Post processing woes

[LadyShutterBug]

for an 8-hour coverage, shooting digital with 2 photographers, i generally end up with between 300 and 600 final images. i weed through and get rid of duplicates and such.

it just depends on what's going on, how many details there are to capture, the setting, how many guests, the sequence of events, etc.

i will obviously have more images from a 400+ guest wedding that is before, church, formals, and reception with dancing to the wee hours than a simple wedding with 35guests and a sit down dinner at a nice restaurant or residence.

as for the strobes, i shoot with available light whenever possible (and sometiems when it doesn't seem possible) so i can ttoally see how someone could just shoot and shoot and shoot... but that's definitely quantity over quality. i never guarantee a certain number of images... i just tell them we cover the day as we see fit... and if they like the stories we've told in the samples and portfolio work they've seen, they have nothing to worry about. if they want 3000 pictures, i am not the photographer for them.

it generally takes me 1-3 days to process a wedding's worth of images. all of hte editing, retouching, and artisitc license is included in my package pricing... so what they see when they're presented with their images is what they get.

[droreyal]

For my 2c, we have two shooters and we shoot around 1200 images at a wedding. No strobe 90% of the time so there are no recharge issues. To give you an idea, for the bride and the FOB walking down the aisle, you're looking at 10+ images each so around 20 in total. We edit them down to 400 or so which we show the couple.

My philosophy is to take the shot, experiment, try new things, sometimes they work, sometimes not, if I were to always take the shot I know will come out I could probably cut it down to the 400 or so images I used to take when I shot film.

Back to the original question. One trick to get through so many images in the editing process which works for us is to edit in rather than edit out, in other words pick the images that you want rather than weeding out the images that you don't want. It is much quicker.

Also as someone else on this thread alluded, its better to have less images but stronger than many that are so so as they will weaken the overall impression. Sometimes it does feel like you're giving up your children to the local orphanage, but think of all the time you will spend with your actual family rather than touching up mediocre images.

Thanks,
Dror.

[droreyal]

Just to add to the above the edit in rather than out tip originally came from Jeff Ascough's workflow tips.

[DEMDeepEllumMusic]

Really shooting more than 120 shots an hour per photographer just says that you are scatter shooting, not talking about special scenes such as isle walk, rings on fingers, kiss in church, cake eating, toasting, bouquet toss and garter toss-those are all heavily shot but about the rest of the service and reception. If you are taking less than 30 seconds for a shot consitantly for hours on end it comes down to you not composing most of them properly and to be honest who cares what someone else does-yeah this guy does 4,000 shots a wedding crap- YOU NEED TO PUT OUT THE BEST PRODUCT THAT YOU CAN!

As to your statement are you going to show your client every shot you took? IF YOU DO THEN YOU ARE NOT A PRO!!!! TO be HONEST a client should see at most 30% of your shots if you are shooting at this high level unless you have a lot of posed one off shots-like shooting each person as they go through the reception line with the B+G and then those should be considered-otherwise set the camera on auto stick it on a tripod and let it shoot every 5-10 seconds.

HEY it is hard for people to face up to that weddings used to have 5-10 rolls shot of 35 mm and even less of 210 back in the day and the B+G would get 100-150 shots tops and that was with the top level photographers.

Don't let some BS that the photographer shoots pj style compensate for that, when they say that about 90% of the time it means that they just fire away and don't really know s from shinola about composition and just toss the client a pile of crap.

So do you need 40 shots of the ringbearer picking his nose? Or 30 shots of Grandpa looking bored? Yeah you may shoot that many between 2 shooters not knowing who is covering what but the client really just needs to see the best one.

As to your review of your pics you should do a quick review of each pic-10 seconds or less and toss them into 3 piles (keep-maybe-dead) so 1200 shots will take about 3 hours to go through then go back after taking an hour break and look at the maybes and then do a keep/maybe/toss selection on those then go to the keeps from the two sessions and let the second shooter go through them (about 10 seconds each) you are doing no post on any of these just looking at composition and subject matter and then they look at which are keepers (not all will be) and then let them look at the 2nd tier maybes and see if any of them are keepers then start your heavy post work on these final files. Yeah you spend several hours going through the first level of shots but once you get up to speed you can cut that time down even more for reviewing (eyes close, odd face, people stepping into frame and not croppable, etc). Then after looking at your final product you can start trimming back on what you shoot at the wedding (no need to shoot something that will be in the trash bin at the edit desk) and you can cut your post time down even more by looking at 80% keepers that need to be decided if given to the client.

To be honest the client should have no more than the # of guests x 2 + 30 basic shots so a 100 guests is 230 shots given to them-you may shoot more but the client gets that count. This is with a basic wedding, now if they have a live orchestra, special scenery, extra cakes, etc, opening of wedding gifts (anybody remember back when they did that?), special ethnic dancing or ceremonies, etc of course you will have more.

Just go and ask people in their 50's to see their wedding albums from 25 years or so ago, or even older folks and see how many pics!

