Couples seeking wedding photographers are going to find a wide range of wedding photographer’s in Roanoke and the Roanoke Valley, ranging from just a few hundred dollars to upwards of $4,000-$5,000 and even a couple in the $10,000 range.

Today, we’ll explore the main price ranges, help you figure out which is best for your wedding budget and we’ll provide some insights to the affordability factor when it comes to weddings in our region.

Are photographers based in Roanoke affordable?

Most wedding photographers in South Western Virginia are going to be affordable when compared to other regions of Virginia.

In fact, couples in our region of the commonwealth will see 23% less costs with their wedding than other areas like NOVA, Charlottesville and parts of Tidewater. You can pull this data from both The Wedding Report and Snappr.com.

What are the three price ranges for wedding photographers in Roanoke, VA?

Budget

In our region, you’ll be able to find few budget wedding photographers.

These are people that are usually fairly new to the business, typically photography students or those with a low-end camera with limited features.

While under $1,000 typically, they will have a limited knowledge base of best lighting practices, camera operations and experience within the wedding industry.

Generally speaking, these were people with less than a couple years experience.

This range of wedding photographer is generally $300-$1,000 for a full day of coverage.

Mid-Range

You’ll find that most wedding photographers fall into this range, $1,100 to $2,999 with various levels of experience.

It’s also the most popular range among couples.

They will often times have professional grade cameras such as the Canon 5D Mark IV, Sony A7iii or A7rIV, Nikon D750 or the like. An example of mid-range camera bodies range in the $1,500-$4,000 (not including lenses and other grear).

They will have a good depth of knowledge with their equipment, lighting practices, posing, post-production and the like.

You’ll find that they have a wide range of experience from a few years to a couple of decade’s.

High-End

Roanoke does have a few higher-end wedding photographers in the region, ranging from $3,000 to just over the $5,000 mark.

They will have about the same level of experience as the mid-range photographer, but they will be great at posing, imagery and providing an overall experience for the couple.

Many will have medium format cameras with extreme high end capabilities, like the $45,000 Hassleblad H6D-400.

With these people, you will have the best peace-of-mind experience they will get everything right.

Luxury

While we don’t consider this a category, there are a couple of wedding photographers in our region that charge more than $10,000 for a wedding.

These are professionals of a caliber that mostly travel for all their wedding events, exotic venues, famous celebrities and those that are able to easily afford the luxury of having them at their wedding day.

Of the two that we know in our region, both rarely do any weddings in our region.

Do wedding photographer’s truly make a lot of money?

Although many people believe wedding photographers make a lot of money, that’s far form the truth.

Many have lots of post-production hours (editing), camera gear to recoup, insurance on their gear and events, marketing costs, business taxes, licensing and the like too.

We’ve created an online calculator that can better show a true cost per hour when you take into consideration some of the overhead and general cost of doing business.

What price range should we be looking at for our wedding day?

It’s a misconception that you should be overpaying for your wedding photographer, which leads to the question, what should you be paying for a professional since there are so many price ranges?

The answer isn’t “What are other couples paying for wedding photography?”, the answer actually lies within your own wedding budget. You should look for a photo pro within 10-13% of your overall wedding budget.

If you don’t know what that should be, we developed another online tool to help.

Just adjust the slider to how much you plan on spending on your wedding and we’ll figure the total with a low, medium and high range that should give you a good baseline to finding the right wedding photography professional.

What is the Average Price Couples Pay for a Wedding Photographer in Roanoke?

The number varies depending on who you ask, but let’s dive into a couple of those numbers.

A company called The Wedding Report is a national report broken into each of the demographic metropolitan regions.

According to them and the 2018 data, 1,891 couples spent an average of $1,573 per wedding photographer totaling more than $2,974,543. (The Wedding Report 2018, page 139 of 192)

Wedding Wire and The Knot’s websites show that an internal study they conducted, they average price was $2,400.

Value Penguin, from LendingTree said that the average price range was between $2,095 and $2,556.

Based on those spreads alone, we can determine that most couples are going to spend in that range with an average of $1,986.50, splitting the numbers mentioned above.

“Couples spend on average $1,986.50 for wedding photography in the Roanoke Valley.”