The Journal · Full public price ladder
Nobody is going to tell you that you are not welcome. Some say that you are, in writing, before anybody asks.
By The Little Wedding Planner Editors · · Updated 10 September 2026
A photographer who has never written a sentence about who they will photograph is not telling you anything, and there is nothing to read in that quiet. The ones who have written it did something small and specific: they answered a question before a couple had to ask it, so a first message can be about the date and the hours and nothing else. Where the sentence sits on the site tells you nearly as much as the sentence does.
It is half past nine on a Sunday and you are writing to a photographer. You have the date, the venue, a rough idea of the hours. Then you reach the line about who is getting married, and you stop. Fiancée or partner. Whether to say it plainly, or leave it and let it come up on the phone, which is worse. You read it back twice, you send it, and you open the next tab and start again for the venue.
Nothing has happened. Nobody has been rude to you. This is only the extra work of writing to a stranger, and nobody pays you for it. One thing means you never have to do it: a sentence already on the page, answering the question before anybody asks.
Nobody is going to tell you that you are not welcome. Ask outright and you will be told yes, warmly, and the warmth will be real. That is the problem. A photographer who has never written a word about it is not withholding anything, and the likeliest reason is that nobody there ever thought a sentence was wanted. There is nothing to read in the quiet, in either direction. Being told yes on the phone comes after you have asked. Reading it on the site comes before, and that is the whole difference: you never have to work out how to ask.
The pages you are reading were written with a different couple in mind. Plenty of package lists still say bride and groom: the menu tasting for the bride and groom, two chairs at the signing table for the bride and groom. Nobody chose that wording to keep anybody out. It is inherited, and it sits in documents that get copied forward every season. Which is why a sentence written the other way stands out. Nobody inherited that one; somebody sat down and typed it.
Go looking for these sentences and you find them shaped as answers. They sit in an FAQ, under a question, in the same list as how long until we get the photographs and do you travel. Which means somebody asked, often enough that the photographer wrote it down and stopped having the conversation one couple at a time.
The best of them are short. The question, then the answer: yes, of course, sometimes with an exclamation mark on the end and a bit of impatience at having to be asked at all. Nobody drafts a sentence like that. It gets typed once, in the same voice as everything else on the site, and left there.
What that costs is small and it is real. The word is now on a public page, under somebody's own name, where a client who dislikes it will read it too. Nobody should call that brave. It is a person choosing to be specific in a business that runs on being agreeable.
The sentences themselves are much alike. What differs is where the photographer decided to put one, so read the page it sits on.
Some put it down among the prices, at the foot of the page you open when you have stopped browsing and started spending. Underneath packages set out in full, after what an extra hour costs. It is filed with the money, in the same run as the deposit and the clause about moving the date. Somebody worked out where that sentence would actually be read, and put it there rather than on an About page, where a business says nice things about itself.
Others pick no page at all. The line runs along the bottom of every page on the site, so it closes the prices, the portfolio and the FAQ alike. You cannot miss it and you never have to go looking for it. A badge on an About page has never once managed that.
The argument against writing any of it is better than it sounds, and it comes from photographers who would be hurt to be thought otherwise. It goes like this. I photograph whoever books me. Announcing it implies I gave the matter some thought, and a badge on a website makes a special case out of somebody's wedding. Better to do the work and let the work say it.
That last part is right, and it is the strongest thing in the argument. A portfolio is better evidence than a paragraph, because it is far harder to produce and it shows you the thing itself. But it is only evidence you can use if you can get to it.
Some make that easy. A blog is filed under headings, and same-sex weddings is a heading, sitting between the engagements and the weddings abroad like any other sort of wedding. That is a filing decision rather than a statement, and it lets you click a word and look at the work instead of a promise about it.
Sometimes there is no paragraph at all. Two brides, hand in hand, posted in with the rest of a year's weddings, no label on it and nothing made of it, because that is what it was. The ordinary week's work.
So the work can do it. What the argument gets wrong is who the sentence is for. Nobody reading it is trying to work out whether a stranger is a good person. You are wording an email at half past nine on a Sunday, and a paragraph is what you can check in four seconds. The sentence does not stand in for the work. It tells you the work is worth opening, and it tells you tonight, with the email still half written.
Look at enough of these pages and you find one that goes further than a sentence. It is not in photography.
A bridal shop can keep a page for it in the shop's own navigation, in the same list as alterations, plus size and recycled gowns. Filed there, beside the other things the shop actually does, it stops being a welcome. It is tailoring. Suits cut for the person standing in them, gowns made to numbers taken in the room, seamstresses in the building who will alter a gown you bought somewhere else. Somebody there has thought past the front door and as far as the fitting room. Being told you are welcome gets you an appointment. Somebody who cuts to your measurements gets you something to wear.
No photographer could reasonably be asked to go that far. But the shop tells you what a written sentence is worth. It is something you can hold a business to. A welcome that was only ever assumed cannot be held to anything.
So it is worth the extra minute, and worth saying so when you find it. Not because it proves anybody good. Because at half past nine on a Sunday, with somebody who has already written it down, you get to write the boring email. Names, date, venue, how many hours. Send.
Graeme Passmore is an editorial wedding photographer and film maker based on the Gold Coast, working across Byron Bay, Brisbane and the Sunshine Coast.
Rick has been photographing weddings in the Yarra Valley since 2015 and now runs a small team of associates from Healesville.
Mr.Wigley is a Sydney photo and video team whose whole pitch is that a wedding should feel like a party rather than a photoshoot.
Ashley Oostdyck photographs weddings around Brisbane as Stories by Ash, working alone on most days and describing herself as an extra friend you did not know you…
Thomas Stewart lives in Bowral and shoots around sixty weddings a year, most of them across the Southern Highlands and the South Coast.
Lisa Hatz has photographed weddings out of Alice Springs since 2009 — more than two hundred of them across fifteen years.
Sukha By Sam is Sam, a photographer working across the Bellarine Peninsula whose name comes from a Sanskrit idea of ease and sweetness she picked up in a yoga…
La Belle Bridal Boutique has been dressing Canberra brides for 50 years, and is now run by owner and couture fit specialist Ashleigh Switalski from Barker Street in…
James Rose has photographed weddings since 2010 and has more than six hundred behind him, working from Sydney’s lower north shore.
Jeremy Becker has been photographing weddings for nearly ten years, the last three of them full time, and works out of Coffs Harbour across the Mid North Coast.
Mark Roa Vergara photographs weddings out of the City of Maitland in the Lower Hunter Valley, and his galleries read like the region itself — vineyard rows at dusk…
Florent Vidal Photography works from Soldiers Point on Port Stephens, where Florent and Angelica have built a wedding practice now fifteen years old.
Lisa Watson lives by the ocean at Halls Head, just south of Mandurah, and photographs weddings across the Peel coast, up through Perth and down to the Margaret…
Lavan Photography is a Melbourne team shooting weddings and wedding film together, working from Ashburton across the city and five Victorian regions.
Daisy + Pine is a Bendigo wedding photographer and filmmaker working across central Victoria, Melbourne and further afield.
Born on the shores of Lake Como and now on the Mornington Peninsula, she founded Perla Photography more than a decade ago and works with a team.
