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I am at the peak of my wedding season. Translation: double wedding weekends, late night editing until 2am, 2+ caffeinated drinks on my desk at a time. But despite the intense workload, I have never felt more inspired. The couples I get are all so in love, so loved by others, and are so much fun to work with-which makes the daily endless hours of editing at a time, and 20 +/- hour total post production time well worth it.
Regardless, I still need a break from time to time… so I thought I’d take a few minutes to write a blog about my post wedding workflow.
Sometimes people ask me about what happens after a wedding with their images. The answer in short: a lot.
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The Night of the Wedding:
No matter how late your weddings ends, how long my drive home is, or how busy I am the next day I always back images up immediately upon returning home or to my hotel. From my memory cards I back the files up in triplicate- once on an external hard drive, a second time on my desktop hard drive, and a third time on another computer.
Within a Few Days of the Wedding:
I prepare a preview to post online for my clients via my Facebook page. This usually consists of about 5-7 photos. Clients are also informed right before this is posted so they know to expect it, and are informed of the 4-6 week estimation of when the full gallery will be ready.
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Culling:
I use Photo Mechanic to cull my images. Up until about 4 months ago I did all my culling/sorting in Lightroom, until I discovered that Photo Mechanic is a fantastic program for this- it loads the images at lightning speed and exports full resolution copies of the RAWs at the fastest rate I have ever seen. I keep all images which tell the story of the day in a flattering way and are not exact duplicates. For a typical 8-10 hour wedding, this usually results in 500-800 images.
Editing:
I edit 99% in Lightroom, and occasionally have a few images I need to edit down to the pixel in Photoshop. My editing process is clean and as natural as possible. Typically I will brighten, warm, and do light retouching. Every single image is edited by hand by me, including the images from my second shooters. Once editing is done, the files are exported. Images are then formatted for Facebook, blogging, and client galleries.
Backing Up:
Once images are exported, they are kept on an external hard drive. Additionally, I back up all of my high resolution images on a cloud storage. I use Crashplan . The photographer community seems to love Backblaze, and I did too-until I found out that Backblaze only acts as a mirror of your current system. Once a drive or folder has been removed from your system for more than 30 days, it deletes the backup. Basically, you have to plug in each external hard drive once a month in order to retain your backups…which basically defeats the point of having a backup in the first place. Finally, I burn a dvd copy of the high res images as well as a third form of backup. Anal retentive much?
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Delivering Images to Clients:
Clients receive images in an online proofing gallery. I use now use PASS- previously I used by Into The Darkroom since I preferred to have my own private system loaded onto my website as opposed to paying monthly or by the gallery for a service. However, PASS offers the ability for clients and families to download the full gallery with one single click and it is much more convenient for them to share photos this way.
About a week-two weeks after the images are delivered online, the USB for my clients are shipped. Images are loaded onto my custom wooden usb drives in high resolution, packaged into a gorgeous handmade beefy wooden box, and keepsakes from the wedding day are stashed into three tiny vials for the couple to keep in their heirloom box as mementos along with about 200 4 x 6 prints.
The Client’s Job:
ALWAYS eject your USB properly. Never just pull it out of the drive without first closing the folder and hitting “eject” from your computer. Doing this will eventually result in killing the drive. Always- it’s just a matter of time.
As a wedding client or portrait client, you absolutely must make sure to back up your photos in at least two place, preferably three. Your usb, disk, computer, or other source WILL fail eventually. You may lose your usb, unplug it improperly and fry the FAT pathways rendering it useless, lose files in a move, have your laptop stolen, etc. Back these up by creating a second and third copy on a hard drive, external hard drive, cloud storage, disk, or other form of storage and try to have one copy offsite or in the cloud in case of fire/theft.