Keeping Photographs!!

As wedding photographer I normally take around one thousand images per wedding, which I think is around the standard. the problem is what to do with all the images? Which to use? Which to Keep? Which to throw away.?

The selection process is not always that simple and I must admit that I find it very subjective. With weddings I normally make the initial selections and make up the album from this but let the Bride and Groom tweak it with their selections, sometimes there are very few changes (occasionally none!) but sometimes the Bride wishes to make wholesale changes.!!
I am of the opinion that the customer is always right therefore I dont really mind, but I will try and persuade them with other options and I WILL tell them them if I think its just not right.

What I really wanted to mention today was what to throw away from any set of images? Normally I would only really get rid of the really obviously flawed images, leaving the semi flawed images until a later cut. Many times now I have used part of a photograph, maybe the groom has a better smile, and with a little bit of tweaking I can make a much better finished product. The idea of using these spare parts is purely to maximise the final image, I normally do not tell the couple that I have sliced a few pictures together, I merely give them the finished result - which they love. (If you tell them they will undoubtedly want more images changing which takes up valuable time.)

For this reason I do not throw many pictures away and I really enjoy looking back on some of my very early work, (wedding or Not) and seeing what I could do with them now, a few years on.

A good example of a picture being useful at a much later date was not actually one of my weddings but a typical day out by the seaside. I took this photograph in the very early nineties of some Sand Yachting on Lytham St. Annes beach and managed to get the old buliding in the background,It went into the filing system with dozens of others and not thought of until very recently.

Eighteen months ago we purchased a beautiful apartment right on the beach at the very same spot. I remembered the series of sand yachting photographs and dug them out I was amazed to find that the picture I had taken over 20 years ago, was where we actually lived now (well at weekends!)

.
It must be the only picture of the old buliding taken from the beach, and with the sand yacht and seagulls it makes it very very special.

I now have this picture enlarged and framed on my wall and is a massive talking point with all our visitors.

I was so glad that I did not throw these pictures away, and now regularly look through old collections. With external storage so cheap and easy now it really is no excuse to get rid of those "average" photographs.