The Pricing & Delivery System

1. Start with the number you need

Competitor pricing tells you what other photographers guessed. It tells you nothing about your equipment, your tax situation, how many weddings you can physically shoot, or what you need to live on.

Work in this order, and only this order:

• Decide what you need to take home after tax
• Add what it costs to run the business for a year
• Gross both up for tax
• Divide by the number of weddings you can sustainably shoot

That final figure is your average booking value — the number your package structure has to produce on average, not the price of your cheapest option. Everything else is positioning.

2. The worksheet

A worked example, then fill in your own. The numbers below are illustrative, not a recommendation — your expenses and tax situation are yours.

Be honest about weddings per year. Twenty is a real season for one person handling their own editing. Thirty is possible with an editor and a genuine tolerance for losing most of your summer weekends. Forty is not a business, it is a countdown to burnout.

3. What you are actually being paid for

Couples see the coverage hours. Price against the whole job.

An eight-hour wedding is roughly a full working week once everything is counted. A $3,000 booking is therefore around $75–100 an hour before expenses and tax — which, after both, is not far off minimum wage in a good month. Say that out loud once and pricing gets much easier.

4. Building the three-tier ladder

Three options. Not two, which reads as a trap, and not six, which produces paralysis and a long email thread.

• Entry. Genuinely useful for elopements and small weddings. Not a bait tier — it should be something you are happy to shoot.
• Middle. Where you want most couples to land. Price it closer to the top tier than the bottom, and make it the obvious answer for a standard full day.
• Top. Full coverage plus the things that cost you little and read as premium — a second shooter, an album credit, a day-after session.

Sell hours, not image counts. Image counts invite negotiation over deliverables and set you up to be compared line by line against someone cheaper. Hours are a clean unit that maps to what actually constrains you, and they let a couple self-select without a phone call.

5. The inquiry response system

Speed converts better than polish. The photographer who replies in an hour with a decent email beats the one who replies in three days with a beautiful one, almost every time.

• Reply within a few hours. Have a draft you adapt, not one you send verbatim.
• Confirm the date is available in the first line — it is the only thing they are actually asking.
• Reference their venue by name. Two sentences of specific local knowledge outperforms a paragraph about your philosophy.
• Give one clear next step: a call, or a link to hold the date.
• Follow up once at four days and once at ten. Then stop.

6. A six-week turnaround that holds

Long turnarounds are almost never a capacity problem. They are a decision-making problem — time lost re-reviewing images you already reviewed.

• Day 0 — back up twice before you sleep. Two physical locations, one of them off-site.
• Pass one — flag, don't rate. One decision per frame, keep or skip, no star systems. Ninety minutes for a full day, timed.
• Pass two — grade in batches by lighting scenario, not chronologically. Getting ready, ceremony, portraits, reception. Sync each batch from one corrected frame.
• Pass three — refine the heroes only. Thirty to fifty frames get individual attention. The rest are already finished.
• Deliver 50–80 images per hour of coverage. More is not generosity, it is an unedited-feeling gallery and a couple who cannot choose an album.

The discipline that makes this work is refusing to revisit pass-one decisions. If you flagged it, it is in. If you skipped it, it is gone. Re-culling is where entire evenings disappear.

7. The sneak peek play

Ten to fifteen images, delivered inside 48 hours, is the highest-leverage thing you can do for referrals — and it costs you about an hour.

You are catching the window where the couple is still euphoric and their entire network is actively asking to see photos. That is the moment your work travels furthest. The same images posted six weeks later land in a feed where everyone has moved on.

Cull the sneak peeks on the drive home while you still remember which moments mattered. Grade them in one batch. Send them with a short note, not an essay.

8. What to stop giving away

Every one of these has a real cost that quietly comes out of your margin:

• Unlimited revision rounds. Two is generous. State it in the contract.
• Raw files. They are not a deliverable, they are an unfinished product with your name on it.
• Open-ended overtime. Publish an hourly rate and apply it. Receptions expand to fill whatever you allow.
• Long unpaid travel. Anything past about ninety minutes gets a travel fee. Overnight jobs get lodging.
• Rush delivery, for free. It is a real service — price it as one.
• Second shooters, absorbed. If a wedding needs two, that is a package tier, not a favour.

Where to start this week

Fill in the worksheet in section two. That single number tells you whether your next move is pricing, marketing, or capacity — and it is almost always the one you were least expecting.