Question For You Guys!

kpage · August 8, 2010

I've been getting into wedding photography a lot over the last year or so... slowly getting better with each wedding I shoot... I've only been second shooting but hoping by next summer to have one or two of my own

I have a question though in terms of what you give your brides (and grooms) after the wedding... I have had two friends whose weddings I've been involved in (not photography wise) over the last two years who have gotten back all unedited images. The one most recently paid $900 for 3 hours of shooting (ceremony + formals). She got her pictures back today and it was 400 unedited pictures with the option to buy the edits of the pictures for $5 for a 4x6... I asked her if she got a disc of unedited ones (that's what my other friend got instead of buying prints) and she said no but she gets a slideshow dvd... so if she wants edited pictures they are done on request but at an additional cost...

Looking at the pictures I personally was unimpressed with them but maybe its cause I've seen so many amazing pictures here and these photos were completely unedited... although there were some where people were covered up by others and they had flowers growing out of their heads...

Anyways long story short... would you ever post your unedited photos??? Personally I can't imagine doing so because it doesn't always reflect your best work (don't get me wrong - a lot of us shoot to get it right off the camera but when the colors are dark and the white balance is off it doesn't reflect how good you are imo)

Just thought I'd ask here and see what everyone does!

ssimmonsphoto · August 8, 2010

I never let a photo out without processing it and I tell my brides that. Even last weekend when I had a flight to Salt Lake less than 6 hours after the wedding was over, I still got home, got some of the images download, edited my favorites, and posted a sneak peek before I left. It would have been easier to post the sneak unedited, but that just reflects poorly on me and my business. The field is so stiff anyways that I don't want to give my potential clients a reason not to talk to me.

Matthew Saville · August 9, 2010

kpage wrote: »

would you ever post your unedited photos???

...say when!

=Matt=

Dmanning · August 9, 2010

Matt, You crack me up! If my metering was right on, framing good, subject looked perfect. Yup I would post unedited. We shouldn't have to rely on fixing it in post as much as we probably do. Digital makes us lazy. Also, I think I and my peers are the hardest to impress/please.

Darren Troy C · August 9, 2010

AGREED! Not a thing wrong with posting "unedited" footage if the images never called for it to begin with. Clients, without a shadow of a doubt, know UPFRONT that what they get on the delivery end....is it. PERIOD. I'm not talking quantity, rather quality. Why, in the name of all that's good and evil, would you EVER deliver images that weren't what you thought were top quality? I have had a few requests to "see all of the images, regardless of anything I have done to them....we just want every shutter snap from beginning to end." NOPE!!! You signed the little piece of paper saying what I do and what you get. The past 15yrs have been spent on honing in-camera composition, lighting, cropping, etc. Sure I spend a lot of time in post, that's a personal touch I feel like I bring in addition to the original image. And of course there are inevitably the ones that will need technical post work. I have had clients tell me that I'M NOT HIRING YOU as a result of your style. Awesome, I say!!!!!! I'd much rather be able to concentrate on bringing style and originality to the table instead of being spoon fed a bunch of specifics. Getting a little off subject, but ultimately it leads to YOU delivering the best image possible, no matter the amount of work that goes into final delivery. So, don't produce or deliver sub-standard product.

Matthew Saville · August 9, 2010

Dmanning wrote: »

Matt, You crack me up! If my metering was right on, framing good, subject looked perfect. Yup I would post unedited. We shouldn't have to rely on fixing it in post as much as we probably do. Digital makes us lazy. Also, I think I and my peers are the hardest to impress/please.

You bring up a good point- Digital can really make people lazy, and they need to realize that there's a price on that laziness.

With film, the price used to be very arbitrary, because we ALWAYS just paid a lab to do our printing, and they just corrected our mistakes for us. It pretty much cost us the same to process and print a roll of film, whether or not we nailed our exposures. But now with digital, when everybody is trying to become their own lab, the "price" of NOT nailing your shots is VERY clear- Time, time, TIME. If you shoot sloppy, you could be spending a 40 hour work week in post, instead of a 4 hr half-day.

I'm not saying that anyone here shoots sloppy, I'm just rambling on mostly.

The flip side of the coin however is that Photoshop actually IS a very powerful tool. Take away burning and dodging, and Ansel Adams would NOT be Ansel Adams! The same goes for many of the greatest wedding and portrait photographers of our time- Photoshop CAN be a powerful artistic tool. It can even be the defining element in a photographer's style! Just check out the work of someone like Scott Robert Lim...

