Big Mike's Digital Photography Blog

Wedding photography: easy money with a camera

The easiest way to make money with a camera is by becoming a wedding photographer. If the average wedding photographer earns* $1,900 for a wedding, he only has to shoot 53 weddings per year to make a six-figure income. Wedding photographers who earn $5,000 for a wedding are making more than a quarter of a million a year. Not bad for one day of work per week. No wonder why Marketwatch reported that wedding photographers are one of the ten most overpaid jobs.

Wedding photographers, if asked about their status as top ten overpaid jobs, will whine about the “stress” of shooting a wedding. I have no doubt that it’s stressful, but so is every other job in the U.S. The regular working stiff has to work in a high stress job eight hours or more per day for five consecutive days, while the wedding photographer only has one high stress day, then six days to relax before his next wedding.

Someone will probably ask the question, “if wedding photography is such easy money, why isn’t everyone doing it?” The answer is barriers to entry.

There are two barriers to entry: acquisition of knowledge capital, and acquisition of marketing capital. The only way to learn wedding photography is to apprentice to another wedding photographer, and even if you want to apprentice for free, you probably won’t find any takers. The smart wedding photographer doesn’t want to train the competition.

Even after you learn the business, it’s difficult, at first, to find any clients.

But once you learn the business, and once you acquire a reputation among wedding planners and others in the wedding industry/scam so that you get a lot of referrals, it’s all easy coasting along on your six-figure income.

Footnote

* The Marketwatch article says that an average wedding photographer "earns" $1900. That's "earns", and not "grosses." Indeed, in looking through wedding photographers' websites, they typically charge $2000 for a wedding package that does not include a wedding album, just a few prints that maybe add $100 of costs, so yes, the average wedding photographer seems to earn about $1,900 on a wedding. Furthermore, most wedding photographer websites don't list prices, so I suspect that only the cheaper photographers put a price on their website.

For example, this wedding photographer in Rochester NY charges a minimum of $2000 to take five hours of photos, and that includes no extras at all, if you want an album you have to pay him an extra $2,150 for a "medium-size" album. So yes, maybe it takes him some time to make the album, but he's making quite a bit of profit on the album. This guy is probably pulling in over $150,000 per year if he's well booked, and that's a damn high salary for Rochester, NY. That's more than a family doctor makes, and unlike the doctor, the wedding photographer didn't have to borrow six figures to attend many years of medical school. A wedding photographer doesn't need to go to college at all.

UPDATE

Apparently, if you want to get a lot of people to visit your blog, all you have to do is write a post about how wedding photography is easy money. But you have to put up with a lot of nasty comments.

Someone who calls herself “Hope” wrote a great response to this post on another internet message board (original can be found here). I repeat it below:

Wedding photographers can make as much as doctors without the years of school, long hours clocked in the ER for the first few years and extremely high cost of keeping a practice. They can make as much as or more than miners without working twelve or fifteen hour shifts in a mine where they are putting their life at risk. Wedding photographers make more than nurses and nurses' aids, who get paid only slightly more than minimum wage to wipe people's butts, wipe up vomit and watch people die on a regular basis. Wedding photographers make more than prison guards, who on a regular basis are assaulted, stabbed, pelted with feces, sexually molested or even raped, and through it all have to worry about being sued/fired for so much as laying a hand on said prisoners who revile them so much.

Tell a cop to "outsource" being in the line of fire. Tell a waitress she should demand higher tips because her time is valuable and she should refuse customers who give her a hard time. Tell someone in the military just back from two tours in Iraq that wedding photography is not easy money.

Let's be honest here. You set your own hours. You decide what clients you work with and when. You don't have to answer to anyone but yourself and to some extent the specific person you're working for. A "hellish day of work" would consist of poor lighting conditions and rowdy or rude wedding guests. Does wedding photography take talent, good business sense, etc.? Yes. Is it "easy" in the sense that any untrained person could, with fortitude, randomly decide to get into it and plausibly make a good living for themselves with a small investment? YES.

