Wedding photographers - How many weddings do you do a year?

Another aspect I think that limit's the amount of weddings people can take on is processing. I hear that some togs spend 3x longer on processing than shooting the wedding. That seems a little excessive imo, is that normal?
 
Raymond, how much time would you say you spent processing an average wedding?
I'm tempted to look into options for outsourcing like russinating pointed out, although I think I'd struggle to relinquish control, and trust the outsourcing company.
 
Raymond Lin said:
More togs don't have a party of 4 either.

And when people ask how many they shoot, it means them, physically.

I might as well say I can shoot 100 because my friend shot 28, and i know someone else shot 40 and someone else shot 25.

But somewhere, there is a parent company that binds us all?
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I don't want to derail the thread, but russinating said he has 29 bookings on separate days. I'm assuming he is saying he could shoot those wedding's solo if he wanted.

The only thing that may be different, is perhaps larger setups may have bigger marketing budget's, so may get more work due to that?
 
Raymond Lin said:
I am a control freak, they are my photos from beginning til end. Outsourcing book design I would consider, but out sourcing processing, no way.

If i sit down and do it, never really timed it but rough guess, i say about 36 hours ?
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I'm also a bit of a control freak, but I also thought what would I prefer to do, process a wedding, or shoot another one or two.
But I think I'l also keep processing in house, as I'v been working on speeding up my workflow, as it stands I adjust exposure, WB, and straiten images manually, but my processing 'style' is an automated action which doesn't take much time at all.
 
Raymond Lin said:
The quickest i've done it.

From download - 90min to 2 hours (depends if i am sitting there in front of it)
Culling - 3 hours
Process 10 hours
Second cull - 1 hour
Tidy up - 2 hours
Export - This is an overnight job, Mac is slow, it takes about 4 hours to do this.
Admin - emails, make picture disc, upload to private gallery, burn disc, order CD cases. 90min.

Thats about 20 hours, not including exporting time, I leave it overnight whilst i sleep.

Quality, not quantity.

It's the beauty of having a paycheque I guess. But then again, if and when I move into this full time, I rather be shooting 20 weddings and earning as much as another tog shooting 40.
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Me to, but I think you could also cut out huge chunks of that workflow and still maintain quality. For instance your exporting time is massive, how many images are you delivering?
My OC'd i7 with plenty of ram as well as running on SSD's doesn't seem to take hardly any time at all...
 
I know your a mac guy, but I think this is one area I'm glad to be a PC user.
Below is my shopping cart for tomorrow, I'm downsizing to a nice little shuttle R5, that I can upgrade as and when in the future...

pc.jpg


Edit: Oops I'v made a mistake with the ram
 
Russinating said:
Shock horror at bad photos from a £750 for two photographers package.
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Unless the couple were shown pictures from another photographer or something, I don't really have much sympathy, as they obviously didn't care much about the quality of their wedding pictures prior to the wedding.

Russinating said:
Bit much recreating it though. What are they going to get memory-wise from reconstructed photos? :confused:
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I don't get it either, surely it just reminds them that they were cheapskates and that their wedding photo's sucked.
 
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