So the road goes both ways. On the one hand, know what the heck you're doing and nail it in-camera. On the other hand, don't think that "needing" Photoshop to define your style is a sin; you have some (actually MOST) of photography's greatest legends who relied heavily on darkroom and PS tools to define their style...

:-)

Oh and you also bring up a good point about WHO we're trying to impress here- Fellow photographers might be able to tell the difference between a SOOC image and a corrected / processed / stylized one, but the cold truth is that most brides won't be able to tell. That doesn't mean get sloppy, that just means that the delivery timetable is WAY more important to clients than perfect color.

=Matt=

Dooginfif20 · August 9, 2010

I have yet to shoot a wedding on my own, but I have been a second/intern on 4-5 so far. This is something I ponder on everyday with everything I shoot. The question with that photographer is what was the $300 an hour paying for and was their an agreement on it? Was their a set number of pictures promised to the client in the beginning? I personally do not like to see a picture of mine go out without even getting some sort of look through PS. Do I make changes to every picture? No. 400 images would take a long time to go through. If he promised edited photos then he should deliver edited photos. If they agreed it was more for them later then thats what they agreed to. My personal experience with my own wedding photographer was we paid $1200 for everything. That included all day coverage, 400 EDITED images, and a photo album of all of them. We got a disc of "Edited" photos aka pictures that were downloaded from his D200 and then saved in a folder named "Edited". None of them were touched. The album was bought from Wal-Mart and pictures were printed from Wal-Mart. (He shouldn't have left the reciept in the album) I am just ranting on now. I understand where you are coming from. Its all about what they agree on. If the customer is happy they are happy. It really tough for me as a photographer to not look at flaws on someone elses work that isnt my own.

kpage · August 9, 2010

Dooginfif20 wrote: »

I have yet to shoot a wedding on my own, but I have been a second/intern on 4-5 so far. This is something I ponder on everyday with everything I shoot. The question with that photographer is what was the $300 an hour paying for and was their an agreement on it? Was their a set number of pictures promised to the client in the beginning?

Unfortunately I don't know what was agreed up.

I agree with you guys that not all images need to be edited, but in this instance there were photos that were either blown out, too dark, or completely off in color. I've had two people contact me (one of them the bride) saying she'd rather order my pictures that i shot (I did some getting ready ones for her as a wedding present since she was only paying for three hours) and just not deal with her photographer anymore... What got me was that the photographer was charging $11 for an edited 5x7... So I guess another question then, do you charge extra for edited images?

Dooginfif20 · August 9, 2010

its really tough to say. I know the photog here charges $25 for a sheet of 2 5x7 retouched photos. Its all about the package. Some packages come with a lot of prints some dont. I know how you feel about the retouching. Both my sister in-law and her friend asked me to retouch their photos from their weddings that were done by the same photog. She is a great photographer, she just lacks post processing work.

heatherfeather · August 9, 2010

I guess another question is: What is unedited? Does running a photo through lightroom or bridge and doing conversions count? Because 95% of mine do not get opened in PS. There just isn't time. What I tell my clients:
ALL of the photos get basic processing... (brightness, contrast, color and or conversion editing) and at least 30 of the photos get deep processing (blemish, double chin, distracting element edits... plus extra creative processing. Basically anything opened in PS) My clients appreciate the effort, and I feel proud of the photos at both process levels.

Matthew Saville · August 10, 2010

heatherfeather wrote: »

I guess another question is: What is unedited? Does running a photo through lightroom or bridge and doing conversions count? Because 95% of mine do not get opened in PS. There just isn't time. What I tell my clients:
ALL of the photos get basic processing... (brightness, contrast, color and or conversion editing) and at least 30 of the photos get deep processing (blemish, double chin, distracting element edits... plus extra creative processing. Basically anything opened in PS) My clients appreciate the effort, and I feel proud of the photos at both process levels.

If you shoot RAW, then yeah when you open the images in Bridge or Lightroom, there's an automatically applied default, and you can set it to be whatever you want.

In my opinion, "SOOC" means that you don't look at individual images, you either shoot JPG and truly DO upload them without touching them, or you shoot RAW and you output them without touching them individually.

=Matt=

Icebear · August 10, 2010

My own "standard" is that SOOC means no pixel level editing. Works for me. YMMV.

Question For You Guys!

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