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You have your man, you have the dress and your wedding castle destination to die for, now you need to get those photographs to be able to relive it whenever you want without it costing you an arm and a leg.

With wedding photography costs sometimes exceeding thousands of pounds, it’s one of the biggest expenses on your budget. Here’s a number of ways to reduce the costs of your photography at your wedding castle.

We’ve all got a friend or relative who loves to take photos and more importantly they leave us green with envy when we view their photos.

Well, perhaps they’d photograph your wedding as a gift? As a back-up it might be worth asking two people to do it, that way, you can be sure one of them will have got it right!

Ask two or three of your guests (the ones who are interested in photography and who have a digital camera) to shadow the photographer during the day. Schedule the different guests to different time slots. If at all possible, pick a girlfriend for the pre-ceremony photos of the bride getting ready so she can also take shots of lacing up the corset etc. A more serious guest might be a good choice for the cutting of the cake and toasts etc.

Photography students are another alternative.
By using a photography student as your wedding photographer, you’re giving them a great opportunity to enhance their portfolio whilst saving yourself a packet.

Contact the photography or arts department at your local university or college and ask if you can place an ad to source a student photographer.

Cut the hours you engage your professional photographer. With professional photographers, the most expensive part of the quote is the labour. By cutting the hours the wedding photographer spends at your big day you should be able to reduce the quote.

You could do this by having all the photographs done in one place or at one time (all the group shots before the ceremony, all the reception shots immediately after the ceremony), reducing the number of shots or making sure you have someone to get people in the right place at the time. This of course only works with quotes that are based on hours and not packages.

Cut the number of shots you want. There are endless possibilities for shots at a wedding castle, so you could have your photographer hanging round for hours. By reducing the number of shots you have could reduce your photographer costs significantly. Ask your photographer if this will make a difference.

Get the negatives/proofs and print your own
Photographers often keep the negatives or hi-res shots so they can charge for each additional print that gets requested by family or friends.

Find a photographer that will give you the negatives or hi-res shots of the photograph. You can then print them out at your local photographers and save a fortune.

Buy the wedding album yourself to save some money. Many wedding photography packages include an album which is often heavily overpriced. By sourcing your own album, you can reduce this significantly.

Finding an album is easy as there are many online stores and department stores that stock beautiful wedding albums (at a fraction of the cost of photographers).

Another idea is to create the album yourself. When you have your prints, put the album together yourself. It’s easy to lay down photos in an album and you can put them in the order you want. By doing this yourself, you are reducing the number of hours the photographer works and the materials they use, so you’ll reduce your costs significantly.

Get copies of all the guests’ shots so you do not need to pay the photographer for the same shots.
These days everyone uses digital cameras, which makes it easy to share and copy photos. Get your guests to send you their shots and you’ll end up with literally thousands of pictures to choose from, each at a slightly different angle.

Invest in some disposible cameras and leave one or two on each table. You never know your luck you may get some good photos and not some shocking ones.

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