I'm not really familiar with LI (b/c I live in Westchester) but from what our LI friends have used for their own weddings, I can say that Duet & S*ilverF*ox are both very good & reasonable.
Why do photographers charge $200/300/400 or more per hour if all you’re doing is pushing a button and burning some files to a DVD? Oh, au contraire mon fraire (this is loosely translated as, “I don't THINK so Bro.!!”)!! For every hour you see any professional photographer with a camera in hand, there are at least 4 more hours spent behind the scenes; prepping for the job, buying, borrowing, or renting the perfect gadget to make your photos rock, and the ever important post production sorting and processing of your images to get them ready for prime time (your in-laws). Plus there's the costs of all the consumables involved in your final project, like DVD’s, archival disks, disk cases, transportation, shipping stuff everywhere, metric tons of coffee and so on. And the cameras ain't cheap either. Now that cameras have tiny little computers and gnomes inside, they have to be replaced every twenty minutes because they're obsolete in fifteen (gnomes need frequent breaks). The most important thing to remember is that you're not hiring a professional photographer for their time, you're hiring them for the finished product, and the buckets of blood, sweat, and coffee that it took to be able to make the kick *** photography magic you know you're going to get. As the immortal Ms. Summer opined so eloquently in 1983, 'She works hard for the money... so hard for it, honey...'
