Okay.. So the wedding is over. You had loads of fun. You can’t wait to see the images from the wedding. You call up your photographer and says “Hey… We are really excited to see our images. I know you said it will take 3-4 weeks for processing them. But can you sent them over very quickly. Its okay.. un edited is fine. We just want to see them.”
I get this request one out of every five weddings. Hey, we have asked the same to our photographer too. But being one photographer now, I understand how it feels.
Asking the photographer to hand over the unedited images or all of the images he has taken at a wedding is like asking an author to give their book in a manuscript format – un edited, unformatted and including the paragraphs and chapters that didn’t make it to the final copy.
We take thousands of images at a wedding. At that time of chaos, we shoot whatever we feel that would convey the story. It is in the post session that we pick and choose the best ones that will tell your wedding story in a beautiful way. Once you have seen the full set of unedited images, will there be any excitement to see the processed story? How would you feel if you see all the footages just after the shooting of a movie? Will there be anything for you to look forward for the releasing? Rather how will the Director feel? Will he be excited to work on the Post production works once all his audiences have already seen the footages?
A bunch of unedited, unprocessed photos doesn’t always convey the right story. Once you hire a photographer, you are not only paying him for his photographic skills. You are paying him for his vision to coin all the parts of the wedding to weave a story out of the snapshots. Make use of it.
But Yes. There are a lot of photographers out there who will right away give you all the images right after the wedding. And you have to pick the ones going into the album from the thousands of images he has dumbed to you. Isn’t it his job ? Isn’t that what you are paying him for ? A photographic sense to select the best ones from the heap of images. We take a lot of effort scrutinizing our images to pick out the best ones. The culling process takes almost 10-30 hrs depending on the number of images. So in a way the other photographer is making you do his work and charging you for it at the same time. Something to think about.
