If you have decided to get married and you’re looking for your wedding photographer, this is a question you are probably thinking about.
There’s no a standard rule and each photographer has its own approach to photography that leads to different numbers of pics given, but for sure, I can tell that delivering all the photos taken on the wedding day doesn’t mean providing a quality service, quite the contrary.
Quality vs Quantity
As a wedding photographer I have the responsibility of capturing the emotions of one of the most important day of your life and give you precious visual memories of those moments to relive for years to come.
So it’s quite normal to shot a lot on the wedding day and coming home with 3000 or 4000 pictures of the wedding day it’s common. But for a quality work it’s essential the culling process.
Culling
Culling the photos I have taken on the wedding day means removing everything you would never want to find among your wedding photos. I’m talking about identical or repetitive images, out of focus and poorly exposed images, grimaces, weird faces and closed eyes, light tests etc…
This is an essential part of the photographer’s job in order to deliver an artistically finished work.
So while having thousands of photos of your wedding day might seem a good thing, basically is not.
Postproduction
This is another essential part of the photographer’s job because the photos downloaded directly from the camera’s memory card cannot be enjoyed or printed without postproduction.
I ‘develop’ every digital file through professional editing software to give to my photography its typical aesthetic in terms of color correction, shadows, lights, composition and contrast. Digital files, exactly as analogic negatives, need to be developed to fully become photographs.
How many photos I will find on my wedding gallery then?
Having said that, it is clear that a well-finished and artistically complete photographic service cannot ignore, after the shooting phase, the work of selection and post-production of the photos and also that, quality wins over quantity when it comes to precious memories like your wedding day ones.
For a full day I usually deliver between 700 and 900 high resolution fully edited photos, ready for print.
The number of photos delivered can obviously vary accordingly to what happen during the wedding and the number of guests, but this is usually the right number of photos to tell all the significant moments of your wedding day and to get rid of all that doesn’t enhance your most beautiful day.
