Chapter 19 Destination Weddings 359 Two Reasons to Do Destination Weddings The first and most common reason to shoot destination weddings is the lure of getting out of your own town to see the world. Some people are content to be where they are while others are always curious to see what's on the other side of the hill, no matter how good it is where they are. If you happen to fall into the latter category, destination weddings will certainly be attractive to you. The second reason to shoot a destination wedding is if you happen to live in a remote area or an economically depressed area that doesn't have many clients. For example, a good photog- rapher in New York City could easily charge $6,000+ for a day of shooting and might gross $10,000 after the couple purchases albums and prints. If that same photographer were to move to a small town in rural America, the number of $6,000 jobs within driving distance would not be enough to survive on. At this point, the price difference has nothing at all to do with the quality of the photographer. Luckily, we live in the age of the Internet, so if you know how to market your website, a bride in New York can find your business right in the comfort of her own home. She can also use the Internet to pay you and communicate with you to make all of the necessary arrangements, even if you happen to be off shooting a destination wedding in some remote place halfway around the planet. Thanks to the Internet, photographers are no longer quite so limited by geography -- photographers can live and work anywhere they want. Is It a Job or a Vacation? Every job you do as a wedding photographer has to make money. That is a very simple fact of our existence that seems to elude some people for an amazingly long time. Destination wed- dings may seem at first like they would be so much fun that you might even be tempted to do them for free. Heck, some are so cool it seems like maybe you should be paying the bride for the privilege of doing the job. Many photographers who are new to the destination wedding business undercharge to get what looks like a "free ride" to some exotic location. At first, going to Hawaii for a wedding sounds like the perfect excuse for a vacation in Hawaii. However, as photographers, we must collectively realize that destination weddings are a growing part of our market, and in the future they are certain to become much more common. With that in mind, the concept of undercharging to get the job has the same effect abroad that it does for wedding photography at home. For example, if you are an established wedding photographer and one of your competitors starts charging a fee so low she barely breaks even, you would be knocking on her door to inform her she is devaluing the whole business of wedding photogra- phy. Of course, beginners have to start with low fees, but decent photographers should always check the local market to see what everyone else is charging so as not to degrade the business by running prices down. Pricing for destination wedding photography works exactly the same way -- or at least it should. As you can see when you look at the figures in the section "How to Calculate a Fee," you are far better off skipping the working vacation and just taking a real vacation instead. Compare those prices to the fact that you will be gone for at least four days during which time you can't do any other work except answer e-mail from your laptop. How much money could you have made if you had stayed home and worked those four days at local weddings and portrait jobs? Assuming you're open to shooting more than one wedding per weekend, you could probably