Have you ever thought about how much time wedding suppliers actually spend on each wedding? The day itself may actually constitute a small proportion of the entire amount of time that is required to provide a certain service.

I can’t speak for other suppliers but it stands to reason that for cake makers and florists, a great deal of time is spent physically creating and perfecting the items purchased by couples for their wedding day. These services are time-intensive in the run-up to the wedding whereas other services - and I suppose I’m mainly talking about photography and videography - are actually most time-intensive once the wedding is over.

So where does the time go?

I thought it would be pretty interesting to take a closer look at the time breakdown for a typical wedding.

First off, let me provide you with a few caveats. These calculations are based on tasks that are event-specific. For example, every wedding includes me physically being there to take photographs. However, not every wedding includes a pre-wedding photoshoot or the design of a wedding album. I’ve stripped it right back to the basics and based these calculations on the tasks that I undertake for every single wedding. Namely, admin, travel, shooting and editing.

Admin

To be honest, I’ve probably underestimated how much time I spend on admin but I’ve worked out that for a typical wedding it is around 17% of the total time. Included in this figure is the time I spend replying to emails, organising meetings, arranging invoices, chasing for payments etc…

Travelling

This is probably the trickiest one to calculate - some weddings take place 15 minutes away and don’t involve any driving back and forth. Other weddings take place a 2 hour drive away and include travelling from the morning prep location to a church and then on to the reception venue. On average I spend around 7% of my time travelling but it can vary from as little as 4% up to a whopping 20%

Shooting

It might surprise you to hear that I only spend around 34% of my time actually taking photographs. Once all of the other tasks are taken into account, physically being at the wedding and positioned to take pictures only accounts for around one-third of the total time spent on each wedding. I’m pretty sure that, for most people, their assumption is that this would make up the majority of the time - perhaps as much as 75% - but it simply isn’t true.

Editing

Now then, here’s the big one. For a typical 10 hour wedding I have calculated that I spend around 42% of my time editing. Included in this are tasks such as downloading images, creating back-ups, culling, exporting the perfected images, creating online galleries, uploading the images and then storing them once the gallery has been finalised. Every single image I deliver has been edited. Most images only require a simple edit (for colour, contrast and straightening) but some images will require much more to balance the image and ensure the gallery is consistent in tone and style.

What I didn’t include

There are, of course, many tasks that I undertake regularly that I didn’t include in the breakdown above. For example, driving to and from my office, visiting venues, under-taking pre-wedding photoshoots, taking part in Wedding Shows, scheduling social media posts, professional development and training, networking, designing Wedding albums, ordering prints, visiting the Post Office and a hundred other day-to-day tasks that I need to do to ensure that I can continue working as a full-time photographer.

It’s impossible to include these tasks in my calculations because they contribute towards ALL weddings not to individual events but if I had to guess then I would say that for every hour I spend physically shooting a wedding, I easily spend the same amount of time on all of these behind-the-scenes tasks.

A final note

The distribution of tasks is, of course, going to vary depending on the number of hours coverage a wedding requires. I have based the above calculations on a full day wedding of around 10 hours. However, shorter weddings don’t necessarily involve less admin. I will often have a face-to-face meeting no matter the length of coverage required. The same number of emails are likely to be exchanged. Invoices still need to be created, galleries need to be set-up blog posts need to written… the list goes on.

The pie chart below shows the figures for a smaller celebration of around 3 hours. For weddings such as these you can see that both the admin and editing tasks take up a greater percentage of my time compared to taking photographs on the wedding day itself. In fact, when you look at the time spent actually taking photographs, it constitutes around only one-sixth of the total time!

Hopefully this has given you an insight into how much more is involved in wedding photography than simply taking pictures. What’s the proverb? “It takes a village to raise a child” and it’s a metaphor that can be applied to wedding photography. To create the finished product (i.e. the final set of wedding photos) it takes a whole “village” of tasks to get the job done!