For the last few months, I have been second shooting at some weddings with a view to launching my own photography business in the first or second quarter of next year. I've sat down and worked out my business plan and in the process, I've worked out that - on average - every DJ event that I am booked for comes to about 15 hours altogether (from the initial answering of the enquiry to the pack away of gear at the end of the night and everything in between). I decided that I would double that for photography work as, based on my little experience, 30 hours should be enough to cover the pre-wedding stuff, shooting all day and all the editing afterwards. Based on that logic, I saw fit to double my DJ fee - twice the work, twice the price, and all that.

After that, I decided to refer to Bridebook's annual survey to see what the average price of a Wedding Photographer was in the UK in 2018 - £1,264.00. This has genuinely surprised me, as I thought that it would be much higher than that! I wasn't expecting my starting out price to be at the low end of the market, but I certainly wasn't expecting it to be above average (albeit by £31.00).

I'm not going to lower what I'll be charging as I based it on a business plan and I feel that it correctly values me. I'm just genuinely surprised at the average price and I think it shows how many are making a 'business' decision and how many are making a 'who is charging what' decision. I always knew photography would be similar to the DJ world when it came to this stuff, but I am gobsmacked at (on average) how little photographers are charging.