How many hours do wedding photographers work?

How Many Hours do Wedding Photographers Work? – “Forget the money?  Are you nuts” I can hear my fellow photographers say!! (well, jokingly I hope.).

Yes – Forget the money.  This post is about how many hours wedding photographers work.  More specifically the hours worked when I’m photographing a wedding.

So…lets start right back at the very beginning as it’s a very good place to start….

Getting the Sale

To get sales meetings I typical do one of two things.

1 – I see clients at a wedding fayre and then they ask to meet up and chat.

2 – Clients see my advertising in some other way and they then ask to meet up.

How many hours do wedding photographers work in getting a Face to Face meeting

Wedding Fayres

Typically each wedding fayre costs me 9 hours of time.  Setting up, the fayre itself and clearing up.

I usually get 2 meetings from each wedding fayre, so let’s call that 4.5 hours to just get in front of ONE interested client.

I then drive to the client and I budget another hour each way for that and an hour at the meeting.  That’s 3 hours.

Running Total – 4.5 + 3 = 7.5 hours

Other Advertising.

Seriously.  You DO NOT want to know how much time I spend (or money!) advertising on social media, Google Adds etc.  It would just push up those numbers. Ok.  I spend about 2hours per day on social media advertising and posting and commenting etc.  I’ll not include that in the list of how many hours do wedding photographers work.

Pre Wedding Photography Session

I ‘budget’ for spending an hour to drive there, an hour to do the session and an hour to drive back.  I then budget a further four hours to upload, cull, edit, export and upload to an online gallery.  So that is another 7 hours.

Running total of 4.5 + 3 + 7 = 14.5 hours

Wedding Day Itself

Typically I spend 12 hours attendance at the wedding.  In the darker months, it may be less, in the summer months it may be more, however, it is usually around 12 hours.  Hours drive there plus hours drive back and its a total of 14 hours.  And don’t forget, I may well have two or ten three weddings in a weekend.  42 hours work over the course of a three day session.  The EU law is only for 48 hours in 5 days!

Running Total = 3.5 + 3 + 7 + 14= 28.5 hours

Editing the Wedding Photographs

This is where the really long hours take place.  It’s also where most non-wedding / non-photographers get it totally and utterly wrong.

I get back home after my wedding and spend an hour making sure I have backups of everything.

Running Total = 3.5 + 3 + 7 + 14 + 1 = 29.5 hours

The next few days and weeks are spent on culling, editing and retouching the photographs and then uploading them to an online gallery.

For every hour of wedding photography, I do a MINIMUM of 1-hour editing, sometimes 2 hours.  SO let’s call that 18-hour of editing and retouching etc

Running Total = 3.5 + 3 + 7 + 14 + 1 +18 = 47.5 hours

So far this wedding photographer has worked a total of 47 hours on 1 wedding.

Wedding Albums

A one hour session to chat through the options for a clients wedding albums.  An hours drive there, an hours drive back.  3 hours in total.

Running Total = 47.5 +3 = 50.5 hours

Designing the wedding album

I can’t lie.  I have a great bit of software that allows me a lot of freedom in designing wedding album layouts (if you want to know more then book yourself on one of my Wedding Photography Training Workshops!)

Let’s call it an hour of design.  A few changes here and there form the clients – add in another hour. 2 hours total

So we are unto 52.5 hours of work for one wedding.