When we do a shoot for somebody, should we give them all the photos or do we only give them the nice ones? How do we know what photos to pick? Is it more about a technically perfect photo or what the customer wants?
After a few days of topics directly related to wedding photography, this one is a nice transition. It very much applies to wedding photography, but is a helpful topic in general.
When we show our selection of photos to the customer, they will almost inevitably ask, “Where’s the rest?”. They want to see them all. Whether it is a wedding or a soccer game, the photos the customer would pick are not necessarily the photos we would pick.
Customers will pick a photo, even though their son is blurred beyond recognition in the background of a soccer game shot. Why? Well, it has their son. They may or may not have some nice-sounding explanation, but really, it just comes down to one thing: they want the shot. Who cares why…especially if they are paying.
This happened with the wedding I just shot. I gave the couple my selections. All that means is that out of the ten shots I took of any one moment, I gave them the one or two that were crisply focused and had good expressions. Still, with hundreds of photos in their hands, they asked, “Where’s the rest?”
So, I batch processed all thousand plus photos to a computer screen size, no photo by photo editing like I had put into the selections. So, they have the outrageously blurred photos, multiple shots of any one moment, and more than a thousand photos to browse through, but that was the only way to save my time.
Now I understand why many professional photographers let you view all the photos, but make you choose which ones you have printed. It depends on the customer and what kind of photography you are doing for them. If you are just paid for your services, take the shots, hand them all over, and move on. I think we can do one step better than that, though. Hand them a CD with your selected photos and then a separate CD with all the photos.
They have the photographer’s picks, among which are probably the only ones they would ever think of printing, but they also have peace of mind knowing they are not missing out on some great shot that the photographer missed. They can spend the hours digging through all the photos if they want. If they do not have time, though, they have the photographer’s picks to go straight to the best shots.
