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Comment by hellweaver666 | Hacker News Reader

> It's now scarcely possible to make a proper living and most > of the old-timers are shooting commercial work or weddings.

Strange you should say that, as we actually hired an ex photo-journalist to do our wedding photos as we didn't want any posed nonsense, just genuine photos of people as they naturally were. The photos that we received were amazing and we were really happy with the results.

I spoke to him on the day of the wedding and he gave me almost the exact same story you've just posted.

It seems to me that every industry that relies on technology gets seriously disrupted when the technology becomes cheap enough - printing, publishing, photography and I'm sure there are many more.

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That's because people doing weddings are NOT selling photographs. They are selling their time and expertise, which will always be in short supply.

Bingo - if something's being sold, it's because it's scarce:

http://journal.dedasys.com/2007/02/03/in-thrall-to-scarcity

If what you sell is not scarce... watch out.

Kind of. Let's not forget that most wedding photographers explicitly own the rights to the photos they take of your wedding, and have print and digital packages they explicitly push both to you and to your friends and family as part of their offering. Some wedding photographers don't even offer the digital pictures as part of their base packages.

Our wedding photographer gave us a DVD with everything and an explicit release to do anything we wanted with them. She was very forward thinking and she seemed to be doing very well for herself.

If you push the issue, you can get your full res digital photos. If nothing else, find a photographer who is trying to break in to the business, and who is still small time. That's what we did for our wedding, and we got really great photos (both posed and candid, as the photographers were actually a husband-wife combo, one doing each), as well as a full dvd with every single photo they took, and the rights to do whatever we wanted with them.

most wedding photographers explicitly own the rights to the photos they take of your wedding

Like most things, that's negotiable. When I went looking for a photographer for our wedding, one of the first questions I asked was "How much extra do you want for a copyright assignment?"

The additional charge varied from $0-500. The ladies we chose -- though primarily for other reasons -- were in $0 group.

We did the same thing, and were also really happy. Plus, he didn't keep the copyright to the results and he gave us a DVD filled with photos.

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