A couple is back from the beach with nearly four hundred photos from the trip on their phones, and now they’re choosing between two offers for an evening shoot. The first promises “200+ edited photos,” the second “around thirty final images.” On the face of it the first is more generous: nearly seven times as many for the same money. But this is where intuition lets you down, because a client and a photographer count finished photos differently. To the client the number measures generosity; to the photographer it measures selection, and the same figure can stand for completely different work. It pays to understand what that number is made of in the first place.
How many shots it takes to get one keeper
An hour of photographing people means about 100–200 frames. That isn’t excessive caution about duds; it’s the nature of the work, because you can’t tell in advance which of several near-identical frames will be the one where pose, light, focus, and expression all come together. Experience tells you how much of what’s shot is worth keeping at all. On a calm, posed shoot, at best one frame in four comes out usable; in reportage, where a moment can’t be repeated, one in seven. That sets the floor for the frame count: shoot any fewer and you won’t have enough keepers, which means the shoot has failed.
From that floor the count only climbs, and each complication adds about half again on top. To have shots to spare, you shoot one and a half times the minimum. A dark scene adds backup frames against missed focus and motion blur: another ×1.5. A group shot needs everyone’s eyes and expressions to line up at once, so you shoot burst after burst until it all comes together, for ×1.5 more. Fast movement (running, jumping, fire shows, hair blowing in the wind) adds as much again.
The multipliers compound, and on a tough, fast-moving shoot the count runs far past the usual hundred or two. To deliver thirty good photos from an evening of reportage, where it’s dark, crowded, and everything is moving, a photographer shoots 30 × 7 × 1.5 × 1.5 × 1.5 × 1.5, or around 1,000 frames. That’s where the proverbial “thousand frames” comes from: it’s the volume the photographer starts with, not what you should end up with.
A photographer’s level shows in how much reaches the client
Photographers of different levels barely differ in how much they shoot: everyone takes those same 100–200 frames an hour. The difference is in how many reach you, and in what state. A beginner hands over nearly everything as shot, a hundred or two frames, unculled and unedited, which is why it’s ready in a day or two: there is essentially nothing to sort through. A solid mid-level photographer selects and delivers 40–70 photos an hour with basic color correction. A pro culls harder and delivers 30–40, but each one is developed from RAW by hand. The higher the level, the smaller the number — and the more work behind each photo. The rate and turnaround ranges for each level are on the prices page.
A single shot takes about a minute
The number has a ceiling too, and it’s a firmer one than it seems. To get a shot that genuinely differs from the one before it, pressing the shutter again isn’t enough. You have to change the angle: move closer or step back, crouch or stand, walk around the scene. Then you change the subject’s pose and try it out with a test shot or two, set the camera for the light, position the light source and fine-tune it, and work the pose until it’s at its most flattering. Only then do you shoot a short burst of backup frames: for focus, against blur, for the right instant of an incoming wave or of hair in the wind, for the moment between blinks. All of that rarely takes less than a minute.
Hence the hard ceiling: an hour yields around sixty genuinely different shots at most, and the rest of those hundred or two frames are backup duplicates of scenes already shot. So a promise of “hundreds of different shots an hour” comes down to one of two things, and for photography both are failures: either shooting in nonstop bursts, with no pause and no choosing, or stills pulled from a video clip. If what you’re after is a continuous stream of moments captured whole, that’s a fair thing to want, but video exists for that. It’s a separate format with its own gear and workflow, and it shouldn’t be confused with an order for “lots of photos.”
Selection is half the craft
Selection is strict because of how the craft itself works. Any creative work rests on two pillars: first the artist builds up variety (those same angles, poses, and moments that all the extra shooting is for), and then weeds out everything that fell short. The second pillar carries no less weight than the first, which is why a strong photographer delivers fewer photos than a beginner: only what got through his own filter reaches you. The ability to cut your own work comes with experience. A beginner who hands over everything isn’t being generous; he just hasn’t learned yet to tell strong from passable, and it shows at once in how uneven the quality is within a single series.
