5,500 USD. One photographer, up to three days, anywhere in the world, with everything except yourphotographer’s accommodation already in the number.
Most photographers won’t put a figure on a page, and we understand why — every wedding is different. But ifyou’re planning a wedding abroad from the other side of an ocean, you need something you can actually put in aspreadsheet. So here’s ours, and exactly what sits inside it.
What’s included
Flights. Transport to the venue and around it. Food. Visas. Insurance. Three days of coverage, with no hourlylimit on the wedding day.
You pay 5,500 USD and one other thing, and that’s the whole arrangement. There is no travel line item thatarrives later, no per-diem, no “plus expenses” at the bottom of the invoice. We built it this way deliberately:nobody planning a wedding should be doing arithmetic about a photographer’s airfare.
The one exception: where we sleep
We ask the couple to arrange our accommodation, at the venue or as close to it as possible. It’s the only thing notin the price, and it isn’t about saving money. It’s the single decision that changes what ends up in your gallery.
Two examples of why.
One couple asked us to document a full day of their life — not the wedding, a day. We arrived as they werewaking up, at seven in the morning, and stayed until half past one the next morning. Everything in between istheirs now.
At another wedding, the party wound down and we went up to our room. We’d started at nine that morning. Atthree, the group decided to jump in the pool. We came back down and photographed the whole thing. If we’dbeen in a hotel twenty minutes away, that hour of their wedding simply wouldn’t exist.
Mornings, breakfasts, the last conversation of the night — none of that happens inside a booked window. Ithappens because someone is still there.
What you actually receive
Across three days we’ll take somewhere between 20,000 and 30,000 frames.
You receive over a thousand finished photographs. Sometimes closer to two thousand, depending on howmuch happens — if there are activities, we don’t hold back, and everything unique that’s worth keeping isdelivered.
A first handful arrives two or three days after the wedding, so you have something to post and something toput on thank-you cards while people are still talking about it.
The full online gallery comes about a month after the wedding, downloadable at full resolution.
The gallery stays online for one to two years. After that we keep everything on our own server. Couples havewritten to us years later — one of them a decade on — and we’ve simply put the gallery back up. We keepbackups of weddings going a long way back.
The photographs are yours to use anywhere, for anything, forever. No time limit, no usage limit, nothing toask permission for. We keep only the authorship that any photographer keeps by law.
On our side: we like to publish work on our site and on Instagram, but only if you’re happy with that. If you’drather we didn’t, that’s completely fine and it changes nothing else. Most couples are proud of their wedding andpleased to see it up, but it’s your call, not ours.
Albums
Albums aren’t included in the price, and they’re worth talking about separately.
We make them with a wooden cover and a wooden box, and nothing about them is standard: the wood, thecolour, the combination, the box. Parents’ albums can be engraved with a message for them.
We’re not neutral about this. Your photographs will live on a hard drive or in cloud storage, and you will look atthem far less than you think. An album is the version you pick up. Holding one brings the day back in a way thatscrolling never does.
How payment works
50% to hold your date. The balance within a week after the wedding.
That second part is unusual and it’s deliberate. The standard in this industry is full payment thirty days before thewedding. We don’t do that. If we’re taking your money, we’d rather you first watch us do the work — see that wewere there, see that we did everything we said we would — and then pay the rest, and then we deliver.
Payment is normally in US dollars. If another currency suits you better, we’ll talk about it.
If you move your date, we work it out with you. In practice this has never been a problem: couples don’t shift awedding on their own, they do it together with the vendors they spent months choosing, and something alwaysfits.
If you want two of us, or more than three days
Some couples want two photographers. It’s almost never about the number of guests — it’s about wanting the daycovered from more than one angle. When there are two of us we can also produce some video content and reelsalongside the photographs, though we don’t shoot a full wedding film.
That’s a conversation rather than a package. It depends on where the wedding is and what you actually want outof it, and we’d rather work it out with you than publish a number that fits nobody.
The same is true of a fourth or fifth day. It’s easy to arrange; the shape of it decides the price. In practice, almostnobody needs more than three.
How this compares to what else you could do
Three options exist, and they’re priced very differently.
A good European photographer for the wedding day, around eight hours, starts at roughly €4,000 and goes upsteeply from there. That’s for one day.
Bringing a photographer of comparable quality from the United States to Europe means the fee, the flights,the hotel and the travel days. Photography is simply priced higher in the US market — that’s why you constantlysee European photographers working in the States and almost never the reverse. Realistically you’re looking attwo to three times what the same standard of work costs in Europe.
Us: 5,500 USD, three days, travel included.
The pattern we keep seeing is couples who had set aside a budget for their wedding day and discovered itcovered three. That’s happened in Singapore, in Barbados, in Cuba. People had flown in from all over the worldto be there, and the couple ended up with the welcome dinner, the wedding and the morning after, instead of eighthours in the middle.
Why we priced it like this
Because the alternative is worse for everyone.
If we billed travel separately, every enquiry would turn into a negotiation about airfares, and couples would startchoosing photographers by which flight route was cheapest. If we charged by the hour, we’d be the ones watchingthe clock at two in the morning — and the pictures we’re proudest of are almost all from hours nobody hadbooked.
One number, three days, no clock. It’s the simplest honest way we’ve found to do this, and it means that onceyou’ve booked us, the only thing left to think about is your wedding.
