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How to ask brides/clients to be patient?

haring

Member
I am a wedding photographer. Brides always want me to select single photos and send to them before delivery date. I am not really talking about thank you card but other photos with family remembers.
I would love to do it for them and send them but the only problem that it really messes up my workflow. I allocate equal time for everybody's wedding. It is hard to pull the drives, go through the wedding photos, selecting them and editing them before final delivery while I am still editing somebody else's wedding. It takes a long time and this way I feel that I will never be able to meet my deadlines.

The best example is father's day. Everybody wants to have a photo with their father...

How do you do it? Are sending clients/brides photos after their wedding before the delivery date or you ask them to wait for the final product? If you ask them how do you ask them to be patient?
 

bradhusick

Active member
You could always implement a "pay for speed" option that makes it much more expensive to get a fast turnaround - that will naturally separate people into different groups.

Normal speed = $X
Delivery in half the time = $X times 1.7
Delivery in quarter the time = $X times 3
 

Jorgen Udvang

Subscriber Member
After events (I don't do weddings, or at least, I try not to), I always deliver per email 2 photos the next morning or even the same night, one formal and one informal, always including some of the most important people present. I've made this part of my workflow and it doesn't take many minutes to do it.

Some advantages are:
- The client is happy and has a photo to distribute to friends and relatives, possibly including a couple of nice words about this great photographer who offers such fantastic and unusually fast service.
- I get breathing room to process the rest of the photos without getting frequent calls with questions about when he/she can expect to see the them.
 

fotografz

Well-known member
IMO, this expectation is a product of the Smart Phone/Facebook generation who seemingly have zero patience.

I used to try and post a few shots quickly, but as often as not it led to requests for other specific shots they remember me taking.

I think in this environment, the primary thing we have to sell wedding clients is experience and creativity at the shoot, and consistent craftsmanship afterwards. The faster you do something the more it reinforces the growing belief that there is nothing to it, and "Why can't you get stuff done overnight like Uncle Bob?" Heck, some guests post shots on social media before I even get home from the wedding.:facesmack:

Now days, I NEVER give them anything until I'm done. For one, I want to deliver consistency across the images and prefer letting a job sit for a day or two then re-review it … but most importantly, I like building a story essay of a wedding … not just onezies-twozies.

INHO.

- Marc
 

Jormungandr7

New member
As to your problem, I think I may have a solution that could really help you out. I recently found this program, FastRawViewer, and it is, in a word, a godsend. I often also have to work with a lot of images very very quickly, and the main upside of FastRawViewer is that it is, well, fast. I’ve input 36 megapixels images into it before in large amounts, and it hasn’t ever taken me more than half a second to open each one; smaller files obviously open even faster, down to the low tenths or even hundreths of seconds. In fact, I literally dumped my entire photo collection into it once, hit the spacebar, and watched basically a movie of images float by on the screen.

A few other points that may especially help you, you can change the white balance and exposure settings in FRV – any changes you make will be read/registered by Lightroom or ACR, which can be very useful.
Moreover, you can set the preferences so that any changes to exposure or white balance that you make will propagate to the next images that you open until you tell it to stop – a big help for serial shooters :)
Also, another point in its favor is that FRV can actually show RAW histograms, unlike any other program that I’ve used, so when I’m looking through images quickly and they seem odd or noisy or w/e, I can just check the histogram.
Oh, and if you do try it, you may find that, like for me, the keyboard settings/shortcuts aren’t the ones you prefer/are used to. To fix that, you can go to the Keyboard Shortcuts and tune it to your liking. FRV is still in the beta stages; I’ve been using it for a month now, and it’s been stable, and it’s free at the moment, so that’s even better.
 

haring

Member
You could always implement a "pay for speed" option that makes it much more expensive to get a fast turnaround - that will naturally separate people into different groups.

Normal speed = $X
Delivery in half the time = $X times 1.7
Delivery in quarter the time = $X times 3
I love this approach! LOL
 

bradhusick

Active member
My wife was a corporate lawyer and she'd always tell her clients, "Good, fast, cheap. Pick any two."
 
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