So, the big day is quickly approaching. If you don’t have everything ready to go, don’t worry. It takes a lot of work to plan a wedding. The last thing you want is to put money into something only to find out later that you were duped. Let’s talk about wedding photos today. How many should you purchase?
Every Photographer Is Unique.
That may appear to be an obvious statement, but it is correct. Not every photographer will take the same number of photographs. You want someone who enjoys the art of photography. Someone who enjoys capturing the moment. A large number of your photos can be stored on a disc. Let’s go over what a wedding photographer should do.
If you’re planning a wedding photoshoot, one of the most common questions you’ll have is, “How many photos can you expect from a wedding photographer?” The photographer at a wedding takes a large number of raw photos but delivers a smaller number of photos after selecting and editing the best ones. A professional photographer selects high-quality photographs, such as 200 photographs from a collection of 1000-2000 raw photographs.
The quantity of photographs is never as important as their quality. In this article, we will answer your questions about the wedding shoot, how many photographs you can get, and what you should consider when choosing a wedding photographer.
With so many Wedding Videographers to choose from, it can be difficult to find the right one. Take a look at our top picks right here.
Consider the Following:
Not Quantity, but Quality
Having a lot of photos may appear to be a good thing in theory. However, there comes a point when the number of photos becomes excessive – especially when they appear redundant.
We take approximately 4,000 photos at a typical wedding. As a solo wedding photographer, we take approximately 2,000 images.
The majority of clients would not want all 2,000 or 4,000 of these images. That’s insane!
If you have someone who is looking for all of the RAW images or something, we would advise you to avoid it. In the following section, we’ll go over why this is the case.
Finally, if your wedding photos are all excellent, you could deliver fewer wedding photos than the average and still have extremely satisfied clients.
Photographers Sift Through Their Images
Remember the 4,000 photos we mentioned earlier that we take on a wedding day? When we get home, we transfer them to our computer and then narrow them down to only the “keepers.”
There are numerous reasons why we might want to reduce the number of images we have taken. These are some examples:
Unappealing photos should be removed (i.e., people making weird faces, poor lighting, etc.)
removing images that are repetitive (i.e., too much reception dancing photos, too many walking down the aisle shots, etc.)
Getting rid of out-of-focus and underexposed images
This culling process is critical to the workflow of any digital wedding photographer. It’s easy to be trigger happy and take a lot of pictures, so limiting the number of images you’d like to share with your clients in the end product is critical to this process.
Photographic Storage
We start this process while we’re filming.
We use cameras that allow us to simultaneously write images to two SD cards. This gives us confidence that we will not lose any images between shooting the wedding and uploading them to our computer at home.
When we get home, we immediately upload them to our external hard drives as a backup. This is a must-have for any wedding photographer!!
Obtain the Images Desired by the Client(s)!
While knowing how many photos should be reasonably expected is useful, knowing that you should deliver 400-800 photos for a typical wedding day only tells part of the story.
In reality, most clients want a good distribution of images that effectively cover ALL of their wedding days. It may appear that something is amiss if you provide five getting-ready photos and 200 reception photos.
Remember this when photographing the wedding.
Of course, before the wedding, consider directly contacting your client(s) and asking them what is most important to them.
You can read about how we use questionnaires to elicit the most important information from our clients, as well as other great wedding photography tips for beginners, here!
When you fill a wedding gallery with the most important shots and wedding moments for them, regardless of the number of images they receive, they will be much happier with their images.
Beautifully display the photos
Picture-review-gallery-preview-screenshot How you present your clients’ wedding photos is just as important as the photos themselves.
We’ve seen some inexperienced wedding photographers upload them to a difficult-to-use and visually unappealing platform like Dropbox. While this is an excellent cloud storage site for a variety of files, it is not ideal for making a good first impression.
We use dedicated wedding online photo galleries to get the most bang for our buck. We switched to Pic-Time because it had some appealing features. Sign up for Pic-Time today (it’s free to start) and use promo code FORMEDFROMLIGHT to get one month free on any upgraded plan.
Of course, some photographers prefer to deliver their digital images in a physical format, so selling albums, prints, and USB flash drives is a viable option. You can learn more about our trusted print shops here, and if you need custom USBs, we recommend WoodyWoodClick!
In a contract, define your image count.
When it comes to the number of images provided, the most important thing to do is to set the expectation in writing.
Clients are frequently perplexed, if not outright upset when this information is not provided upfront. It’s a common blunder, especially for newcomers. The simplest way to alleviate this frustration is to specify how much is to be expected! Simple!!
We set a low standard and frequently exceed it!
Some wedding photographers will do this and then charge an additional fee for the additional images.
The sky is the limit, but writing it down eliminates all concerns right away.
If you’re a photographer who wants to provide 50 stunning highlight images, you can do so while still keeping happy clients by being upfront about it from the beginning.
Conclusion
How many photographs should a wedding photographer provide to their client? The short and simple answer is $100 per hour of shooting, which equates to approximately 800 photos for an 8-hour wedding day coverage.
As previously stated, this figure is not an industry standard that all wedding photographers must follow. Different photographic styles and approaches will result in a different volume of images at the end of the day.
Finally, if you are honest with your clients about the number of photos they should expect and produce excellent work, however many you decide to include in your wedding packages will be sufficient.
