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Post Wedding Photography Workflow

So, we're gonna start in workflow. In previous lessons, you guys saw how I prepared my clients for a successful wedding day. Later, you saw how I shot the wedding. So, this is bringing us to where we are today, and where we are today is workflow. I mentioned to you guys before the cameras came on that workflow always makes me a little like, whomp, whomp, workflow. It is not the glamorous part of our job. It's probably not my favorite part of the job. But it's part of the job that I think can hinge on really what creates a successful photographer. So, when I started my business, and for the first year or two, I became so overwhelmed with workflow, because it felt like I was creating a new system every time I got a wedding. And I would say, oh, I should try this, and oh, I should try this, and oh, I should try this. And I never actually adhered to any sort of system. And then once I built a system, I said, I'm gonna dedicate myself to trying this again and again, and then I will make mod...

ifications to this system as needed instead of trying to recreate it with every single client. So, before I'm gonna move on, I wanna start with how I cull the images and the things that I'm looking for as I cull them is after I cull them, how I back them up. Then I'm gonna talk about how I send them off for processing, and all of this happens, the downloading of the images, the culling of the images, the backing up of the images, and sending 'em off to processing takes a few hours for me. Talk about what that looks like. So theoretically, I could be done with 95% of the wedding the Monday after the wedding. So we're gonna talk about what that looks like. Wait for it, wait for it. Wow. (Jasmine laughs) Am I selling you yet? It's like QVC. But wait, there's more. Now, I became a photographer to be a photographer. What I didn't know when I became a photographer, that workflow and building a process was such a big part of it. Now, I wanted to create a business for myself that lent itself to freedom of shooting and of life. So, when I talk about this workflow and everyone's so impressed with the workflow, you have to understand that it comes at a different cost. The cost that I take are lifestyle and freedom and photography. Now, there are others who want control, perfectionism, and a distinct ability to edit all of the photos. When you say yes to something, you say no to something else. I am saying no to bulk processing. I'm gonna show you why. Let's get into that. So, we're gonna get into an overview of what workflow looks like. Because I like linear presentations, I wanna walk you through all of my steps, and then you're gonna see the components of those steps. So, first and foremost what I wanna do is I wanna express appreciation. This was the first step of workflow in my engagement session workflow, which is what you saw in a previous lesson. Then I'm gonna talk about how I culled the wedding, culling, raking, selecting your favorites. That's just the word that I use, is cull. Now, I talk about how I'm gonna make quick decisions. You're going to see how I do this. Now, what I encourage you to do, which is what I'm going to do, is to view the images as an editor, not as photographer. So you have to wear a different hat. On the wedding day you shoot the images like a photographer. When you cull, you're viewing them as an editor. Now, the thing that you want to do as you're culling your images is you want to make it as easy as possible for your clients not to get overwhelmed. In light of that, there will be photos that don't make the final edit because you have to think for them and not for yourself. Then we're gonna get into the editing process. We're gonna talk about why I outsource my post-production and what that looks like. We're gonna get into the nitty gritty of it, too. Then we're gonna move into releasing the gallery, what I do to explain and educate my clients in regards to downloading, sharing, and printing instructions, and then I'm gonna talk to you about how I share with the creative team, and we're gonna talk a little bit about how that transpired from the Knot Dream wedding. And lastly, I'm going to talk about surprising the client. We're gonna get to that in a second. Okay, now onto this slide. The first component of my workflow is expressing appreciation, and I express appreciation in three ways. I do it first and foremost by email. I send a thank you email the day after the wedding, and this is a template email. You guys will hear me say template email at least 15 times today, because they are truly the bulk of my workflow. Then I express appreciation by snowing a sneak peek from the wedding. I tell the clients that it'll be about a week before they see a sneak peek from their wedding, and then they see it the next day. In previous lessons, I talked about building a brand, and the first step of building a brand, one of the first components, would be to manage, to