You've just received a quote from a wedding photographer. It says six hours of coverage. You do the quick mental maths — six hours, divided by the price — and suddenly it feels expensive.
But here's what most couples don't realise: those six hours on your wedding day are just the beginning.
What You're Actually Paying For
When you book a wedding photographer, you're not paying for someone to show up, click a button, and hand you a USB drive on the way out. You're investing in an entire process — one that starts weeks before your wedding and continues long after the last guest has gone home.
Here's how the time really adds up.
1. The Consultation
Before we ever pick up a camera, we sit down with you — virtually or in person — to understand your vision, your timeline, your venue, and what moments matter most to you. At Senses Photo and Video, this consultation is completely free, because we believe the best photos come from understanding the people behind them, not just the schedule in front of us.
This alone can take one to two hours, sometimes more for complex weddings.
2. Planning and Preparation
Good wedding photography doesn't happen by accident. Before your day, we research the venue, study the light at different times of day, review your timeline, coordinate with your other vendors, and prepare our equipment. A poorly prepared photographer is one who misses the moment. We make sure we never do.
Add another two to three hours here — minimum.
3. The Wedding Day Itself
This is the part you see. For a six-hour package, we are with you from getting ready through to the reception — present, quiet, and watching for the moments you won't even notice are happening.
But those six hours are intense. We are on our feet, constantly moving, making hundreds of split-second decisions about light, composition and timing. It is not passive work. It is one of the most mentally and physically demanding things a photographer does.
4. The Culling Process
After your wedding, we sit down with every single frame we shot. For a six-hour wedding, that can easily mean sorting through 1,500 to 2,500 raw images to find the 250+ that tell your story best. This process alone can take four to six hours.
We are not just deleting blurry shots. We are curating a narrative — selecting the frames that, together, bring your whole day back to life.
5. The Editing — Where Most of the Time Goes
This is the part that surprises most people.
Editing a wedding gallery is not applying a filter and pressing export. Every selected image is individually processed — colour graded, exposure adjusted, skin tones refined, distractions removed where needed — to ensure it looks exactly the way it felt.
For a six-hour wedding with a guaranteed minimum of 250 images, editing alone can take up to five full working days. That is not an exaggeration. It is the reality of delivering photographs that are genuinely beautiful, consistent, and worthy of the day they represent.
At Senses Photo and Video, this editing time is included in your package price. Always. You will never receive a gallery that looks like it was rushed.
6. Gallery Delivery and Administration
Once editing is complete, we prepare and upload your online gallery, write delivery notes, and handle any follow-up requests. For our packages, delivery is within 25 days to five weeks depending on the coverage — because we would rather take the time to get it right than rush something you will look at for the rest of your life.
So What Does a Package Actually Cover in Total Hours?
Let's take our Essential Coverage package as an example — six hours of wedding day coverage from $1,600.
Here's the honest breakdown of what goes into it:
Task | Estimated Time |
|---|---|
Consultation | 1–2 hours |
Planning & preparation | 2–3 hours |
Wedding day coverage | 6 hours |
Travel (within Sydney) | Included free |
Culling | 4–6 hours |
Editing (250+ images) | 30–40 hours |
Gallery delivery & admin | 1–2 hours |
Total | ~45–60 hours |
That $1,600 — divided across 50+ hours of skilled professional work — tells a very different story than the mental maths most couples do when they first see a quote.
Why We Don't Charge by the Hour
Charging purely by the hour would actually work against you as a couple. It would incentivise us to shoot more and edit less — to hand you a bloated gallery of mediocre images rather than a curated collection of beautiful ones.
Instead, our packages are built around outcomes. You get a minimum number of images, a guaranteed delivery timeframe, and a photography style that stays consistent from the first frame to the last — regardless of how many hours it takes us behind the scenes to achieve that.
Every Wedding Is Different — And So Is Every Quote
At Senses Photo and Video, we believe no two love stories are the same, and no two wedding packages should be either. Our prices are a starting point, not a ceiling. If your day is longer, shorter, more intimate or more elaborate — we will build something around you and your budget.
What won't change is the commitment to quality. Every image we deliver has been worth the time we spent on it. Every gallery tells the truth of your day.
Ready to Talk?
If you're planning a wedding in Sydney and want to understand exactly what you're getting — not just the hours on the day, but everything that goes into making your photos something you'll treasure forever — book a free consultation with us.
No pressure. No sales pitch. Just an honest conversation about one of the most important days of your life.
Senses Photo and Video is a Sydney-based wedding photography and videography studio. We work quietly, watch carefully, and press the shutter when you forget we're there.
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