A burning question on so many minds! Believe it or not, for Photographers and Videographers there is no such thing as a “wedding tax” The rates are comparable to what photographers charge for commercial campaigns or editorial projects of this scale. Included in your fee is not just the manual work a photographer puts into the day, or even before or after. It’s a specialised service where you are commissioning a craftsman or an artist to pour all of their creative energy, emotional labour, insightful knowledge and expression into your day. It is an honour for us to do that, but it is an extremely taxing job both physically, but more than that, mentally and emotionally. We are utilising both our right brain and left brain for an extended period of the day, and not to mention the enormous sacrifice it takes to live a life artfully. This is what you are paying for. That’s why it’s so important to vet your photographer, make sure they are the real deal, make sure they’re not a phony copying other people's style, editing with other people's presets and replicating the same shots weekend after weekend. I agree those photographers should not be expensive.

Yes, I’m glad you asked. Something prevalent in the industry is outsourcing the editing process. Either to poorer countries for a small fee or to the dreaded AI. We believe the editing process is an important part of our service and we thoroughly enjoy curating your images to match the feel of the day.

This has been a conscious choice of ours because after many, many years shooting weddings, something we realised is couples are always trying to find ways to cover everything without adding astronomical amounts of hours. It’s also one of many hidden costs that photographers keep up their sleeve after they lure you in with their attractive base line price. We see it more like a project, as if you commission an artist to make a painting, you would never think to pay them based on the hours it took. It’s a paradigm within the capitalist structure that places value on traceable metrics and within that structure the service becomes more about optimising quantity over quality.

This would be awkward to ask but it may be a fear on the back of your mind. It is a huge investment and there are a lot of tricksters out there. There is a high certainty that we really care about your day, there is also a deep dedication to this as a craft. The important distinction to make between a photographer is whether or not someone sees their work as a product or not. I think that is where the problems start to arise, it’s just so easy these days to curate a desirable product online, but the need to replicate the product leads to systems and structures that we feel stifle creativity.

We created a co-op agency model. That means that all of the photographers contribute to the workings of the business side of things, and in return we share certain percentages of each job as a cost to the photographer. Each photographer operates as an individual artist, meaning they don’t abide by a certain style, they are free to express themselves. However the current path for wedding photographers is to go it alone, which can be exciting, but the loliness contributes to dissatisfaction and burnout, or the photographer shoots for a studio where they see a tiny fraction of the budget but do majority of the work just to avoid the ‘risk’ of financial instability. We flipped this on its head.

It’s really important to mention firstly that less than 30% of what you pay for your photographer to shoot your wedding will go to the photographer, in some cases it would be less than 20%. Big studios operate like a business, they need to increase profit margins and reduce costs, all of which don’t serve you. In a lot of cases, you won’t know who the photographer will be upon booking, and the studio is simply pulling from a list of freelancers who shoot for all of the other studios you got prices from anyway. It’s not truthful. They give them a rigid shot list that abides by the rules to keep the photos aligned with the brand’s “product”.

I get it! I really do. Sometimes it’s just easier to not care and take whatever is the best option in front of you. We now look at so many images a day that we have become desensitised to good images. But photography is one of those things where it’s really easy to be a good photographer but extremely hard to become a great one and you only know the difference once you experience it for yourself. Just looking at wedding shots online or on a site won’t do it for you. Often you just like the photos of the people you wish you could be, the curse of advertising. The art is when you see a photo of yourself and it doesn’t make you feel uncomfortable, but it evokes a feeling of love within you. The only way that is possible is through the eyes of someone who has trained themselves to witness beauty in all things. Then they have to know how to use their tools to execute their vision. Whether that be understanding what lighting best communicates the essence you see in someone, or what focal length is the right amount of intimacy to communicate an abstract feeling someone gives off. There’s an infinite amount of layers to how to do this and these are the thoughts that consume a photographer with that ability.

On the contrary, we believe this is one of the most varied forms of photography because every couple and their guests are so different. Sometime were at a winery in a remote part of New Zealand and the next weekend we might be in a cool inner city restaurant that we’ve never been to. But ultimately even if we were at the same venue two days apart the whole day will feel completely different. One couple might be completely expressive and overly affectionate with their love and the next couple might be more private and reserved with more subtle expressions of their love.

No.

No. We are photographers first. We choose weddings as our subject because it’s an environment we want to be in and it’s a fascinating anthropological hotbed of exciting and beautiful moments to capture. You can make money shooting anything but ultimately the great photographers are only great because they’re so interested in the subject. the best fashion photographers are obsessed with fashion, the best national geographic photographers studied their subject not photography.