exceed expectations. So how do you exceed expectations? You exceed expectations by managing expectations. So I tell clients that they will see a sneak peek in one week, and then they get to see it the next day. I'm gonna talk about how that transpired for the Knot wedding. Now, lastly, I include a thank you note. Now, I write a hand-written thank you note to my clients expressing my appreciation. The note is supposed to be a part that bolsters their experience with me, because I can say thank you, and I can email thank you, but there's something very unique about receiving something tactile. That might not be for your brand, but it's definitely a reflection of mine, and I adhere to that. Now, I want their emotional connection with me to come in different forms: in email, when I say it verbally, and also something that they can touch. Now, I'm going to show you two of the three ways that I expressed appreciation after the Knot Dream wedding. I want you to see how that unfolds for us. Now, I'm gonna start with the email, and then I'm going to get into how the sneak peek fared. Now, I won't be able to show you the hand-written note, but trust it will be done; it has been done. So we're gonna move onto our next slide, cool. Now, this is the email that I sent my clients the day after the wedding. Hello, my favey faves. Thank you so much for such a spectacular day. Your wedding was one for the record books. How could so much awesome be condensed into one day? I appreciated being able to document your love and first day as husband and wife. I'm sure you're tired of getting emails from me, but you ain't done with me quite yet, wink face. Just wanted to follow up and let you know I've been working on your gallery and can't wait for you to see the photos. So many good moments, eek. On that note, that sounds funny. I should be like, eek! Okay, on that note, please let me know if/when Samantha's mom might be up for family/wedding photos. Lemme back up for a second. I didn't get into this. Unfortunately, Samantha's mom, about three days before the wedding, was admitted to the hospital, and she was in such a state that she would not have been able to travel for the wedding. Now, understandably, Samantha was devastated, and she had called me crying, and she had said that she was looking for a way to incorporate her mom in the day without it seeming like a memorial. So we talked about a few ideas, but JD and I took a trip to San Diego, and it was like a small vacation before we came back up and things got crazy with CreativeLive. When I got her call, I said, let me leave San Diego. I'll go to the hospital, and I'll shoot your mom, you, and Taylor, and we'll get that photo printed, and we'll put it at the wedding. And she was just crying, and she had said, thank you so much, I appreciate it. She was like, what I want to do is I want to get photos of me and my mom in my wedding dress. Can you do it after the wedding? I said, absolutely, that is my number-one priority. So, I wanted to follow-up with them after. On that note, please let me know if/when Sam's mom might be up for family/wedding photos. I'm here for anything and everything. I'm leaving on Wednesday to film again for CreativeLive but return on Saturday. This is happening literally in realtime here. Let me know what works for you, and we can take things from there. No rush, but I want to ensure you know I'm here for it all. Much love, J Star. This is Taylor's response. Hi, Jasmine. First off, what an amazing day Thursday. It was honestly the best day of my life, and it couldn't have gone better, minus all the interviews, haha, in my wildest dreams. (audience laughs) Thank you for being you and just being awesome that whole day. You were so wonderful to work with and the most efficient photographer I have sever seen. You allowed us to get more time with our guests and not waste time during photos, and that means the world to us. JD is one of the coolest and nicest guys we met through the entire journey, so please thank him for us both for being so awesome as well. We cannot wait to see all the photos from the big day. To no surprise, the sneak peeks were absolutely stunning. Thank you for your work. Thank you for working so hard on all of those. We feel like the luckiest couple in the world to have had you as our wedding photographer. On another note, Sam's mom isn't doing very well at the moment. We actually had to cut our weekend short and drive back early Saturday morning to be with her as she fell into an unforeseen medical state. She's certainly a fighter, as we know, as we all know, and is a little better. But as you know, the disease is an uphill battle from the start, so all we can do now is keep her in our thoughts and prayers and be there for her to continue to fight. I wanted to let you know this because I know Sam feels pretty bad about not being present or active on social media since the wedding but knows that everyone understands. It's been a rollercoaster of emotions for us all, and