We price our weddings by the hour because it is the most honest way to charge a couple for a day we have not lived yet. There is no $2,000 package here, no $3,000 package, no $4,000 package. There is an hourly rate, a four hour minimum, and a final number that comes from your real timeline instead of from a tier somebody invented in a spreadsheet.
Sheila and I have looked at how most studios in South Florida build their pricing, and the thing nobody says out loud is that tiered packages are built backwards. They start at a price point and then fill it with hours. Eight hours, ten hours, a second shooter, an album, whether your day calls for any of it or not.
Then comes the part that actually costs money, and it never shows up on the photographer's invoice. Once you have bought ten hours of coverage, you start building a day long enough to use them. The suite gets booked the night before so there is somewhere to photograph the morning. Hair and makeup start two hours earlier, and that team bills by the hour too. The planner stays on the clock. The venue rental gets extended on the back end. The DJ gets another hour. Add the vendor meals and a driver sitting idle between locations, and the package you bought to simplify your budget has quietly pulled a couple thousand dollars out of the rest of it. None of that money went to photographs. It went to filling hours you had already paid for. That is a package making decisions about a wedding, and it should be the other way around.
So here is exactly how ours works. Two rates. Classic at $250 an hour and Signature at $300 an hour. The difference between them is what you receive afterward, not what happens on your wedding day. The coverage is identical either way. Same cameras, same team, same effort from the first frame to the last. What changes is the post production and the deliverables, and you can see that breakdown on the Packages page. Whichever one you choose, what you pay is the rate multiplied by the hours you book.
The one floor we hold is a four hour minimum. Under four hours we would be arriving in the middle of the day and leaving before it finished, and the gallery would show it. Four hours is the smallest window where a wedding still comes back to you as a story.
If you book photo and cinema with us, both run the same number of hours. Four hours means four hours of each. Six means six of each. We do not split them, and there is a real reason for it. A wedding film that stops an hour before the photographs do leaves a hole exactly where the day gets good, and a gallery that ends before the film does means we were shooting with half a team in the room. When both cameras cover the same window, the still images and the film come from the same moments seen two ways, and they finish together. That is what makes them feel like one body of work instead of two vendors who happened to be at the same party.
The rest is simple. You choose where coverage starts and where it ends. If the party is running long, you add an hour and you pay for an hour. And the math is easy enough to do in your head, which is more than most couples can say about the pricing sheets sitting in their inbox.
Now the part I care about most. A small wedding is not a lesser wedding, and it is very often not a modest one either.
Some of the most beautiful days we have photographed in South Florida had fifty or sixty people in the room. A garden ceremony in Coral Gables with dinner for fifty five. Fifty guests at a private estate in Palm Beach. A waterfront afternoon in the Keys with sixty of the people who actually matter and nothing on the schedule that did not. These couples did not scale anything down. They made a decision. A shorter guest list and a higher standard for everything on it, the food, the flowers, the room, the wine. Intimate is a choice, and per guest it is usually the more expensive one.
And there are couples who keep it small because that is what this season of their life allows, and I want to say something clearly about them too. They deserve the same photographs. Not a stripped down version, not a junior shooter, not a starter tier. The same photographs. Hourly is how we make sure nobody has to sit across from us and explain why their wedding is not big enough for the menu.
Because the quality does not scale with the hours. That is the whole point. The four hour wedding gets Sheila and me, the same cameras, the same lenses, the same lighting, the same editing, the same eye that has been doing this for over 15 years. A shorter day is not a smaller job to us. It is a tighter one, and honestly it asks for more attention, not less, because there is no slack in the timeline to recover a missed moment.
I will be straight with you about the one place hourly is not the bargain. If you are having a full ten or twelve hour wedding with two locations and a late night send off, there are studios whose top tier package will land at a lower total than our hourly math. That is real and I am not going to hide it. What that package will not tell you is which of those hours were priced at nothing to make the tier look good. We would rather quote you a number you can verify than win you with one you cannot.
Everything else, though, tends to break in the couple's favor. Hours you do not spend on coverage go to the flowers, or the food, or the venue, or the honeymoon. The timeline gets built around the wedding you want instead of the coverage you already paid for. And nobody spends the morning of their wedding doing math.
So when you write to us, do not lead with a budget. Tell me about the day. Where it is, what time you are saying your vows, who is going to be standing there, what part of it you would be most heartbroken to lose. We will figure out the hours together after that, and the number will follow the day instead of the other way around. Whether there are fifty people in the room or two hundred and eighty, you are getting the same two people behind the cameras, and we are going to treat your afternoon like it is the only one that matters. Because for those hours, it is.