Can you ask a photographer for unedited photos?
Should I ask my photographer for RAW photos?
Occasionally, clients ask if I can send them all of the unedited photos from their shoot. It’s a fair request. They paid for my services as a photographer and want to keep all the moments I captured on their day. But this isn’t something anybody really wants. I promise I’ll get back to this point soon. But let me give you some context first...
WHY I WON’T SHARE WHOLE UNEDITED SHOOTS
We’ve all created something. Maybe you write, perhaps you’re a musician, actor, designer or artist. Whatever your medium, you’ll be familiar with the process of developing work from the first draft to the end product.
Music is a good example - We all love music, right? Imagine listening to a song that's important to you. Then afterwards, thinking, “I’d like to hear how that sounded before it had been edited, mixed and mastered. With all the missed takes and bad notes. Without professional post-processing like compression and EQ”. You probably wouldn’t enjoy the song at all. And because you need to hear all the bad takes, it’d feel like it was spoiled and never-ending! The artist’s vision for the song you love is the one you know. All the decisions made along the way, all the bad takes, and the raw audio are just the process to get there.
My analogy is a lot like my photography coverage. I’m trying to record my best version of your day. That means capturing a lot of attempts in a raw form to work on later.
Knowing my chances of getting the exact photograph I want are slim, I can quickly rack up thousands of frames in pursuit of great photographs. That makes my camera roll kind of boring. Each shot is repeated over and over. And honestly, a bunch of them aren’t good photos! But I must do that to guarantee I can deliver great photographs to my client. An important part of my job is wading through thousands of photos to find the gems.
Using my experience, I judge and edit my shots based on whether they’ll still look good in ten or twenty years. If the picture isn’t up to my standard, I don’t use it. Once I decide what shots to use, I finish the process in software called Lightroom (it’s similar to Photoshop), the same way the song you love is mixed and mastered to sound finished and polished. This is my artistic vision.
At the risk of breaking my promise, I’m going to get back to my point now. That’s the reason nobody wants a whole or unedited shoot; it doesn’t represent my work. And I’m hired because of my work.
Sure, there are logistical reasons nobody wants over one hundred gigabytes of data you can only view with specialist software. But more importantly, the reason people hire a professional photographer isn’t to get the most photos - it’s to get the best photographs consistently processed in your photographer’s signature style.