A simple example shows what selection costs in time. Say an hour of shooting produced a hundred and fifty frames, fifty at each of three locations. To pick the strongest of fifty, you have to compare them in pairs, each against every other. That’s on the order of 50 × 50 / 2, about 1,250 pairs per location. Even at a second per pair that’s over twenty minutes, and for three locations just over an hour. That makes at least an hour of selection for an hour of shooting, before any editing at all. And the work hardly depends on how many photos are left at the end: everything has to be compared with everything else all the same, and the pro only sets the cutoff higher. So “I’ll give you everything” saves the photographer exactly that hour: the shots were never compared with one another.
Selection also has a dimension beyond craft. In earlier eras the unit of an artist’s statement was the single work: a painting, one photograph. In the postmodern era it becomes the series, and authorship shifts from taking the picture to selecting and sequencing. The canonical example is Robert Frank’s “The Americans,” eighty-three photographs that add up to one continuous statement. So for a photographer, selection and the series are one and the same job: choosing what to keep, and what to set it beside, is what makes him an author. A mature master’s style shows not in one striking shot but in the assembled series, where his hand is visible.
How many photos you actually use
It helps to look at the same number from your own side as well. How many photos from a trip do you actually end up using? A few go into your feed, one or two get printed or framed at home, and a small handful stay around to look through now and then. Even a large family archive really lives on a dozen favorite pictures that people return to for years. A folder of two hundred adds nothing to that dozen. It only hides them among near-identical duplicates, and then the favorites have to be dug out. The photographer’s strict selection does that work for you in advance, and does it better: he has both the trained eye to tell a truly strong shot from a merely lucky one and the resolve to throw out the one that almost worked.
When a big number is a warning sign
Since thirty delivered photos have hundreds of shots behind them, the phrase “I’ll give you all the shots” changes its meaning. What’s been shot is duplicates, test shots, and misses, and going through them to keep the ones with life in them is half the work. “All edited,” from a serious photographer, means “everything I selected,” and that’s the smaller part of what was shot. But “all the originals,” “unlimited,” and “a thousand frames” say exactly the opposite: no selection was done, and sorting through the pile falls to you — at home by then, working on your own photos without his eye.
A big number is also easy to sell. A figure is simple to compare, while strict selection doesn’t show in the shop window, which is why tourist packages so often tempt you with “100 photos free” or “all shots included.” There’s less in it than the promise suggests: a big folder doesn’t make the strong photos stand out. It drowns them: ten excellent ones get lost among two hundred passable ones, and the overall impression sinks to the folder’s average.
When one photographer is not enough
A wedding or a large event brings all these multipliers together at once (reportage with no second takes, a dimly lit hall, big groups, dancing), and there the count runs to thousands shot and hundreds delivered. Comparing a wedding folder of eight hundred with thirty from an hour-long couples shoot is pointless, because the amount of work behind them is different. But it isn’t only the multipliers: at a large event there are so many places and moments to cover that one person physically can’t be everywhere.
The fix is simple: you add people, in a certain order. The easiest step is to bring in a videographer alongside the photographer and tell both in advance, so that they coordinate and stay out of each other’s shots. If that still isn’t enough, you add a second photographer. Then it’s important to settle right away who is the lead and who is the second, and which comes first when the two clash, photo or video; otherwise they’ll be fighting over position and light. That’s how big weddings are covered: the lead photographer shoots the couple, the second shooter the guests; the lead covers the stage with the DJ and the dancers, the second the room and the crowd’s reactions. It’s safer to plan for a second pair of hands in advance than to end up with half the moments missed.
How to read the number in an offer
Ask what’s behind the figure. Does “fifty photos” mean fifty final edited images, or fifty selected originals with no editing? In price and in labor those are completely different things, and you should find out which before you pay.
“From 30” is a minimum. It says only that there won’t be fewer; there may be no upper limit at all. If a predictable count matters to you, ask for the expected range for your kind of shoot.
Check the number against the editing and the turnaround. Thirty photos with real retouching means hours at the monitor; three hundred at the same quality means weeks, which the price of an hour-long shoot simply doesn’t cover. A big number and thorough editing of every photo almost never go together at an ordinary price, so while you’re at it, ask about the type of editing, the number of revision rounds, and the turnaround time. A full breakdown of what’s in a package is in the price guide.
Ask why that many. Not just “how many photos will you deliver” but “why that number”: the way the photographer answers shows whether he counts selection as part of his job.