especially for Sam. So for now, she's avoiding a lot of the wedding stuff, social media, et cetera, so she can focus on her mom. Also, the photo session with her mom will have to be put on hold now, unfortunately. Thank you so much for continuing to be you and trying to make this happen for us. It means a lot to us both. We look forward to seeing the pictures when you finish them, but please don't rush them for us. Thanks, Taylor. It's hard. Like, it's really, really hard. So what we deal on a wedding day is high emotions and very low emotions. But this wedding isn't one standalone. But if I hadn't sent an email to say thank you, I wonder if I would have known. The power we possess to simply, I will say that in life's darkest moments, the smallest, kindest gesture means the world. Do I think that my email was profound, no. But it did it let him know that I care for him beyond it being the Knot Dream wedding? Yeah, I do. Now, he had mentioned the sneak peek. So let's talk about how the sneak peek fared for us. Now, I usually share three photos in a sneak peek, but things and people were so active on social media after the wedding that I felt like my three photos were going to get swallowed whole. So I decided to share eight photos, because so many photos had been pushed out on social media that I wanted to make sure that I at least tapped a few vendors to make sure and give a global, a global perspective. Now, this is the sneak peek that I shared, and the sneak peek was a little bit more about my experience, and again, maybe this heralds back to maybe a future lesson when I had said I'm a natural apologizer. The next morning, this is prior to me reading anything. This is me just go, go, go. This is me on a deadline for the Knot. This is me sharing a few photos, and I just open. Exhausted can't even begin to describe how I feel, but neither can thankful, humbled, or appreciative. I was just honest with what this looked like. I shared eight photos, and I wanted to bring people on the journey with me, instead of masking it for anything that it wasn't. I was feeling a mix of emotions, and instead of being like, what a perfect day for amazing people, I would prefer to say, listen, I went the full gamut of emotions on this day. But what I think happened transpired very well. So here's the results. This is the same portion, just the lower portion of it. 64,000 people had seen this post just a few hours later. There were 18 shares and 2100 likes and 144 comments. That is powerful, for a sneak peek. Now, is this wedding an anomaly? Maybe, maybe not. This is people connecting with photos, and this is the power that we possess as photographers. Now, sneak peeks take a lot of time, because you're doing them the day after the wedding when you're exhausted and when you have a wedding coma, and the only thing you want is Sunday brunch. Like, right? Like, you're tired. But, this is a marketing opportunity, and this is a marketing opportunity that I know we are all capable of. I was reading in the Facebook group about how somebody, and like, here's the thing. I might not be able to comment in it, but I do read a lot of what's going on. And somebody had said, well, it must be nice that Jasmine's page can get, and I don't think it was snarky. It was just like, it must be nice that Jasmine's page can get that much traction, but that works for her. And I would say, no, lemme flip the script. I've worked hard for the social media platform to grow and be what it is. But percentage-wise, everybody is capable of the same type of success. If you have 800 people on your Facebook page and you're putting out photos and you're tagging the other vendors and then they're sharing them, you might not have 64,000 people reach, but you can have more than what your average is. So that, and people say like, it's growth. Nobody ever has a Facebook page that goes from a hundred people to a hundred thousand people. It is always micro-growth, and that's what I think sneak peeks do. They kind of hit the wedding first shortly after, and then a little bit after, you hit the wedding again, and then shortly after, you hit the wedding again. You grow it by actually putting out fresh content that's personable and in realtime. That's a sneak peek. So now what I wanna do is get into culling the wedding. (audience laughs) Because do we all not feel the way that this little girl feels about her hair getting done? Maybe I'm the only person who gets frustrated. No, I have to say, I just looked up at JD, and I'd be remiss to not say that I didn't take this photo; JD did. Dang it! (audience laughs) (audience applauds) Yeah, you guys, I actually take a lot of credit for his photos; I'm not lying. He's the good one. It's your brand. It's my brand, that's right. You're my second photographer. No, no, no, no. He was popping in every so often, and he just wanted a couple photos, because he knew, now, this goes back to what we'd spoken about in a previous lesson, which is when I was preoccupied with the Revlon