The Truth About Wedding Photography - Anyone Can Shoot It!

There. I said it.

It's TRUE! Anyone with a camera can shoot a wedding!

Let's say your friends just bought a new Nikon D80 camera. Better yet... let's say they spent the money and got themselves a new Nikon D200. And, they splurged and bought one of the fancy 17-55mm f2.8 DX lenses to go with it. And, to top it off, they got themselves a Nikon SB-800 flash with a nice diffuser too.

Wow! They must be really able to shoot your wedding right? After all, they have the same basic gear that many wedding photographers use. Same camera, same lens, same flash. Oh, and they bought plenty of Compact Flash cards too, so they can shoot 2000 or more images as well!

But to be safe, you went ahead and contacted a couple of professional photographers. Wow, that guy is going to charge you $2500 to shoot the wedding! And then, another guy had the nerve to say it would cost $5000 to shoot the wedding and to make an album! Are they crazy? The whole camera system doesn't even cost $5000!

So you decide that perhaps your friend with the new fancy camera can do just as good of a job. And you don't expect him to do this for free... so you offer to pay him $1000 for his time and effort. That's more than fair right? You had checked out Craigslist and found some "pro" photographers offering to shoot weddings for $500. So giving your friend $1000 is more than fair!

In this case, I would agree with you. Paying him $1000 is very fair! It's twice what some guys will do it for and they are in business to do this! Your friend is getting double and he's not really doing this professionally.

Ok. So your friend shoots the wedding, goes home and puts the images on Photoshop Elements and fixes some of the shots that did not come out too well and then prints up 4x6 images of all the photos and gives them to you. What? They don't look as good as you thought they would? Why is that? He's got the same camera, same lens, same flash, lots of Compact Flash cards to get lots of shots, but it still doesn't really look that good? Something's not right here. What is it?

Lack of experience! Lack of artistic vision! Lack of technical expertise!

Now you know why some of these wedding photographers are charging $2500 or $5000 or more for a wedding. What you are paying for is not the camera. You are paying for their ability to give you quality images and quality albums based on their professional abilities.

Anyone with a camera can shoot a wedding. But would you really want them to?