The $2,000 Photographer Does Not Exist

Somewhere in a shared spreadsheet, on a tab named Photographers, there is a column headed From. It is sorted ascending. Someone has highlighted a row in green and typed "sweet spot" beside it, and further down someone else has written "too much?" and left it there. That column looks like the most decisive research in the document.

It is stacking a ceremony on top of a wedding day and saying nothing at all about the difference.

Across 500 Australian wedding photographers, 384 publish a starting price clear enough to read. The median of those entry packages is $2,200. That number gets repeated in forums, in budget calculators and in the back of your head until it hardens into a fact about the industry. It is not a fact about the industry. It is the median height of 384 shop windows, and a shop window holds whatever the smallest thing in the shop happens to be.

What the number is made of

Sort by what the entry package actually covers, which 267 of those businesses also publish, and the single median comes apart in your hands.

• One to two hours: median $1,600, across 125 businesses.
• Three to five hours: median $2,000, across 79.
• Six to seven hours: median $3,000, across 47.
• Eight hours or more: median $3,550, across 16.

Four answers to one question. A $1,600 entry package and a $3,000 entry package are not a cheap photographer and a dear one. One buys a couple of hours. The other buys most of a wedding. They are the same trade quoted at two different lengths of day, and the median you were handed averages calmly across both.

Then the figure that should settle it. Of the 300 who publish a minimum at all, 114 publish a minimum of exactly two hours, and 135 publish two hours or fewer. Two hours is a ceremony and a set of portraits afterwards. A registry office on a Thursday. A headland with both families standing on it in the wind. It is a real product, sold honestly, and plenty of couples want precisely that and nothing more. Sitting in a From column, it is also indistinguishable from a nine hour day.

Nobody is hiding this

The easy move now is to accuse the trade of a bait and switch. It does not hold up for a second. The businesses that prove the point are the ones being clearest with you.

A Melbourne photographer publishes both of her starting figures and labels each one. Elopement and micro-wedding collections start at $3,100 for two hours. Wedding collections start at six hours of coverage with a minimum of 400 images, and against those six hours she publishes $5,200 on the page she titles for pricing and $4,800 in an FAQ elsewhere on the same site. Both pages are live. Take the lower one.

Read the two products side by side and the median stops meaning anything. Her two hour elopement collection already opens above $2,200. Her six hour wedding collection clears it again on either page. One business, two products, and a median landing between them that describes neither.

The lowest starting figure anywhere in this directory belongs to a photographer in Adelaide. It is $295, and the coverage sits right beside it: forty minutes, ceremony only, around 150 photographs, travel included. Her wedding collections are a different ladder and they start further up it, $995 for four hours and $1,995 for ten. The $295 is honest. The From column it gets pasted into is not.

One Daylesford studio goes further by publishing less. There is one offering on the site and it reads $1,850 for six and a half hours, covering getting ready, the ceremony and the reception, with up to 150 colour-corrected images delivered digitally and on a USB. Couples whose day is shaped differently are quoted on request. There is no entry tier under it and no ladder above it. The number in the From column and the number for the wedding are the same number. That is the whole of what you are asking a photographer to do.

One photographer has worked the Douglas Shire since 1995 and publishes exactly two packages: $548 for one hour at a Port Douglas location, minimum 60 edited images back inside 48 hours, and $848 for two hours, minimum 100. Longer coverage and travel out of Port Douglas are by quotation. He prints no figure for either, rather than one you would carry off into a spreadsheet. That one to two hour band is not an average across unlike products. It is those two packages, and there are no others.

Scan a photographer's site at speed and you will lift a price off one page and an hours figure off another and carry them away as though they described the same thing. They belong together only when the business says they do. A few say it in a single line.

A photographer at Edgeworth near Newcastle is one of those. All day coverage starts at nine hours. Those nine hours belong to the all day product and to nothing else on the site; the elopement and intimate rate is quoted on its own and carries no duration beside it. The hours are claimed only where there are hours to claim.

Nine hours, stated plainly, before any figure with a dollar sign in front of it. You learn what you are buying before you learn what it costs, and nothing stops any photographer on your list from telling you in that order.

The ones with no figure at all

116 of the 500 publish no starting figure. Those businesses fall off shortlists early, on the assumption that a withheld price is a high price. Read their enquiry pages and plenty of them say straight out that the number arrives once you get in touch.

One Sydney studio publishes four wedding packages at six, eight, ten and twelve hours, plus two hour and four hour elopement options. Every inclusion is listed. Every price reads "Get pricing", and the FAQ confirms the figure follows an enquiry. Everything a From column cannot hold is on that page. The one thing a From column wants is not. A price kept back is a decision about how a business sells. Reading it as a decision about what a business charges will cost you photographers you would have liked.

Rebuild the column

Delete the From column. It puts a two hour ceremony shoot directly above a nine hour day and calls the gap between them value.

Put two columns in its place: the hours, and the price of the shortest package that covers the day you are actually having. You will have to ask for the second one. Send everybody on the list the same line. What does six hours cost, and what is in it? A working photographer can answer that in a sentence, because six hours is a thing a business can price. A From figure is a thing a marketing page can print.

When the answers land, hold them against the median for the length of day you are buying: $3,000 for a six or seven hour day, taken from the 47 businesses whose entry package runs that long, and $3,550 for eight hours or more, taken from 16. Forty seven businesses is thin and sixteen is thinner, and neither will bear much weight. They are still better yardsticks than $2,200, which is a much larger sample of the wrong question.

Then go back to that spreadsheet. There is the green row with "sweet spot" typed beside it, and further down the one somebody flagged with "too much?". Neither note is about a photographer. Both are notes about the length of a day, written by two people who could not see the length of either. The green one might be two hours: a ceremony, a set of portraits, everybody in the car park by four. Find out which day you are buying before you fall in love with a number. Then go and find the person who shoots it beautifully, and pay them for the hours it takes.