shoot, I was looking up, I was looking up. If I saw that there was another photographer in the room from my business, from my brand, I knew that the candids were being handled in a different way, and this is what transpired in one of 'em. I have to trust and let go, and I think he did a great job. Now, up until this point, we've spoken about first expressing appreciation and then the subcomponents under expressing appreciation. Now as we get into the logistics, please note that there are microphones. If I'm overstepping things and moving too fast, please interject as we go along. So, what we're gonna get into right now is an unculled section from the wedding day. I'm gonna show you the photos straight out of my camera. What people are seeing during the broadcast, in previous lessons, when you saw me shoot the wedding, the photos that you were seeing were straight out of the camera. Was that disconcerting? Aw, hell yes. Do I wanna show you my untouched photos? No, never in a million years. But again, the greater good. This is gonna show what I did in-camera and then what we can do, considering that awful light, considering that crazy, gnarly light and those crazy green casts. Like, right? Thank you, thank you. Now, I'm gonna show you how quickly I move through a selection. I'm gonna talk to you about what that looks like. Now, because culling a section is not exciting, I'm gonna show you a brief section of what that looks like, and then we can get into questions after that. Now, my backup system, we did a Periscope in Sonoma, and I had my computer, and then I had my hard drive sitting on top of my computer. So, when we travel, and even when we don't travel, the backup system for our raw images, all of the raw images, are on the cards. We do not reformat cards until we know everything has been backed up. So we have them on the cards. I back them up to a computer. Since I was on the road I backed up the images to my laptop. If I was at home, they'd be backed up to my desktop computer. And then I put all of the images on my hard drive. So, my raw images have three forms of backup: cards, computer, hard drive. I feel confident and safe that that's gonna be the best mode and mechanism for me. Now, once I have all of the images backed up, then I will start the culling process. And I'm gonna get into my iView on my computer right about now. Cool, great. So, I use iView Media Pro. Now, this is similar to Photo Mechanic. This is different from Lightroom in that Lightroom, you can do so much, and in things like Photo Mechanic and things like iView, you only view your images, and you only select your faves. Like, that's just what it does; it's one thing. And I feel like it's really important for me just to have a really streamlined process of what this looks like. So I'm gonna walk you through the bride getting into her dress and the things that I was looking for. So, this was the first frame, I'll highlight it. This was the first frame that came out of camera, and I actually ended up liking it because it's her sister looking down at the dress, as opposed to this one where her mouth is open and it doesn't look like she's admiring the beauty of it. Her mouth is open here. I kept this one 'cause she was smiling at the bride. Now, as the bride is gonna get into it, I kept this photo because her friend's looking at it. She's blinking here. Her mouth is funny, and she's holding her robe awkwardly. Then this right here is the one that I kept. You will see the ones that I keep. So these are blanks, and you'll see that they're indicated by greens. And how I get the green is the numbers on top. One through nine all have different numbers, and in my mind, green means go. So I press number two. And I only press my keepers because it makes you feel better. If I went through and I threw away all my negatives, like bad, bad, bad, bad, let's flip the script and say, great, great, great, I mean, or good. We could say good. Let's cruise on down. Now here, her face looks funny, and they might have seen something on the dress, as in here. Not keeping it, not keeping that. Her mouth is funny here. She looks a little flat in the eyes here. She looks happy, eyes are open, she's looking there. Now, this is the bride getting into the dress. I do not shoot the bride unless otherwise requested. So I'm shooting things that go around in the room. This is the moment of her slipping into the dress, and she's uncovered, so I'm shooting the flower girl from behind. I did not keep that photo because her arms are up, her face is looking funny, and her fingers are weird. Here, I never put photos where the bride is covering her bosom. It's just never a good look for anyone. But here, she'd slipped her hands down her wait. That's the one that I kept. I don't have brides really looking at me during the prep, because I feel like it reveals an insincere moment. Her hands were tucked behind her waist, which I did not like. Her hands are to the side, but it just seems like a there photo. Remember, I'm