>Photographers get paid $1000+ and keep the copyright. Almost every other work-for-hire intellectual job involves an IP transfer.

That probably means the wedding photography business is not actually sustainable at $1,000 per engagement (no pun intended). They probably need to make (example) $1,500 per engagement to make it worth their time, but the industry has consolidated around a "standard" of lower foot in the door costs where they make up the additional money required on the back-end via licensing the IP.

One could create a photography business where there is a one time cost of $1,500 and the customer retains all IP rights, but customers probably just (ignorantly) view you as 50% more expensive than the "exact same service" sans IP rights.

The other thing to keep in mind, is by breaking out costs associated with IP ownership, the service isn't just hiding total up-front cost, they are also offloading some of the burden of cost from the purchasing decision maker (ie bride/groom) to the wedding guests.

I have no idea if the above is correct, but wedding photography is a commoditized service so odds are there's a reason it's standardized this way.

It seems that wedding photographers keep the copyright so that they can reproduce them for self-promotion and advertising, which totally makes sense.

Also, if you think the cost is unreasonable, I completely disagree. Photography is a very expensive vocation, and the wedding season is very short. There is little room for error, and the photos have an enormous emotional significance. The event day (or days) is incredibly long, and cataloging and processing images can be an enormous time suck afterward. I get that some people may not be interested in wedding photos, but that doesn't mean the photographers are overpriced for the work they do.

> It seems that wedding photographers keep the copyright so that they can reproduce them for self-promotion and advertising

That's probably not the main reason, since many other artists are able to use their work-for-hire in self promotion. All they'd need is an appropriate usage license, not copyright ownership.

More likely, when wedding photographers try to keep the copyright, they are hoping to charge separately for additional prints or DVDs, control which print shop reproduces their work, enforce the presence of their watermarks, or relicense the images as stock photography. These are all additional revenue and advertising streams that would not be available if the customer held the copyright.

> Also, if you think the cost is unreasonable, I completely disagree.

The market sets the price. I don't really have a problem with that.

> It seems that wedding photographers keep the copyright so that they can reproduce them for self-promotion and advertising, which totally makes sense.

I understand the rationale. That doesn't make it any less absurd.

If I'm a freelance journalist I don't get to keep the copyright so I can do self-promotion. If I'm a freelance web designer I don't get to keep the copyright so I can do self-promotion.

If a photographer wants a portfolio to show potential clients, they can do what everyone else does: make a portfolio on their own time.

Wedding photography is ridiculous even before the photographers get involved. The entire weddings industry in the US is one giant rabbit hole, capable of absorbing any amount of money, no matter how large, and returning little more than "an emotional experience" for it.

It's easy to get the copyright. Just say it's work done for hire, the RAWs are part of the deliverables, and they won't have to shoot anything stupid. If they balk, break it off and contact someone else.

Their job is lighting, framing, focus, capture, in that order. Postprocessing and prints are not part of the deal unless they can upsell it.

I agree somewhat with you, but might be able to put a bit more perspective on this.

Photographers use their work product as advertising, so attach their name to their work. They also often do any retouching themselves. This, along with copyright preventing modification of the images, allows those images to accurately reflect the abilities of the photographer.

It's a lot like software licensing in that way. As a company, you don't necessarily want someone tweaking your software you've sold to the and either expecting support, or even just possibly leaving a bad association with your software for the people that use it that don't realize that the reason it may be unstable is because someone has made unstable changes.

That doesn't make it good, but it does explain their thinking somewhat. Photographers are like software consultants, but because of the different time they came to prominence, they've managed to make it the norm that they retain rights to their work product. This is changing though. It's not too hard to find photographers that are willing to just dump the images to DVD pre-retouching and hand them over for you to do with as you wish. It won't be cheap, because they are losing out on being able to upsell you albums and video collages, etc, and their cost reflects not just the time they spent there, but their experience in knowing where to be and what to do to get the best pictures (in the same way that someone that pays my consulting rate is paying for my decades of experience).

This is silly. The most important "ability" of a wedding photographer, bar none, is to not screw up the part where they're actually capturing photos of the event. A wedding is a one-time event that people care a lot about, so this alone is probably well worth the $1000+ premium. Retouching the photos is something that anyone will be able to do at any time, given the untouched originals.