How many photos should a photographer give for a wedding ?

I've been working as a wedding photographer in South Wales now for well over 10 years and covered around 700 weddings and I always get asked this question by clients and also by those amateur photographers who are looking to get into wedding photography and learn what is expected on the delivery of the photos.

It's a question that has no fixed answer due to the fact each wedding is different. I often use the example that I could shoot two weddings back to back on a Friday and a Saturday at the exact same venue and exact same weather conditions and what I deliver digitally. i.e the amount of photos will be vastly different for each bride. Let's examine why that is below...

1. Number of wedding guests

One of the key answers to this question revolves around how many guests you have invited at the wedding. Quite simply; the more guests that are at the wedding the more natural and candid photos there are for us as wedding photographers to capture on the wedding day. This probably has the greatest bearing on how many photos you get. Are you having a micro wedding with 15 guests, or a large wedding with 140 day guests?!

2. Summer or Winter wedding

This is often understandably overlooked by couples booking their wedding, and when pointed out it becomes obvious but something that they wouldn't have thought of. With a summer wedding you get a full day of light, sunset in August for example is 9.30pm, whilst last light in winter is 4.15pm in December on the shortest day! Add in the higher probability of bad weather in winter too and it means that there is far less time spent outside and it becomes increasingly harder to shoot as much as a summer wedding. I often say that we work twice as hard on a winter wedding to try and deliver the same amount of wedding photos and having someone highly experienced for your winter wedding is priceless!! Anyone can get away shooting a decent set of photos on a long sunny day in August even the cowboys! Put them in a winter wedding in a storm though and what they will deliver to you is not on the same level of quality or consistency!

3. Time of ceremony

Quite simply if you are getting married at 11am then you will likely get more photos than if you are getting married at 4pm.

4. Travel hours

Are you going from house to church and then to venue? If these are close by then that doesn't really matter, but in the past just as an example I've covered bridal prep in Penarth, church in Cardiff and then wedding reception in Oxwich bay!!. Yeah I know that sounds a bit extreme but it does happen. There's a lost 2 hours of the day there just being in the car driving from place to place. This has an effect on the amount of photos you receive.

5. Weather

I'm not really talking about some rain here. After all most weddings have a little shower even in summer on and off. Any experienced photographer will easily deal with this and this generally has little impact. Full on torrential rain however from start of day to finish, even in summer and combined with what type of venue you are at will have an obvious impact ! Even not being able to get a sparkler shot or confetti throw done correctly means you may get less photos.

So to summarise a combination of all of the above can drastically affect how many photos you receive! This is why it's vitally important to book a highly experienced wedding photographer. You may think as wedding photographers we just snap away and are maybe a little arty and able to put a popular or trendy filter on your photos and its sad to see sometimes brides fall for photographers who maybe have the best looking instagram reels and shout the loudest on social media, but please PLEASE don't overlook experience. You only get one chance at this!!

As an average I deliver around 500 photos, this can vary between 400 to 800 though depending on the above and as a general rule of thumb thats inline with other wedding photographers worldwide not just in South Wales.

Below is an example of a sunset photo taken at Oxwich in a December wedding at 4.15pm with Sarah and Jake.

We had rain all day but its the ability to move fast through experience that delivers at the end of the day. I won two awards with this image, and had this lovely review from Sarah..