The advice is everywhere and it isn't wrong: know your worth, stop undercharging, raise your prices. I did it. It worked — the number went up and people still said yes.
What nobody warned me about was what raising them did to me. For about a year afterwards I was a worse photographer, and it took a stranger's father to show me why.
What I actually did
About four years in, I studied the business properly for the first time. Supply, demand, what people around me charged, where I sat in that. Then I raised my packages by nearly 200%. Not a nudge — a different category.
A few days later someone asked for information. I sent the new prices without flinching, half expecting silence. Within hours they accepted, asked for my bank details, and paid the retainer.
I want to be precise about what happened next, because it's the whole point of this article. I didn't feel proud of my work. I felt promoted.
The part I'm not proud of
I looked them up. Found the company, read the signals, and built an entire fantasy out of them: the venue this would be, how the couple would look, the kind of wedding that finally matched what I was now charging. Luxury. Magazine people.
Months later we met for the pre-wedding session. When they got out of the car, something in me sank. They weren't what I'd pictured. Not glamorous, not styled, just two people.
I felt cheated. By people who had just paid me more than anyone ever had, for a wedding I hadn't photographed yet.
Writing that down is uncomfortable, and I'm leaving it in because I don't think I'm the only one it's happened to — I think I'm one of the few who'll admit it.
What it did to the work
I shot the session from a distance. Not physically: emotionally. I got the composition right, the angles right, delivered images that were technically fine and completely empty. I told myself I'd make up for it at the wedding.
Then the wedding came, and the venue was modest. Cheap vases, half-wilted flowers, a concrete dance floor, a DJ with no production. And I got angry. I took photographs out of obligation. At one point I handed the camera to my assistant, sat down next to the DJ with a whiskey, and thought about where my luxury wedding had gone.
What broke it
Somewhere in the middle of the dancing there were shouts and applause, and I walked over without any enthusiasm.
In the middle of the floor the bride was dancing with her father, who could barely stand, and was standing anyway — for a few seconds, holding her hands, because it was her wedding.
I don't remember deciding to lift the camera. I remember the knot in my throat, and understanding with complete clarity that I had spent the entire day being the most worthless person in that room.
The actual lesson, which isn't "don't raise your prices"
Raise them. Undercharging has its own rot — resentment, overwork, and the slow conviction that your time isn't worth defending.
The problem was never the number. It was the expectation I stapled to it. Somewhere between sending the quote and meeting them, I'd decided that a higher price entitled me to better-looking clients, a nicer venue, a wedding worth showing off. I'd turned my price into a filter for who deserved my attention.
Nobody warns you about that, because the conversation about pricing is always framed as a business problem. It's also a character problem, and the character problem is the one that shows up in the photographs.
What I'd tell you before you send the new quote
Run this test. Picture the most modest wedding you can imagine — small, plain, no production at all — booking you at your new price tomorrow. Notice your first reaction. If any part of it is disappointment, that's the thing to watch, and it will reach your clients long before you say it out loud.
Price for your life, not for a tier of client. The right question is what you need to work sustainably and shoot fewer weddings well. The wrong one is what kind of couple a number like that "should" attract.
Don't research clients to decide how much they deserve. Learn about them to serve them. I can't always tell the difference in the moment, so I mostly just don't look anymore.
And know what raising prices won't fix. It won't fix being tired of the work. I found that out later and the hard way — I've written about what burnout actually felt like separately. Charging more and shooting the same volume just gets you to the same place with better equipment.
Where it left me
That bride taught me something I couldn't have bought: that what matters isn't in the budget. It's in a man deciding to stand up.
I still charge what I charge, and I don't apologise for it. What changed is that the price stopped being a statement about who I'd become and went back to being what it always should have been — the cost of doing this properly, for whoever wants it done.
This is one of the harder chapters in a book I wrote about ego, money and learning to look again. It's called The Word Became Image, and the opening is free to read there.