A Look Behind the Scenes
The session may be over, but my work isn’t! When I finish photographing your family session, lifestyle newborn session, engagement session, or wedding, the behind-the-scenes work begins!
When I get home, I immediately back up your photos to a hard drive. The safety of your photos is incredibly important to me, so making sure they are backed up in at least two locations is always where I start. Once your photos are safely backed up, they get imported into my editing software, Lightroom…this is where the magic happens.
So, what happens next? Well, friend, I spend hours culling through the photos we captured together. Depending on the type of session, I could have anywhere from 1,500 to 6,000 photos to sort through. I am an overshooter, I’ll admit that! But I prefer to have more photos to choose from, and usually I’m having so much fun that I don’t even notice how many photos I’m taking.
After I have meticulously culled through every photo and selected the ones I feel are the best, I begin editing them. This is the part of the process that really brings the photos to life. A RAW photo (the unedited image) doesn’t always fully reflect what we saw with our own eyes. Editing also gives me the opportunity to bring my own artistic eye into the process. I personally love to keep things close to what our eyes naturally see, but make them romantic, whimsical, lively, and soft. Ugh, it’s what I consider dreamy, without making the images feel overly edited or changing what the moment actually looked and felt like. The professional photo editing process can be quite tedious. While adjusting things like warmth, white balance, and contrast is mostly straightforward, I also spend hours removing distractions like trash cans, people in the background, leftover temporary tattoos on your child’s hand, or crazy flyaway hairs. Anything that distracts from the story is edited out. I also spend time cropping and straightening your photos to make each image more pleasing to the eye.
Once the editing is complete, I review the entire gallery to make sure everything looks cohesive. Lighting can change throughout a session, especially if we move to different locations, so I make sure the photos from each situation look natural and consistent together. When I am completely satisfied with your photos, I upload them to an online gallery that you can access anytime. From there, you can download your photos to your phone or computer, purchase prints, and choose your favorites for a custom heirloom album.
Taking your photos is only the beginning. The hours I spend carefully selecting, editing, and preparing your gallery are all part of preserving your memories with the care they deserve, and I can’t wait for you to relive them when your gallery arrives.
