You may notice that I’m on a bit of a wedding kick lately. I don’t expect that to stop soon either since these things are expensive. On top of food and drink, invitations, venue, decorations, flowers, dj, etc., you can pay the price of a small car for a wedding (I could insert a joke about which is statistically likely to last longer but that might be in bad taste given my current situation). Figuring out how to cut some of these expenses down is important but you just need to learn to stomach some of them. That said, is there a bigger single expense rip-off than wedding photographers?
After paying somebody 2-4 grand for taking pictures for several hours, they want to then sell you the ‘rights’ to the pictures of your wedding they took? I saw a website refer to these as "digital negatives"! If there’s a clearer sign that something is a rip off then I can’t think of it. Adding a computery word before an old outdated process doesn’t mean that there’s any of the old work involved. Imagine if you had to pay for e-stamps when sending email.
This is simple. If you pay someone thousands of dollars to take photos of you for 6 hours, they should be giving you 6 hours worth of photos. Instead, they just give you 30 "best of" shots and want to sell you the rest. What the crap was the thousands of dollars for?
Another thing wedding photographers want to sell or package for you are the wedding albums, online slideshows, etc. Now this is surely a valuable service for some people but giving me a "best of" physical album and not giving me the pictures I paid thousands of dollars for is missing the entire point. I’m paying for ‘wedding photographers’ not ‘wedding photo album makers’. Let’s not lose sight of this basic fact.