It’s rare that a project results in a payment adjustment or reduction. However, if we’ve decided that your payment will be reduced or adjusted, we’ll include a note with the specific reasons in your Payment Request Approval Email.
Any reductions are based on several factors, including general industry standards and expectations for professional wedding photography and videography along with any increased costs or expenses that we incur as a result of your performance or deliverables. If your footage or pictures contain technical errors, we might need to devote extra staff time to fixing those errors. If you didn’t capture significant moments during the wedding day, we might lose client goodwill, issue refunds, or be unable to use the gallery to marketing purposes — which we rely on. In other words, your errors or mistakes might reduce the value of the overall product. If you’re a photographer, missing the first kiss is a serious error, but missing a shot of a best man’s fist bump probably is not. That’s because of general industry standards and reasonable expectations for professional wedding photography and videography. Couples expect their wedding photos to include their first kiss: it’s a substantial and critical moment, and a significant part of their wedding ceremony. That’s a reasonable expectation. However, it’s not a reasonable expectation for the photographer to capture every single moment that may happen during the ceremony. If the best man gives a fist bump to the groom — that wouldn’t be considered a significant or critical moment, and it’s not an industry standard that professional photographer reasonably expect to happen, or that couples should reasonably expect to document.
We’ve tried to put together guidelines within the Handbook that offer clarity.
For example, it’s a general industry standard that professional wedding videographers capture footage of the wedding ceremony in a manner that allows an editor to assemble a single video of the ceremony with continuous video and audio from start to finish. A wedding couple reasonably expects that a professional videographer will deliver to them a ceremony video that allows them to watch the ceremony, from beginning to end, without technical distractions, blurry footage, interrupted audio or other material errors. This includes the processional, vows, exchange of rings, first kiss, announcement of the couple, and recessional. There are different ways to setup cameras to achieve continuous coverage. It’s the responsibility of the videographer to ensure they have proper redundancy of camera and audio recording equipment so the entire ceremony is captured with sufficient clarity and lack of distraction. If you start and stop your camera multiple times, or constantly move around — and you didn’t have a secondary camera also recording usable footage and audio — you’ve made it impossible to deliver a video with continuous video and audio of the ceremony. This would be considered a material error, and inconsistent with professional standards for wedding videography. As a result, the value of your deliverables to us is significantly diminished. We can’t provide (or sell) the couple a full video of their wedding ceremony. That’s why your payment would likely be reduced.