The Pros and Cons of Wedding Photography

We shot the bejeezus out of a wedding last Saturday.
The groom is a police officer and the bride works in a city office and they opted for our $750 package which includes two shooters (Maria and me) for eight hours and all of the images on CD-ROM. (Our $1,299 package includes two shooters for unlimited time, all images on a CD-ROM and a hard-cover bound album with the photos printed on enamel stock magazine-style paper. The album typically has about 50 pages and more than 200 photos.)
Like most weddings, it was a fun gig. The bride’s parents are divorced. Her dad has remarried and her mom was there was a date and there were some slightly awkward moments. There were also plenty of relatives who tried to commandeer our shot setups with their point-and-shoot cameras and all of the attendant chaos that you come to expect at a wedding.
But it was a straightforward business proposition in which we required one-third of the fee at the time of booking, the second third two weeks before the wedding and the final third on the day of the wedding.
Last year, when we were still not quite in business as wedding photographers, Maria offered our services free to a girl who had been her protégé at the newspaper and had since moved to a larger nearby paper. Our photography was to be Maria’s wedding present to her friend.
I groused and told her this was the last freebie because, while I enjoy photography, shooting a wedding is a full day of intense work and pressure. Plus the preparations, ceremony and reception took place in buildings without air conditioning on an insanely hot day.
A short time later, another young woman in her office announced her engagement and expressed a desire for us to shoot her wedding. Implicit in the request was the assumption that it would be a freebie.
No fucking way, said I, reasoning that we are now officially in the wedding photography business, have our rates set and don’t want people thinking they can work a special deal.
Nevertheless, Maria caved in and offered them a shoot for $500 - $250 up front and $250 the day of the wedding.
At the same time, this young woman has adopted an increasingly casual attitude about her job at the paper, taking time off for her second “job” as a cosmetics distributor and making a habit of taking three-day weekends by calling in sick on Fridays and Mondays.
She’s also blown off tasks that were requested by the publisher, created her own hours by misusing sick days and compensatory time off and proved to be increasingly unreliable.
It came to a head yesterday when she showed up late and left early, having accomplished little of value to the paper.
Oh, and I should mention that she comes to work in pajama pants, fuzzy bedroom slippers and a t-shirt.
The situation had become intolerable and it was made even more awkward by the fact of our photographer-client relationship with her.
So we decided to sever that relationship in order to clarify Maria’s employer-employee relationship with her. I wrote a $250 check refunding her deposit and Maria plans to snap things into focus for her when she comes in today.
For myself, I’m tremendously relieved. It’s a gig I never wanted, even at our going rates, because I think she’s an immature, manipulative user and her fiancé is an utter moron.
I like making money, but not that much.