A lot of people wonder what is custom photography exactly? And why is it so expensive?

Custom photography is more of a luxury than your entry level cookie cutter chain experience. Custom photography  requires a level of commitment, investment in time and money, forethought and planning on the part of the subject/client and requires a larger time commitment for the photographer as well.

Clients who enjoy taking a more active role in the creation of their families’ memories have the desire to have portrait art that is truly personalized. These more discerning clients have been known to budget and allot time for a custom photography session. Many clients opt for it to be a once a year special experience, some opt to have custom photography sessions done to record their child’s stages in life. Having said this, it is clear that custom photography is not in everyone’s budget, it is something that most families save for to splurge on from time to time to memorialize their children as they really are (not posed and primped in the cookie cutter studio setting).

There is a great deal of time involved in creating high end custom photography sessions for a client. The luxury of great service, better choices and a supberb end product. The result of all this are heirloom quality images.Custom photography is based on being unique to you. How great an experience would be, to be able to sit back and allow a photographer to do this highly custom work for images that you will most likely cherish for a lifetime?

{above statement via [http://www.professionalchildphotographer.com](http://www.professionalchildphotographer.com/)}

You will notice that when researching a professional custom portrait photographer, the session fee itself isn’t unreasonable. But when you get to the print pricing, and the cost {if the photographer offers it} of a CD with your digital files – can appear to be quite pricey.

Keep in mind that you are paying for much more than just the 1-3 hours of your actual shoot time. Your investment covers the hours behind the scenes. Which includes but is not limited to — consultations and emails, travel time, session time, file handling, organizing of images, post processing (the most lengthy portion of the service), processing and uploading onto a viewing site, preparing a preview, burning CD’s, runs to the post office… etc!

So as you can see, there is so much more work involved than most clients realize. Many many hours are spent on your session to get it just right! There are so many important milestones in your life, and to invest in custom photography will provide you with invaluable memories, that you will always be able to look back on!