[AndrewCCM]

Originally Posted by DEMDeepEllumMusic

Really shooting more than 120 shots an hour per photographer just says that you are scatter shooting, not talking about special scenes such as isle walk, rings on fingers, kiss in church, cake eating, toasting, bouquet toss and garter toss-those are all heavily shot but about the rest of the service and reception. If you are taking less than 30 seconds for a shot consitantly for hours on end it comes down to you not composing most of them properly and to be honest who cares what someone else does-yeah this guy does 4,000 shots a wedding crap- YOU NEED TO PUT OUT THE BEST PRODUCT THAT YOU CAN!

As to your statement are you going to show your client every shot you took? IF YOU DO THEN YOU ARE NOT A PRO!!!! TO be HONEST a client should see at most 30% of your shots if you are shooting at this high level unless you have a lot of posed one off shots-like shooting each person as they go through the reception line with the B+G and then those should be considered-otherwise set the camera on auto stick it on a tripod and let it shoot every 5-10 seconds.

HEY it is hard for people to face up to that weddings used to have 5-10 rolls shot of 35 mm and even less of 210 back in the day and the B+G would get 100-150 shots tops and that was with the top level photographers.

Don't let some BS that the photographer shoots pj style compensate for that, when they say that about 90% of the time it means that they just fire away and don't really know s from shinola about composition and just toss the client a pile of crap.

So do you need 40 shots of the ringbearer picking his nose? Or 30 shots of Grandpa looking bored? Yeah you may shoot that many between 2 shooters not knowing who is covering what but the client really just needs to see the best one.

As to your review of your pics you should do a quick review of each pic-10 seconds or less and toss them into 3 piles (keep-maybe-dead) so 1200 shots will take about 3 hours to go through then go back after taking an hour break and look at the maybes and then do a keep/maybe/toss selection on those then go to the keeps from the two sessions and let the second shooter go through them (about 10 seconds each) you are doing no post on any of these just looking at composition and subject matter and then they look at which are keepers (not all will be) and then let them look at the 2nd tier maybes and see if any of them are keepers then start your heavy post work on these final files. Yeah you spend several hours going through the first level of shots but once you get up to speed you can cut that time down even more for reviewing (eyes close, odd face, people stepping into frame and not croppable, etc). Then after looking at your final product you can start trimming back on what you shoot at the wedding (no need to shoot something that will be in the trash bin at the edit desk) and you can cut your post time down even more by looking at 80% keepers that need to be decided if given to the client.

To be honest the client should have no more than the # of guests x 2 + 30 basic shots so a 100 guests is 230 shots given to them-you may shoot more but the client gets that count. This is with a basic wedding, now if they have a live orchestra, special scenery, extra cakes, etc, opening of wedding gifts (anybody remember back when they did that?), special ethnic dancing or ceremonies, etc of course you will have more.

Just go and ask people in their 50's to see their wedding albums from 25 years or so ago, or even older folks and see how many pics!

LOL - Tell us how you really feel.. hehe

I won't comment much more on this other than to say...times have changed. Whether for better or worse, many of the most sought after photogs in world are shooting many more images than what was the norm 10+ yrs ago. I encourage anyone that is serious about wedding photography to checkout the WPPI, PPA, DigitalWeddingForums, Pro4um, etc to see what the norm is today.

I agree that there is a trend towards quantity over quality...but bottomline things have changed. I am still an advocate of pairing down to the best shots, getting rid of duplicates and delivering a manageable set of images much like you mention. To be honest, those that are capturing that many images...I have really no idea what the final delivery is...I do know that the current trend is to have tons of detail shots, dancing and candid images.

I guess the important thing is to deliver what your customer wants and is paying you for.

I guess we sorta have moved off topic huh? SORRY!

[droreyal]

Unfortunately Andrew is right, at least in my experience, times have changed and most young couples these days would not be happy with their parents album - they tend to prefer the "comic book" style albums that are popular today, available light rather than flash at F8, and more photos rather than less. Unfortunately to a large extent the clients dictate how much we shoot, and the arms race that the wedding photography is turning into means that you are often faced with clients who say that the studio down the road shoots X amount more than you, or that magazine Y suggests that they go with a studio that shows you at least 5 photos for every one they expect you to pick.

It would fantastic to hand over 230 photos and be done with it - I handed over around 400 photos the other day and got some very frantic phone calls from Germany wondering where the rest were.

btw if you do the math on that 230, and you show 30% of the images to the client, that means you shot 766 odd images - not that far off a 1000. Same math on the poster's numbers and you're looking at a wedding party of 150 people. Not terrible.

4000 is a ridiculous number and Becker has been criticised many times for it, but I suspect that the way things are escalating at the moment we might be looking at those kinds of numbers in a few years.

Thanks,
Dror.

[Steve O Chap]

I recently did my first wedding with a few individuals from this board... we took around 2500 shots between the 3 of us. I was there from 12:30 - 7:30 and took about 600 myself. They stayed longer and obviously both took more shots than I did.