What Happens After Your Wedding? Why Your Wedding Photographs Take Time
One of the questions every wedding photographer gets sooner or later is, “When will our photographs be ready?”
And honestly, I completely understand it.
You've spent months, sometimes years, planning your wedding. The day itself seems to disappear in about five minutes, I've seen a few preview photographs on social media and suddenly you want to see everything else. I would be exactly the same. Once you've had that little glimpse of your wedding photographs, waiting for the rest probably feels even longer.
But something I've realised over the years is that most couples understandably have absolutely no idea what happens at my end once their wedding is over.
From your side, I've photographed your wedding, I've gone to the office and now I'm editing it. It sounds pretty straightforward.
Unfortunately, it isn't quite like that.
Your wedding doesn't finish when I put the cameras away
Photographing the actual wedding is only one part of the job.
Once I'm back to the office, the first priority is making sure everything I've photographed is safely backed up. A full wedding can contain thousands of individual photographs across multiple memory cards, and before I even start properly editing anything, all of those images need sorting through.
That doesn't mean throwing a preset over the entire wedding, clicking export and calling it finished.
Every photograph that makes it into one of my finished wedding galleries gets my attention.
I work through the images, choose the photographs that tell the story properly, remove duplicates, test shots, blinks and the inevitable photograph where somebody has managed to pull a face that no human being should physically be capable of making. Then the actual editing begins.
Exposure, colour, contrast, highlights, shadows, cropping, straightening and all the other little adjustments are looked at as I work through the wedding.
Sometimes an image needs very little doing to it. Sometimes it needs considerably more.
And that's important to me - I don't rush your wedding photographs
Other wedding photographers may work completely differently to me, and that's absolutely fine.
There are photographers who have different workflows, different turnaround times, outsource parts of their editing or have teams working behind the scenes. I'm not interested in saying one way is better than another.
I can only tell you how I work.
When you book me, it's me photographing your wedding and it's me sitting at the computer afterwards working through your photographs.
I care about every individual image I deliver.
If something isn't quite right, I'll work on it. If a crop could be better, I'll change it. If the colour doesn't look right, I'll correct it. If I've got several very similar photographs, I'll decide which ones actually deserve to be in your finished gallery rather than simply giving you everything for the sake of increasing the number.
I probably drive myself slightly mad doing it sometimes, but I wouldn't be happy doing it any other way.
Your wedding photographs are something you're hopefully going to keep for the rest of your life. I'd rather spend the time getting them right than rush through them because I want to say I've delivered a wedding quickly.
I'm rarely working on just one wedding
This is probably the biggest misconception about wedding photography.
When I've photographed your wedding, yours doesn't suddenly become the only wedding in the business.
During a busy part of the wedding season I can have several weddings moving through different stages of my workflow at the same time.
One wedding might be being backed up and sorted. Another might be well into the editing process. Another couple may be choosing photographs for an album. I've potentially got another wedding to photograph in a couple of days and another one shortly after that.
That doesn't mean I'm jumping randomly between weddings or that yours has been forgotten.
It simply means I'm running a wedding photography business with lots of couples at completely different stages of their journey with me.
And some of those journeys are surprisingly long, I have couples are with me for three years!
Wedding photography isn't a business where somebody books on Monday, I photograph them on Saturday and we're finished with each other the following week.
I'm currently looking after weddings booked years in advance.
From the first enquiry, there are messages, contracts, payments and questions. As the wedding gets closer there are final wedding meetings, timings to organise, group photographs to discuss and all the little details I need to know before turning up with my cameras.
At exactly the same time, new couples are getting in touch about their own weddings.
So while I'm editing weddings I've already photographed, I'm also answering new enquiries and taking new bookings, dealing with existing clients, holding wedding meetings and preparing for the weddings I'm about to photograph.
That's before I've actually picked a camera up.
Then there's everything else you don't see
Like most small businesses, there isn't a mysterious office full of people working alongside me.
There isn't somebody sitting in another room answering all my emails while somebody else does the accounts and another person updates the website.
It's me.
The website needs looking after. The blogs need writing, new photographs need uploading, enquiries need answering, social media needs updating, Google needs feeding, paperwork needs completing and the accounts unfortunately don't seem willing to do themselves.
Alongside Discovery Photography, I also run Stu Brown Photography, where I teach photography through one-to-one sessions and group workshops, including workshops I've been running in partnership with the RSPB.
I love that side of what I do as well, but again, there's preparation and work behind every workshop that nobody attending it necessarily sees.
Put all of that together with actually going out and photographing weddings and suddenly my working week looks rather different to simply photograph wedding → edit wedding → photograph next wedding.
So how long do wedding photographs take?
My wedding agreement gives a turnaround of approximately one to two months, and there's a reason I've chosen that timeframe.
Sometimes a wedding may be ready sooner. At particularly busy times of the year, it may naturally be towards the longer end of that period.
I don't want to promise every couple an unrealistically quick turnaround and then either rush their photographs or disappoint them.
More importantly, if you're still within that agreed turnaround period, please don't worry that I've forgotten about you.
I haven't.
Your wedding is safely in my workflow and I'll get to it exactly as I promised I would.
I know waiting is difficult, particularly once you've seen your previews. In some ways I actually like that you're excited enough about the photographs to be desperate to see them all. That's a pretty nice problem for a wedding photographer to have.
But every message asking whether a gallery is ready still needs answering, and during wedding season those little interruptions across lots of clients add up.
The best thing you can give me is the time we've already agreed.
Your photographs deserve that time
I've been photographing weddings for a long time (18 years now), and one thing that hasn't changed is how seriously I take the finished photographs.
Long after the cake has gone, the flowers have disappeared, the suits have gone back and you've forgotten half of what happened during the speeches, your photographs are still there.
They're the memories I'm giving back to you.
So yes, sometimes I'm sitting at my computer obsessing over things that you probably wouldn't even notice. Sometimes I'm tweaking a photograph, changing it back, looking at it again and deciding it was better the first bloody time.
That's just how I work.
I'm not trying to be the fastest wedding photographer. I'm trying to make sure that when your finished wedding gallery arrives, I've done the best job I can with it.
And if that means taking the time to look after every photograph properly, I'm absolutely okay with that.
Your wedding isn't forgotten.
I'm just busy making sure it's finished properly.
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