Hey photographer friends! Welcome back to our Photography Blog, Mastering the Wedding Photography Biz with Hunter and Sarah! We know that the world of high-end, luxury wedding photography is where most wedding photographers aspire to be one day. Yet until you’ve photographed your own luxury wedding, this entire world can feel so strange and foreign! But between our own luxury wedding photography clients, and our years spent apprenticing under the ultra-luxury wedding photographer, Eric Kelley, we’ve learned a few lessons about the luxury wedding photography market. And now we’re going to share those lessons with you!

 

 

Lesson #1: Having lots of money doesn’t make people good or bad, but it amplifies who they already are.

This isn’t a concept that we’ve come up with, but is definitely something that we’ve learned firsthand as photographers. We’ve met couples whose wedding budgets were over $1,000,000 who were the most kind and considerate people ever. And we’ve worked wedding days where we were barely making $1,000, who’s friends and family treated us like “the help”. It isn’t the absence or presence of money that changes someone’s character.

 

Imagine someone you know who’s incredibly generous and kind. If you gave that person $100,000,000, would they suddenly become an arrogant tool? Probably not! That money would most likely allow that person to be more generous and more kind.

 

But unfortunately the opposite is also true. If you give a jerk $100,000,000, it gives them license to be an even bigger and more arrogant jerk! So just like with any customer-facing role, being a wedding photographer is about dealing with all kinds of people. Kind people and rude people. That doesn’t change when you get to the luxury wedding photography market.

 

 

Lesson #2: When you have lots of money, time is more valuable than anything.

People don’t stop stressing about how much they’re spending on their wedding, even when there are a few extra zeros at the end of their budget. But when you have hundreds of thousands of dollars to spend on a wedding — or even a million-plus — it can change a couples’ priorities a bit. It isn’t that having nice details and a beautiful venue aren’t important anymore. But with a luxury wedding, those things are now a given. We’ve found that, ironically, the more a couple spends on the wedding day, the more they just want to spend time with their friends and family.

 

If you think about it, it actually makes sense. A family who is going to spend $250,000 on a wedding doesn’t empty their coffers or blow their life’s savings to do that. They do that because there are millions more where that came from. And when money is no object — when all your needs and most of your wants can be easily met with money — all of a sudden, time is more valuable. It’s the one thing you can’t purchase more of with money.

 

 

Lesson #3: Couples are usually wonderful… but parents can be a challenge.

We’ve hated the term “bridezilla” from the very first time we heard it. It also hasn’t been very reflective of our couples, especially not our luxury wedding photography clients. However, when the wedding budget extends into the hundreds of thousands and beyond, it can amplify some… challenging family dynamics.

 

This is especially true when parents are paying for the wedding, but the couple has very non-traditional ideas. Some couples want to do a first look, skip the cake cutting, forgo wedding parties or formal speeches at the wedding, etc. But as with any budget — when parents are paying and have other ideas, it can lead to some difficult conversations and even a few awkward moments.

 

Things can also get tricky when it’s the couple who is paying for their own wedding, but parents still feel entitled to dictate certain aspects of the day. By the time the wedding day comes around, our couples usually have a tremendous amount of trust with us. We’ve met with them on video chat. We’ve been emailing back and forth for over a year. We knocked their engagement session out of the park. So when we show up on the wedding day, we’re practically old friends. But we don’t enjoy that level of trust with parents, who can sometimes find it hard to understand how any photographer could be worth $10,000+. But we usually win them over by the end of the weekend 😉

 

 

Lesson #4: Competition is fierce for luxury wedding photography jobs.

We saw data from TheKnot.com a year or two ago that said that the average couple in the US pays $2,000 for their photographer. And on average, there’s roughly 25 weddings per year in the US for each wedding photographer out there. That data told us two things. First, if $2,000 is the average, then the number of weddings whose photographers are paid $10,000+ must be a tiny minority. Therefore, if the average across the entire US comes out to 25 weddings per photographer, the number must be much lower in the luxury and ultra-luxury market.

 

After all, how many weddings happen in your town with budgets of $1M+? Even in a destination wedding market like Charlottesville, the luxury market only has so many weddings each year for any given number of photographers. And at the ultra-luxury level, where couples could pay upwards of $30,000 for one of the best wedding photographers in the world, it’s an even more competitive market.

 

 

 

Lesson #5: It’s not easy getting into the luxury wedding photography market!

This is (literally) the million-dollar question, isn’t it? “How do I get into the luxury wedding market?” That question is why photographers purchase our workshops or even spend hundreds of dollars an hour for 2-on-1 coaching with us. Because we went from shooting $2,000 weddings to booking our first $10,000+ wedding in under 5 years! We figured out how to get into the luxury wedding photography market as quickly as possible, and have been teaching other photographers how to do it every step of the way.

 

If you’re struggling to raise your prices, book high-end weddings, and stop shooting so much, let us help you. Not only have our methods helped us grow our own business quickly, but our methods have helped many of our students as well! Getting into the luxury wedding market doesn’t have to mean putting in decades of work or shooting 500+ weddings before you’ve “earned your stay”. And you certainly don’t have to keep paying for styled shoots or go to every big wedding conference in the country either!

 

It’s certainly wasn’t easy getting into the luxury wedding market. But now that we’re here the steps we took to get here seem so clear in retrospect. Let us help you! Click here for more info!

 

 

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