Starting a Wedding Photography Business
The business of Wedding Photography
OK, so you want to be a wedding photographer and can take nice photos in challenging conditions. What next?
If you’re very new to wedding photography, you might want to watch my video first to catch a few of the basics.
Wedding photography is a business
Much as we love photography – and I really do love the feeling of producing a set of photos that the couple will love – in order to be able to do that over the long term you need to make money from your wedding photography.
At the very basic level, wedding photography is like any other business:
Profit = Turnover – Costs
Where Profit is what you can take out of the business, Turnover is every penny you get in and Costs are the things your business needs to pay for.
You need to produce enough Profit after tax to live. So, taking it one step further to your own income:
Income = Profit – Tax
Income
So, let’s say that you need £26k to live on (you can choose this figure depending on the living you require – but this is the average salary at the moment). Taking tax into account, your profit would therefore need to be at least £35k.
Profit…!
Profit is the amount of money which you can legitimately take out of your business. In wedding photography you can achieve £35k per year in many ways:
One wedding for £35,000
Two weddings for £17,500
Ten weddings for £3,500
Fifty weddings for £700
Two hundred wedding for £175
Where wedding photography differs from a standard business is in the amount of wedding you can do per year. There are 52 weeks and most people get married on Friday, Saturday or Sunday, so the maximum number of weddings you can do per year is around 150. Then you have to consider your poor body: doing 150 weddings will certainly be tiring and hard to achieve in terms of sales. Let’s say 70 is a realistic absolute maximum then (although most photographers do 20 to 40).
The market also provides some realistic minimums and maximums
OK, so you want to be a wedding photographer and can take nice photos in challenging conditions. What next?
If you’re very new to wedding photography, you might want to watch my video first to catch a few of the basics.
Wedding photography is a business
Much as we love photography – and I really do love the feeling of producing a set of photos that the couple will love – in order to be able to do that over the long term you need to make money from your wedding photography.
At the very basic level, wedding photography is like any other business:
Profit = Turnover – Costs
Where Profit is what you can take out of the business, Turnover is every penny you get in and Costs are the things your business needs to pay for.
You need to produce enough Profit after tax to live. So, taking it one step further to your own income:
Income = Profit – Tax
Income
So, let’s say that you need £26k to live on (you can choose this figure depending on the living you require – but this is the average salary at the moment). Taking tax into account, your profit would therefore need to be at least £35k.
Profit…!
Profit is the amount of money which you can legitimately take out of your business. In wedding photography you can achieve £35k per year in many ways:
One wedding for £35,000
Two weddings for £17,500
Ten weddings for £3,500
Fifty weddings for £700
Two hundred wedding for £175
Where wedding photography differs from a standard business is in the amount of wedding you can do per year. There are 52 weeks and most people get married on Friday, Saturday or Sunday, so the maximum number of weddings you can do per year is around 150. Then you have to consider your poor body: doing 150 weddings will certainly be tiring and hard to achieve in terms of sales. Let’s say 70 is a realistic absolute maximum then (although most photographers do 20 to 40).
The market also provides some realistic minimums and maximums