How long does it take to process the images?
When people ask me after a wedding how long it takes me to deliver the finished material, I usually say 4 weeks, but towards the end of the season it can be even 6-7 weeks. This is a relatively safe deadline to produce the quality of images I expect, but it is difficult to calculate with certainty and unexpected situations that can arise. Even if I know in advance piece by piece how many weddings I will have in a year, a wedding can have 50 people or 200, one of the basic bundles with 4 hours standby or an exclusive with 12 hours, the amount of images can be 600 or 2500, the processing time can be several times longer.
Although the number of weddings in the calendar gives you some indication, the expected amount of photo shoots is completely random, as I never know in advance how many people will contact me, when and with what theme. If there are a lot of weddings, especially double shoots, when there is a wedding on Friday and Saturday, maybe a creative shoot the next day or the day before, or a family photo or gastro-photo on the day in between, it can mean an average of up to 4-5000 images to process that week. In a strong month that's 20,000. Of course, some people just copy the whole thing onto a CD or pen drive in raw, as it came out of the machine, and that's it. That's one solution, but I don't think it needs much explanation of the difference in quality between the two.
The quality of the raw material also has a big impact on the time it takes to get the job done. If there are a lot of blemishes on the face or other parts of the body that need to be repaired, a lot of distractions in the background that could not be eliminated during the shoot, mixed lighting or insufficient lighting, it takes longer to adjust and retouch. Having a creative session on a separate day also tends to result in more shots, as we are not so time-constrained, and if there are more shots, there is more raw material to process.
Why is image processing so time-consuming?
I usually take at least 1500 shots at an average wedding lasting a whole day. This could be processed in 4 days or even 4 months or more. Within that time frame, you have to find a point where I think it's high quality but also economical. As the saying goes "we work fast, high quality and cheap but you can only choose two", high quality work takes time.
In fact, a coarser selection of images would speed up the work, but I prefer to have more material to choose from. We are all different, with different tastes, a professional photographer, however experienced is not able to always know what and who is really important. There may be shots that are not technically perfect nor breathtaking, only just average, but that the couple likes them and later they for sure will choose them a part of the family album. The aim is to make everyone, but especially the client, as happy as possible with the final result, which in some cases may even override the "best practice" theories and rules of photography that have been learned.