Here’s a brief observation to chew on. I’m curious what other people are experiencing, both in my locality and around the country. But basing my information predominantly on New York weddings, I’ve observed a disturbing trend accompanying the shift from shooting portraits after the ceremony to before the ceremony. Don’t get me wrong. I love having the extra time to take some nice portraits. But along with that, I’ve also noticed that wedding days have gotten longer. Where the majority of my wedding days in 2009 were 8 hours, in 2012, I’ve watched them expand to 9 or 10 hours on average with 8 hours quickly becoming the exception. Now that would be just fine, but in casual observation, what I’ve also noticed is that budgets have not gone up to correspond with the change in time. In fact they seem to remain about the same. All of this seems to have caused a slight but perceptible shift in the way my pricing functions. So my question is this: Are we suffering from time inflation? And, if so, what are the best strategies to employ to adapt to it?
I can’t say I’ve noticed the same trend, but we charge hourly. That means that “time-inflation” is profitable rather than a disadvantage.
Appreciate the input, David! Yeah, not sure if my spike that is an anomaly or if it’s an actual pattern, since it’s only my data and only 4 years at that. But definitely trending that way insofar as the information I have goes.
I also charge hourly, but what I came to observe in this past half year was that it seemed to work better to raise my base cost and lower my hourly, which made people more comfortable with the balance between the two.
I don’t know anything about your business, but from an economic standpoint one could say that you’ve changed your pricing to incentivize longer days. Let’s say your base is $10k, and your hourly is $500. 8hrs comes out to $14k. Now to add another 2 hours is only going to cost them $1k or 7% of what they originally paid, while increasing their coverage by 25%. That’s a pretty attractive proposition. Of course, I’m sure your difference between base and hourly is much more subtle, and not all clients are making those calculations, but that could in part explain the trend you are seeing.
Then again, looking at a longer timeframe it’s very obvious that there has been “time-inflation.” The idea that you needed a photographer to document your “getting-ready,” through your “after-party” would have been incomprehensible to brides 30 years ago. I’m not old enough to say if wedding photography budgets have gone up in a parallel fashion or not, but I suspect there is some correlation.
A very good point, though in my case, I only made the adjustments recently, so any effect hasn’t been quantifiable as of yet. We’ll see how it goes.