Wedding Photography
Posted on Saturday, January 16th, 2010As many photographers and wedding venues know, there has been a down turn in wedding bookings this year caused by the recession. I came across a forum where the brides were talking about old wedding photos on the websites and that they didn’t like this.
We have been watching the wedding photography market with our eyes wide open over the last few months as we havent really been in the market for wedding photography this year with the R&D that we have been doing.
We are aware that there has been a drop of around 40% in weddings and also a growth in Wedding photographers.
At the start of the recession we had a number of ‘photographers’ who had been made redundant from pie factories and had a keen interest in photography and wanted us to take them on, needless to say the quality of the photography was not very good, and they all seemed to be from other trades and at best were keen armature photographers.
We checked out the online stats of wedding photography when we were looking at the boudoirr photography market and published our finding on line.
When we looked at people searching “wedding photographers” we looked how these compared and also on the information we had from our client base.
Here is part of that post which relates to the wedding photography market as of the 10th of December 2009.
Wedding is dropped 20% from its peak for 2009 .. If I look at the data yearly and average them out a little then give the drops, you can see the difference.
2004 70%
2005 76%
2006 85%
2007 79%
2008 62%
2009 50%
Highs and lows
Peeks 3Q 2004 and 2006
Dips 3Q 2009 (joint 2004 and 2007)
I will let you draw your own summary from the information I have provided, the information clearly shows some dropped over the years and also shows how the market floats around within the year, some photography markets are down and have progressively been this way over the past few years with a drop in 2007 and some peeks in 2006.
I will go into some detail on the years and the levels of social standing and how they have effected the market.
2004 70%, This was the year that house prices started to rise and people were getting married, most people had job security and of course credit cards which they lived by.
2005 76% Most people thought that this was the peek of the property prices and many people took on loans against their homes for refurbishments and also for lavish weddings.
2006 85% This was the peek of the housing market with many people making around £100,000 money on their home and lead to a peek in weddings from older couples who had two homes and a greater disposable income A lot of people we buying into the property market at this time, but later in the year the buyers dried up..
Not only relating this to houses and percieved wealth, Nikon and Cannon brought out the affordable DSLR camera to the general public and aimed their marketing directly at them, so we could see in 2007 and 2008 the weekend photographer with high quality cameras.
2007 79% In 2007 no body know what there house would be worth and the market became shaky with house prices leveling out and the market generally slowing. Uncle bobs with their cameras started showing up in there hundreds and there were more photographers than there were weddings in many cases.
The average wedding had at least 4 people with either professional or semi professional SLR cameras and those Look alike cameras like the fuji 9300.
2008 62% In 2008 we entered shaky ground as the banks foreclosed and shut down, the wedding market took a big breath and the businesses hard struck (advertising companies) started calling around all the photographers looking for those who wanted to place an over priced advert. As 2008 went on the world suddenly turned dull as peoples homes were losing money and people started loosing their jobs and we started to see prices shoot up on the basics.
Olan mills closed its doors and many of the venture photography franchises closed.
2009 50% When we walked into 2009 many people had lost their jobs, many businesses had shut down, people saw the boom times in 2006 and 2007 and had purchased their cameras and wanted some of the wedding photographers pay for their work, in fact there are 35% more photographers than there were in 2007 and with the recession in full swing there were 40% less weddings.
Without needing to say much, people are less happy when they don’t have a job and money becomes tighter; with the drop in these sectors putting stress on couples it was going to lead to more breakup and less weddings.
At this time many people are settling into the recession and budgeting their lives for the “down turn” as we roll back the growth in the economy. There is still some uncertainty but people are coping and this means that the wedding market is turning back towards a small and slow upwards trend.
Oddly it is some of the UKs areas which are known for the low wages and considered generally poorer that have seen the most growth.
Within the members section I will continue this post with the trends on Internet users and what they are looking for.
Tags: Market, Wedding trends
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