My two children are getting married, and In Part 1 I talked about how my eyes have been opened by the experience. What would my kids get if they hired a "professional photographer” for $3500.00 or so? Generally the photographer's time on the day, a DVD, no post work, often from someone who doesn't know how to give a "wedding day experience" on top of everything else. $3500 feels like too much money for that, but as I pointed out, the wholesale costs involved are too high to expect much more. Prices like that encourage couples to go shopping with unrealistically low budgets for photography … but still often expecting everything under the sun. And yet these are my kids getting married and I'm not trying to cut corners. I'm focused on how much they'll miss out on. How can we get across to consumers who want "everything under the sun" that their budgets are unrealistically low given the actual costs involved, and that the shoot and burn deals they end up settling for often aren't a bargain at all? People with unrealistic budgets have always been with us, as have photographers selling at unrealistic prices. There's not much difference between "shoot and burn" and "selling the negatives" in the old days of film. What's new is the idea that this is a pathway to success. I agree with a comment on my previous post, that photographers are artists and should be paid for their talents, but when the penny drops that $3-4k is a helluva lot of money to pay someone for a day's work, there's going to be a lot of pressure on prices. Meantime, it's hard to compete against, I know.