"OldTimers" .. Film Day's workload & process. vs. Digital Era > Weddings / Portraits?

My photography started entirely with digital. While processing some portraits tonight, and thinking of an upcoming wedding, thoughts of our own wedding came to mind. Our photographer shot film, and I think he simply sent the rolls for developing. His work was mainly at the wedding. These days, it seems a lot of photographers spend hours, if not a day or more adjusting afterward. At least for our wedding, we never paid thought to how many photos we got. There were about 140 total and that those sufficiently represent our wedding afternoon and guests.

How many of you started back in the film days? Was an average wedding back then mostly just the wedding day? How do you feel the wedding of the past compare to today, in terms of time and cost? Allowing for inflation, is the cost more now? The same? Etc...

1. Digital has forced much more effort and many more hours of work on the backs of the individual photographer than the film days!
   
2. Digital has created much higher expectations by brides about the number of shots taken by a photographer.
   
3. Digital has taken away income producing opportunities from the digital photographer compared to the film photographer.
   

1. You might shoot 300-400 shots to deliver previews for 200-300 images you would present to a client in a preview book, not 1000-3000 shots!
   
2. You sent the film in to a pro lab, then later afix the individual negs of the ordered photos to specific 'masks' for automated printing. And retouching (which the client paid for) was done by pro retouchers on the neg or on the print by the lab. (Yes, I know some pros printed and retouched all photos themselves in the really distant past.)
   
3. All print orders, whether for the bride & groom's album, or parent albums, or for individual shots for keepsakes sent to friends and relatives generated extra income for the photographer; later reprints, even years later, could generate more income for the photographer. And when the photographer might sell the negs to the client in order to reduce the overhead burden of longterm storage, that could generate more income.

1. You shoot thousands of shots (one of our daughters was delivered 3000 shots of her wedding!)
   
2. You spend hours doing initial post processing, then more hours refining the shots in further editing for photos which were ordered by the B&G for their album.
   
3. You might turn over final prints (which you made) and a DVD full of images, and never make another dime from the job after they have the DVD...they might not even order album prints from you after getting previews on DVD.

If you place a value on YOUR TIME, you have to accept that to earn a loaf of bread or put a roof over your head requires a certain amount for your work labor and the same element of time has more value as inflation increases the bread or the roof over your head. Depending upon where you live, this can be a very substantial increase! Where I am, about 20 years ago a 2BR apartment cost about $1500 per month, and now someone would pay about $2800-$3000 for the same apartment (I just checked the rates where I lived 20 years ago!)

OTOH, I used to pay for a roll of film to shoot 15 shots, pay for film processing and printing previews...for comparative purposes, call that $1 per shot. So to shoot a full wedding of 400 shots was $400 in overhead, and then add in another $25 for a preview book to present the previews in. That cost, in addition to wear and tear on your car plus gas to get to/from bride's home and wedding site and reception. Let's just round that to $500 per job overhead. Add value of your time.

Compare that to your overhead today.

And surely, a lot of modern digital processing is getting done on a batched basis. Fix the settings for one among a group of maybe a few hundred shots ... copy the settings over to the rest of that group ... move onto the next group. Combine that with a very quick cull of obviously out-of-focus, poorly exposed or badly composed shots and you have the preview set to send to the client.

Then you can let the client get on with the hard work of sifting through and deciding which they think are best. OK, it will be photographer's job to polish up the preferred set but I'd imagine that only a small proportion of those are going to need a lot of close attention. In the background, the photographer can maybe work more intensively on half-a-dozen or so shots that he/she can see have real promise.

Given that some of the basic hassle of managing real physical material (rolls of film that need to be organised, parceled up and dispatched to the printer ... and prints and negatives that need to be checked and counted back in) has been taken away, I'd guess a wedding photographer's overall effort and cost in the pre- and post-digital are relatively comparable.

It isn't easy making a good living as a wedding photographer. Nor was it before.

Anyway ... it's all supposition on my part. I have no relevant experience whatsoever.