I’m shooting portraits and wedding. Two different market models.

For wedding, it’s more of a bulk edit approach. I tell a story and send between X and Y photos. If I want a picture to be part of the final selection, I just add it to the bunch, no questions asked. The client paid me a fair amount for the wedding and it’s not like I worked 3 hours on one single pictures.

For portraits, it’s usually package of 4-10 photos, chosen by the client. Retouching is more extensive and that is reflected in the pricing. More often than not, clients chose really weird pictures…to my taste, but I know I’m not the only one thinking this :P. I’ve been bugged by clients not choosing the ‘‘right’’ pictures before, usually I shrug it off and move on, sometimes I throw a bonus photo here and there.

I sent a gallery yesterday and honestly, I overdid myself. A lot of pictures from that session would be portfolio staples for years to come. The thing is, we did 5 looks. Client will chose an average of two per set, maybe will buy more. I don’t know. Let’s say the client has 0 overlap with my preferred pictures from that set, and I want to edit my own 10…do I just keep them hidden ?

Because I would basically do a 500$+ job and if I want to edit them on top of the client selection… That client will likely see images he did not buy on my website or elsewhere and that would be really weird to give basically double of the amount of pictures for the price. It would be a questionable business decision. On the other end, I don’t want those pictures to sleep on an external hard drive forever.

Have you dealt with this before ? How did you handle it ? How many extras ? Have you sent them all to the client or used them privately with other clients ?

Or are you ruthless and you just mourn some photoshoots ?