really want rather than hiring a local. It appears though, that Cabo has a good selection of photographers, which is nice. Other places don't have that.

My prices start at $3500 which includes:

rehearsal and rehearsal dinner coverage
unlimited wedding day coverage
online proofing and ordering
30 page hard cover coffee table album

I have other customizable packages ranging from $3500-$7800 which include different types of albums, Digital negs, etc. Travel fees vary of course.

I'm from Grand Rapids, Michigan which is on the west side of the state. I may be moving to Minneapolis, MN in the next year or two though.

I stumbled across this forum via myspace.com. I'm glad I did. I've been wanting to do more DW weddings and less local right now so it's nice to be here.

I'm more than happy to answer any questions. feel free to contact me any time.

Jonathan

I selected 2-5k since we have booked a local Cabo photographer for that amount. I agree with what many of the other girls have said in terms of their photography budget being important, but as a portion of the wedding, not the MOST important part of the wedding.

I do have strong feelings about my photography because when the day is done, that is all you have left. When I started researching destination wedding sites, I also was looking at photographers at these locations. A large part of the reason why I chose my location was because of my photographer- I saw his website, fell in love with his work and wanted to have him. Yes, he is more expensive than some of the other local talent, and has raised his prices recently to be equal to other DW photographers, but he's a relatively new photographer and I'm glad I booked him before his prices went up! That is part of what attracted me to Cabo- a great photographer that I didn't have to pay to fly down!

Thanks for joining our forum Jonathan, it's great to hear the perspective of vendors. It's too bad you're leaving Grand Rapids- I live in Lansing and it's always great to know of talented local photographers!

You live in Lansing??!! wow... small world. I'm not leaving GR just yet. It will be at least a year or so I think. GR just doesn't have the market so I chose Minneapolis mainly because all my relatives are there, and it's a great city with a huge market. Plus, it's a major Northwest Airline hub which will make it easier for DW travel.

Good for you! That will be much easier than driving to Detroit to fly internationally all the time:)

I guess for us the whole reason we decided on a destination wedding was because we couldn't afford to pay for a $25K wedding at home, nor did we want to spend that for 5 hours with our friends & family.

 

We will have a relatively small number of people at our wedding and as much as I want us to have beautiful pictures, we don't really have a lot of money budgeted for the photography. My FI is not convinced that the photographer that I want so so much is worth $4K, he things its silly to spend that kind of money on pictures and I can understand where he's coming from as much as I'd love to hire this photographer, I know it's really not in our budget. But I found someone else for $3K and I'm hoping he'll let me get this person, we'll see.

you tell you're FI that he's not getting any whoopie on the wedding night unless you get the photographer you want!! kidding kidding. but... you are going to have to live with the pics you get forever, so make sure you get what you really want. Nothing worse than having regrets later.

good luck!

Jonathan

Hi Johathan, I'm also located in Michigan (Novi area) we are only having about 12 people attend our Cabo wedding. For me the photog. is actually a big part of our budget, since were not having a reception (just a dinner) we only hired our photo for 3 hours to do ceremony pics and pics of us on the beach and through out the resort. I knew I wanted a DW because you can do whatever you want and not having to keep up with the traditions of a normal wedding. If I were having a wedding in the states I would hire a photog for 8 plus hours, since more family and friends would be there. But to tell you the truth, hiring my Cabo photographer is one of the things I'm most excited about because I love his work. I would rather pay the extra money to get the perfect pictures then paying a cut rate to get "ok" pictures.

i somewhat agree with what everyone is saying. I know for us we chose a DW in order to SAVE money. we are spending less than $1800 for our wedding photography- and believe it or not that is probably one of the biggest chunks of our budget. There are numerous photographers in Cabo that do amazing work without charging the insane prices that have become very common in the US. i agree pictures are a huge part of your wedding day- but with some many great local cabo photographers with cheaper costs- it makes choosing a photog easy in my opinion. We are only using a professional on the wedding day but i do have a best friend that dabbles in photography a little and she is going to be taking tons of pictures throughout the wedding weekend. so between the two of them we should have the pictures thing taken care of.

I think I am a bit of an anomoly on this board - we did a DW because we want to save money but we mostly chose to have a DW because if we did it in our home town we would have 4x the number of guests - that's just obscene in my opinion so we opted to do a DW. We're definitely not as budget-conscious as some of the other couples on this board. I voted $5k plus - we are actually spending $5k exactly but that's because our photographer gave us an amazing deal - we're getting what amounts to his premium package for the cost of his cheapest package - and he is paying all of the travel. Since we've already invested a couple hundred in epic prints we're technically over $5k.

 

Relatively speaking, the price that we paid is right on par with what other brides from my home town are paying for photography. And it was one of our top three as far as priority goes (food, entertainment, photography)

 

so there you go