There are jobs that are easier than wedding photography. And there are jobs that garner more money. But no one can convince me that all things considered, wedding photography is anywhere NEAR the bottom of the pyramid. When people say, "OMG, I could be a wedding photographer and it'd be easy money!" often times they are comparing wedding photography to the jobs they have had or the jobs their loved ones have had -- and you know what, in that respect, they are absolutely right.

UPDATE 2

I wrote a followup post in response to the angry comments that this post received.

How to get to the front page of Flickr

Want other people to view your photos? Then you need to get your photo to fall into one of the following categories:

Jacked up saturation. Because the colors of the real-world aren’t as interesting. Link.

Black and white. Because the colors of the real-world aren’t as interesting. Link.

HDR. See also jacked up saturation. Link.

Sunrises and sunsets. Link. (The linked-to photo also contains children, which is another common front-page genre.)

Young women. Even if the photo isn’t very good. If the photographer is a young woman, she can excel at this category just by taking self-portraits. Link.

Bokeh shots. Because it shows off the fact that you have a DSLR and a fast lens? Link.

Ultra-wide angle shots. Shows off that you have an expensive lens? Link.

Cute animals. Because they are so CUTE. Link. This is easier if your own pet is photogenic. Link.

Flowers. Because it’s easier to get a flower to cooperate with you than a cute animal. See also bokeh shots. See also jacked up saturation. Link.

Multiple categories. The more the better. The following photo combines the pretty young woman category with the black and white category: link. The following photo combines ultra-wide angel, HDR, and sunrise/sunset: link (as well as long exposure pictures of moving water, another common front-page genre).

Genuinely interesting shots that don’t rely on one of the above gimmicks. Now this is really tough. You should try to avoid this category, they rarely make it to the front page, and require lots of work. The following shot seems gimmick-free, and made it to the most-interesting lineup, even though I don’t quite think it’s that great, and pictures of doors are still sort of cliche: link.

UPDATE

I should have mentioned two additional common categories:

Postcard-pretty landscapes. Link. Though to maximize the prettiness of the landscape, you want to jack up the saturation, and shoot at sunrise/sunset.

Pictures of food and eating utensils. See also bokeh shots. This is a surprisingly common category. Link.

In the only comment left to the post so far, the commenter suggests that my post is sour grapes. But in fact, I did once have a photo show up on the Flickr most-interesting list of the day. It was my cute animal shot:

You will also note that the photo has bokeh, and I shamelessly jacked up the saturation a bit. The perfect formula to get your photo appreciated on Flickr!

Canon G9 does buds

These flower buds are very small. I would not have been able to take this photo with my Olympus DSLR because I don’t own a macro lens. But because the Canon G9 lens does macro, the photo was easy. Yet another example of how a compact camera like the G9 is a lot more convenient than using a DSLR.

Diffraction effect in Canon G9 from F5.6 to F6.3

The following two 200% crops (enlarged using the “nearest neighbor” algorithm in Photoshop CS3) taken at 12.7 mm (equivalent to 60mm) demonstrate the decline in resolution going from F5.6 to F6.3:

F5.6
F6.3

As you can see, the text is more legible in the F5.6 crop. The conclusion is clear: if you set the F-stop on your Canon G9 above F5.6, you will lose resolution because of diffraction.

G9 at wide angle: stop down to F5.6 for best results

I previously posted a test of the G9 at full zoom. Here I post the results of my test using the G9 at its widest angle of 7.4mm (which is supposed to be equivalent to 35mm).

These photos were taken handheld, using the JPEGs. (I thought I was shooting RAW, but after I reviewed the shots, to my horror, I discovered they were actually JPEGs.) Because the G9 applies heavy sharpening to the JPEGs, there was no need for me to do any additional sharpening.

First, the full photo, from the F2.8 shot:

And a comparison of 100% crops:

F Stop	Center	Upper right corner
F2.8
F4.0
F5.6
F8.0

In the center crops, I can barely tell the difference from F2.8 to F5.6, although F4.0 seems slightly better than either F2.8 or F5.6. At F8.0, resolution is clearly lower due to diffraction.

In the upper right corner crops, things look a lot worse. Ugly purple fringing is present. Wide angle seems to be the lens’ weak spot. The best crop is the one taken at F5.6, which shows the most detail and the least purple fringing. The F8.0 crop is worse than the F5.6 crop due to diffraction—in fact, the F8.0 crop has less resolution than even the F2.8 crop.

