This is a really common question that we get from prospective clients, and from our wedding vendor colleagues (thank you Pam Fleming with Matters of Gathering for bringing it to our attention recently).

There is a trend recently for couples to have ‘content creators’. Content creators are people that bring a smartphone and capture behind the scenes photos and videos, intended for short term use on social media.  They do not do a lot (or any) editing, culling, or retouching, as far as I know.  And they are likely not shots you’d want to use as your main wedding memories.  But what they do do is deliver them almost instantly!  And that’s a super fun thing to get so soon after your wedding!!

So the question is, why can’t your main photographer deliver their work more quickly?

A content creator’s job is different from your main photographer’s or videographer’s.  The photographer provides high quality images you will want to display on the wall, in a book, or in a beautiful slideshow, beautifully capturing in high resolution and properly lit all the moments, details, people, and places of your wedding day, in a way that you’d want to look back on 40 years from now.  That means

  • Taking a lot more shots on the day of to ensure that the important ones are really great;
  • Using a professional camera with a great sensor, lenses, and resolution so that the quality is there when you want to print them or put them in an album; and
  • Knowing where to be and when to not miss a thing.

All those shots come with a lot of work, both sorting through and selecting the shots you will receive, as well as working them up in post-production.  In our post on why photography costs what it does, you can see that for EVERY HOUR shot with two photographers, depending on the photographer it could be between 3 and 5 hours of culling and post-production. For an 8-hour day of photography, that’s between 24 and 40 hours of work.

Layer on top of that all the other tasks that a small business owner needs to do (see the same blog post), and the many other weddings that they are working on from that year, and you are starting to get a picture of why it takes some time to receive your final pictures.

When you are shopping for a photographer, consider this when looking at the price.  A ‘low-cost’ photographer might be able to book a lot more weddings.  Putting together all the tasks that our other post refers to, the photographer will simply no longer have the time in their lives to handle the workload they have given themselves. And they probably don’t have the staff or infrastructure to handle all the additional work in a timely way – because if they did, they would have to charge more.

And then the risk to you is that you could wait upwards of a year to see any of your photos, as they catch up with their backlog – or they give you unfinished work. I have heard horror stories of people never even getting their photos at all!

Studio Lumen’s Turnaround Time Guarantee

We choose to run our business in a sustainable way, both from a quality perspective as from a ‘sanity’ perspective. Delivering images faster than we can sanely handle is not good for our team, our client’s images, or our reputation. Delivering sub-par work for the sake of getting it out on time is also not good for those things.

So while our turnaround times are not the fastest, neither are they the slowest. But what we actually do is GUARANTEE that you will have all your final images from 6-10 weeks after your wedding. The range depends on the coverage you need, and whether it is both photo and video. We are contractually in trouble if we are late!

We also try to get you a gallery of between 40 and 100 highlight shots, within 2-3 weeks of your wedding.  This timeline isn’t guaranteed, but we have been able to do so over the last couple of years.