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Why I stopped charging by the hour
There was one season, only one, when I billed my weddings by the hour. Every other year across my ten-year career, I sold flat day rates, full-day coverage. That single season was enough to show me why I never went back.
The moment that kept repeating itself, almost identically every time, happened around eleven at night. The package was ending. The first dance hadn’t happened yet. Nobody was dancing. There had been no cake cutting yet. And that was exactly the moment I had to go find the couple and tell them my coverage was ending there, unless they wanted to book another hour.
I don’t know how other photographers experience that kind of conversation. For me, it was miserable every single time it came up. Interrupting a couple in the middle of their evening to ask whether they wanted to book an extra hour before they’d even had their first dance photographed didn’t match anything I wanted to be for them that night. Maybe the method itself isn’t a problem for everyone. For my temperament, it was unworkable.
One season of hourly pricing was enough
Across ten years of weddings, almost everything I sold was a flat day rate, full-day coverage. One season was the exception, the one where I tried hourly pricing. It didn’t convince me, and I never offered it again.
Three things caused the trouble, and they don’t have much to do with each other: a conversation I didn’t want to keep having, wedding dates I was selling for less than they were worth, and one exceptional wedding I could have missed if I hadn’t arrived earlier than what I was actually being paid for.
The conversation no wedding should force
That moment around eleven wasn’t just awkward. It asked me to turn back into a salesperson at the worst possible point in the evening, the one where a couple is supposed to be furthest from any thought about money. Asking them to choose between booking more time and walking away with fewer memories, when they hadn’t even danced or cut their cake yet, put a decision on their shoulders that I found unfair to raise in that moment.
I know some photographers don’t mind it. I never managed to get used to it, and I didn’t want to toughen up on that particular point. It’s one of the reasons I dropped the model as fast as I did.
A date only sells once
A season of luxury weddings only has a limited number of dates that are genuinely in demand, summer Saturdays especially. It happens to almost every photographer who sells short packages: you sell an eight-hour package on one of those dates, then over the following weeks you get several more enquiries for that exact date, this time for full-day coverage. Five proposals, sometimes more. And that’s precisely the moment you kick yourself for selling that date for eight hours instead of holding out, or negotiating, for a full package.
It’s not a loss you see right away. It’s a loss you discover afterwards, realising you probably could have sold that same day to someone ready to pay for the whole thing. Across a season’s revenue, and the viability of the business, it adds up.
The wedding other photographers didn’t see coming
When a couple asks for eight hours of coverage instead of a full day, it’s almost never about the photos. It’s about budget. But in terms of coverage, eight hours is never a complete wedding. Some photographers are perfectly happy with that, think it sounds easy, they only have to stay eight hours and leave.
And then they arrive, and realise it’s the most beautiful wedding they’ve ever photographed. And they’re gutted they weren’t there earlier, for a full gallery, or enough images to hope for a feature somewhere. I’ve heard that story more times than I can count, told to me by other photographers. It’s one of the reasons that, to me, hourly packages are so short-sighted: some of those weddings turn out to be among the most beautiful you could cover, the ones you’d have wanted in full, precisely because it’s the complete galleries from weddings like that one that reassure the next prospect the most.
Why I covered everything anyway, even when I was paid by the hour
Hearing those stories so often, I always did the opposite. I arrived at the same time, whether I’d sold full coverage or a few hours. I never managed to give less, a bit like I explain about second shooters: once you’ve gotten used to delivering full coverage, it becomes very hard to scale it back, whatever package was actually sold.
Which meant that with hourly billing, I ended up doing the same work, giving the same presence, for a lower rate than a flat package would have paid me. None of it made sense.
The full gallery that sells the next one
One of the things that made my work easiest to sell was sending, at the quoting stage, five complete galleries along with my brochure. Full galleries, start to finish. That let prospects see exactly what I could do, and more importantly see that the quality held across an entire wedding day, not just a handful of my best shots. It reassured them enormously.
Those full galleries were built by the weddings I covered in full. A partial package, billed by the hour, produces a thinner gallery, with gaps, with moments missing. That’s not what you want to show a prospect who’s still on the fence.
What the hourly rate didn’t pay for
There’s also something that’s easy to underestimate: how much it matters to stay in practice. Every wedding trains you for the next one. It adds instincts, adds habits. The more bridal prep you photograph, the more fluid it gets. The more drone shots you take, the better you get at them. And that’s not the kind of skill you can practise alone, at home. It’s learned live, managing a real wedding, through experience. Nothing replaces experience on that particular point.
Coverage cut down to a few hours also means fewer chances to practise the whole job, fewer chances to get better before the next wedding. It’s also what shaped, wedding after wedding, the guide to shooting a luxury wedding solo: the more full days I covered, the more the method in it came together.
Complete memories, not fragments of a day
I do this work to give a family the complete memory of a day, not fragments of one. That’s my view of the job, at least. Hourly billing didn’t fit with that. It asked me to cut a day into pieces, to decide in advance which moments mattered enough to be paid for and which didn’t. A wedding doesn’t cut up that cleanly. You never know in advance which moment will matter most to a couple, ten years later, looking back on their day.
Questions I was asked about this
Should you charge a wedding by the hour or a flat rate?
In my experience, a flat rate for full-day coverage. One season of hourly billing was enough to make sure I never went back. A flat rate avoids negotiating mid-wedding, protects the value of a date, and produces full galleries that help sell the next client.
How do you avoid the extra-hour conversation during a wedding?
By never putting yourself in that position. That’s exactly what hourly billing forced on me, and it’s the main reason I dropped it. Better to sell a package at the quoting stage that already covers the key moments of the day than to negotiate an extension right as the couple is finally having their first dance.
How many full galleries should you show a hesitant prospect?
I sent five complete galleries with my brochure at the quoting stage. That was enough to show the quality held across an entire wedding, not just a selection of my best photos.
What I would do differently
If I started again, I wouldn’t offer hourly packages ever again. Not because the model is wrong for everyone, I know photographers who do just fine with it. But for me, it clashed with too many things at once: the conversation I didn’t want to have with a couple in the middle of their evening, the value of a date I didn’t want to undersell, and the full galleries I needed to convince the next couple.
Shooting weddings solo?
If you want to go further in negotiating the right conditions before the wedding day, download The Pre-Wedding Checklist for free.
It is a free eleven-page guide with the eighteen conditions I negotiate before every wedding, in the order of the day: what to ask, when to ask it, and what you lose if you skip it.