CONCLUSION: for maximum resolution from center to corner, stop down to F5.6, but do not stop down past F5.6 (or possibly F6.3 at the telephoto end) or you will lose resolution because of diffraction.

Water Tower

Nothing says "New York City" like a water tower.

What's a "point and shoot" camera?

Photography cognoscenti bandy about the term “point and shoot” as the worst possible insult to a camera. As in “oh, that’s just a point and shoot camera, those things suck.”

“Point and shoot” means to me a camera where you can point it and press the shutter button, and then the camera will automatically focus and select an appropriate aperture and shutter speed. Thus, such a camera requires a minimal amount of skill and photographic knowledge. You can use it even if you don't understand aperture or shutter speed.

Under the above definition, practically all digital cameras are “point and shoot” cameras, including big and expensive digital SLRs. They all have an auto mode.

Thus it turns out that “point and shoot” is a horribly misused term, because it’s usually used to describe a non-SLR digital camera. So why not just call them what they are, non-SLR digital cameras?

And what exactly is it about the SLR design that makes a digital camera more advanced? The purpose of the SLR design is to make the camera easier to use by giving you a better optical viewfinder and faster autofocus (but not better autofocus). In this sense, it actually requires more skill to use a non-SLR camera because you have to work around the slower auto-focus and lack of a through-the-lens (TTL) optical viewfinder. So maybe users of non-SLR digital cameras should be the ones making fun of the DSLR users instead of the other way around.

The Village

Although it's not a photo of anything particularly interesting, I think it captures the feeling of being there.

* * *

The background is just a little bit out of focus, because the camera focused on the woman in the center of the photo.

Canon G9: use F5.6 for maximum resolution

This is a test with the Canon G9 set to full zoom. These are 100% crops, of a TV antenna atop an apartment building. The goal is to determine the ideal aperture for best resolution. These pictures were taken with JPEG, and as a result there are annoying sharpening halos, as discussed in my previous post; to get maximum image quality from the G9, you have to shoot RAW and do your own sharpening.

First, we examine the results with the antenna in the middle of the photo:

F4.8	F6.3	F8.0

I can’t tell the difference between F4.8 (which is wide open at this focal length) and F6.3. But there is a deterioration in quality at F8.0 because of diffraction effects.

Now, let’s examine the results when the same antenna is at the upper left corner of the photo:

F4.8	F5.6

The corner is much fuzzier than the center of the photo, and chromatic aberration (CA) is also visible. But all things considered, it's not so bad. I've seen much worse CA on my Olympus E-500 DSLR with expensive lenses that cost more than the entire G9 camera. (But to be fair here, the CA on the Olympus shows up at wide angle focal lengths. I would get no CA at this telephoto focal length.)

We also see a clear benefit when we stop down from F4.8 to F5.6. Why didn’t I stop down to F6.3 like in the first set of shots? I should have, but I wasn’t paying careful enough attention to this project. F6.3 would probably be even better than F5.6.

CONCLUSION: for maximum resolution from center to corner, stop down to F6.3, but do not use a smaller aperture than F6.3 otherwise you will lose resolution throughout the entire frame because of diffraction.

UPDATE: further testing has revealed that F5.6, and not F6.3, is the optimal F-stop.

Canon G9 and oversharpened JPEGs

Even though I have my Canon G9 set to sharpening -2, the JPEGs are still extremely oversharpened. See the example below (100% crops):

JPEG	RAW, unsharpened	RAW with unsharp mask, 0.5 radius, 100%

The Canon G9 is producing JPEGs that, perhaps are suited for consumers who don’t know how to post-process their photos, but are not acceptable for high quality professional work. I can only imagine how bad the JPEGs would come out if I set sharpening to zero! (Or maybe the output would be the same because this setting isn’t doing anything?)

This is unfortunate, because besides the oversharpening, I don’t really see any other reason to shoot RAW. But these heavy sharpening halos show up even after I downsize the image for posting on the web, and give the photos an artificial look that I don’t like.

A big thumbs down to Canon for producing bad JPEGs.