What Happens With My Wedding Photos After The Big Day?
What Happens With My Wedding Photos After The Big Day?
You say, “I do.” You kiss. You dance, and you drink late into the night. You go on your honeymoon and spend a week relaxing with your new husband/wife. You come home, and immediately wonder, “Where are my wedding photos?” If you’ve had a dream wedding (or you’re about to have one), then you’ve probably wondered about the time it takes to get your photography in your hands once your wedding has passed. You’ve also probably wondered about what your photographer does in all that time?
The Typical Process for Getting Your Mexico Wedding Photography
Our goal at the studio is to have your photography edited and in your hands within 3-4 weeks after your wedding.
But why does it take so long?
A typical 4-hour wedding yields thousands of photographs (often 2,500 or more). Our first task is to download the images from the cards and immediately back them up onto a backup drive. Then we start to weed through your photographs and choose the best 350-400 images where you look your best, or that capture you and your guests’ personalities. My opinion as a photographer is that someone other than the photographer should do this. Personally, I find that I have an emotion when I take photos, and a hope that it would look and feel a certain way. These emotions and prejudgments tend to cloud the reality of the photographs, and therefore, I prefer to hire a professional editor to go through my photographs so that you get the ones that are truly the best.
What happens next?
Once we’re done choosing the best of your photographs, we go into color correcting mode. We correct for density, perfect skin tones, lighten those wrinkles a little, and make sure the skies and oceans look as beautiful as they did on your wedding day. Yes, I photograph with some of the best Canon digital cameras, but the images coming out of the camera are not up to my quality standards. Furthermore, I photograph in a RAW (.CR2) format. This ensures a higher quality image than if photographed in Jpeg, however, this means that we need to do this custom work before your images are ready.
But that doesn’t sound like 4 weeks worth of work!
The typical 4-hour wedding requires up to 40+ man-hours of editing and production work after the wedding. We span that work over 3 to 4 weeks as we have different team members that do different tasks. We have one that does the culling and selecting of the images. We have another that does the primary color correction, and another that does a final look at the images to ensure that they are perfect. All told, for every hour I photograph, there is about 10 hours of work that goes on behind the scenes.
What happens once everything is finished?
Once the process is finished, I personally look through the images and decide if they hit my standards for quality, and if they are the way I remember that day and match what I believe is your style. If I am happy with the quality, I will send you a few of our favorite photographs to make sure you are happy with them. Once we know you are happy with the color correction, we send you a link to the rest so that you are able to easily download them and save them on your computer.
Everyone on the team understands that this process seems like a long time to you, the client, and we do our best to make sure that we are as efficient as possible. We are continually looking for new and better ways to do things, while retaining my standards for high quality. Over the years we have improved the process, and what used to take 4-6 weeks now takes 3-4 in a studio that is twice as busy.
Finally…
I hope this helps you understand the process. I have some amazing people working with me to ensure that your photos look amazing and are something you can cherish for a very long time. Our goal is always quality over speed. If you are ever concerned about your wedding photographs and where they are in the process, then please feel free to email me and ask where we are at in the process, and when we will be able to get you some images. We never want our clients to feel out of touch with the process so please don’t hesitate to be in touch.
Thank you
– Dean Sanderson