Wedding Photography and Pics Given to Clients

[myjunk]

Just wondering what is the current practice in terms of the pics to be given to clients for wedding jobs (or the like)

Do you give all the pics which was taken (after culling those OOF / bad composition etc) to the client or do you only give a select few.

Perhaps you have packages saying
min 300 pics = $
min 400 pics = $$

However, what i would like to know is what do you do with the RAW / JPEG files. Is it normal practice to give the RAW files as well? Or perhaps the Full Res JPG? Or do you provide only the low res (say 1280x720) in a CD/DVD?

Or do you give nothing at all?

One more thing, does the pics ALL have the watermark on it?

I'm kinda confused because some photographers in my country are stating that it hurts the industry(?)

http://www.shutterasia.com/forum/showthread.php?t=37202

[RDKirk]

You have to stop and think about your own philosophy--who are you, what are you, what is your product or service?

Are you an artist or a picturetaker? Are you "recording the day in pictures" or are you creating a work of art?

Some clients only want a bunch of pictures taken. That's okay--what they want is what they want. Butut it's so simple with modern cameras just to produce a bunch of pictures that a caveman can do it, and people only want to spend a few Flintstone rocks on work a caveman can do. The camera operators who are only producing a bunch of pictures are the ones who have to look over their shoulders for Uncle Bob the family shutterbug.

Or do you have specific types of artistic works you produce, a style unique to you, a service the client can get only from you? Photographers like that aren't worried about Uncle Bob. They may worry about whether enough clients are discrimating enough to want something artistic and unique (that's a matter of marketing properly) but they're not worried about Uncle Bob.

Once you know the answers to "Who are you and what do you do?" then you can begin answering the other questions. For instance, if you're creating art, then of course you would not release your raw files. The answer to such questions becomes readily apparent.

[KFormus]

Would you want to sit through 400, 500, 1000, or even 2000 pictures

Let's say you take 2,000 pictures during an 8 hour wedding. That's 250 pictures an hour, 4 pictures a minute, which makes about one picture every 15 seconds. At what point in between those 15 seconds you have are you being creative?

Don't place a quantitative number, just go in and try to tell a story with what you got. Leave yourself time to be creative. Quality over quantity.

Now if only I can follow my same advise :D

[SuzyView]

I never tell them how many. I just tell them I will process all the usable ones and that is limited. Some ask for everything, and if I was shooting for real money, I'd ask a lot for those. Never the RAW images. I keep those. For a wedding, I can give up to 400, but no less than 150. It's never good to give a number, only an approximation.

[tim]

I take as many pictures as are necessary to cover the day well, the customer sees all the good ones as proofs - 300 - 500 images usually. I don't promise any particular number. If the customer has purchased a high resolution disk they get all the images they saw as proofs, in color, in jpeg format, straight out of my RAW converter. My contract says I supply jpeg files only, but if anyone wanted another format i'd consider it - TIFF easy, DNG if they had a really good reason to want them.