There is always a way to save money when it comes to planning your wedding. With photography, your costs are a direct result of your choices at each step of the wedding planning process. Let’s look at all the different ways you can save some money!
Let’s start with the engagement portrait. Instead of paying $75 or more for a professional engagement photograph, you can take a picture yourself with a good camera. Look at the engagement notices in your newspaper, and take your picture with a similar background and similar pose.
If you want some great quality wedding pictures, but don’t really want hundreds of them, you might consider just hiring a professional photographer for pictures at the church. Along with capturing the ceremony, you can have all the bridal party shots, pictures with the parents, and so forth, done at the church directly following the ceremony. This will save a lot of money because the ceremony is usually during the day, and you are only hiring their services for a few hours, as opposed to all day. You can assign 3 or 4 guests to be your ‘reception photographers’ and give them a list of shots you want them to be sure to get. In addition, you might decide on disposable cameras at each table for your guests to take pictures of each other during the evening. Photographers have afternoon packages that can save you 10% or more on your photographs.
The Bride and Groom’s Album is the main reason for having photographs taken at your wedding. You have many choices here. Although you can purchase an excellent quality album that will last a lifetime, you can also choose lesser costing albums that will also last many years. Moderation is a good thing, and a medium quality album is a great choice. If having a leather, engraved photo album is not important to you, buy your own photo album somewhere else.
Many photographers create proofs, which are 5″ x 5″ photographs that you will use to choose your final prints. You can arrange to purchase these proofs instead of having 5″ x 7″ prints made of the same photographs. These proofs are great to make your own little albums for your parents, your wedding party, and any other special people who contributed to your wedding day. By not purchasing parents’ albums or gift folios for your wedding party, you will save hundreds of dollar over the cost of the proofs that you will purchase. You need to decide if engraved parents’ albums with 5″ x 7″ prints are important for you to do, or whether a small album purchased locally filled with the proofs will suffice.
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