keeping it really tight. This photo is fine, but if you look up closely, her eyes are, she's blinking, and in this photo, she's there. I liked, that was the one that I kept. Here, her hips are too thrusted forward, and I don't feel like it was a good look for her. There, her hand is up in the air. Her left hand is up in the air. Here her hand is resting, which is the one that I kept. There, she's laughing directly at her flower girl. Now look at the difference between photo one. Bridesmaid on the left is in a half-squat. I prefer that photo better, but here, because she's in like a three-fourths squat, which looks funny 'cause she's hinging at the waist. I kept both of 'em, but the one that I used on social media was that option. I kept this photo because it's just like a storytelling of the flower girl, and then I was able to shoot a few other reaction photos from the bridesmaids, but they all looked funny-faced, so I didn't keep them. Here, we have the sister, and Samantha's hands are too, they look a little too fashion-y, so she's cocked forward. Her sister has this weird hand here. Samantha's face is weird. Her sister's hand is looking like aye aye, captain. Her eyes are closed here. This just looks like a just there photo. Nothing's wrong with it, but nothing that I would keep. Her face is a little funny here. Now she's smiling. Her hands are pretty. That's the one that I was gonna keep. Now, as you guys are watching the video, I'm talking you through the narrative, that Samantha's arm got caught, her right arm. So here, I'm not gonna keep it, 'cause it's a funny photo, and her abdomen looks like she's leaning forward, which isn't a good look. Here, her mouth is open; the arm is cocked. Arm is cocked, arm is cocked. And then I stop shooting, 'cause I said, I'm gonna wait for the arm. I knew that the minute she got into the other, other shoe, her body would become like this, and her arm would drop down. And that's exactly what's happening here. I did not keep this photo, but there we go. Her arm is now straight. I didn't keep this photo because I didn't like what was going on until Samantha had looked over at her sister, and that's the one that I kept. And these are all fine, but her bridesmaid here is blinking. Here, I don't, there's this, her little hair that's driving me crazy along her dress. These are the things that I notice that I should have in the room, I should have said, hey, can you just clear your hair, and she would have done that easily. I just was very caught up. So here, the bridesmaid told her she has lipstick. Then she's cleaning the lipstick. None of those get kept. Her wrist is cocked in such a way, not keeping. Now, I didn't keep any of these because her foot is up. I don't like that look, so I said, Sam, can you put your foot down? That was one that I kept. We have jewelry, and that's bride. That is how quickly I would go through my cull. Now, I read some really great tips recently about if you're kind of stuck and you don't know how to move quickly, one thing that you can do is cull backwards. Culling backwards. Because culling takes so long, is that ending with the reception photos, which is traditionally our least favorite part of the day, those photos are just rather hard to get through, start with those when you have the most energy in the beginning, and then you save like, those prep photos that we all like, the detail photos, that's at the end, and it'll kind of give you like a little bit of an oomph. And also starting, when you cull backwards, is that we, at least I do. I can't say we. I have a tendency to shoot stronger at the end. I'm figuring out what's not working at the beginning so that if we're moving backwards, the stronger photos will likely be at the end. So you can feel more confident choosing the stronger ones, and going from strength, strengthness, to weakness. A couple tips to kind of help you move forward with that. So, I'm gonna talk a little bit about what happens, walk you through iView Media Pro. Now, once I have all of the images that I want to keep from my raw images, what I'm going to do is I'm going to upload them to Photographer's Edit. Now, I have decided, we have a question. Yeah. Can you put the mic here? Sorry. Just for InView, does it. iView. I mean iView. Yes, yes. Does it save as a raw file, or does it save as a .jpeg? How do you mean? Like, from iView when you're culling them, and you're putting green, do you save the greens as a raw? Do you know what I'm saying? To send to Photographer's Edit. Lemme just talk it through a little bit more, and then you can reframe the question, just in case I'm not answering it. Okay. So the catalog is like a skeleton. It's a shell. It's not anything. The images, like, versus Lightroom, that the images are in Lightroom, this is just a shell. It's just like a t-shirt that you put over your body. So I'm making these selections, right? And so if I had uploaded .jpegs to the iView catalog, it would be saved as .jpegs. If I had uploaded raw images into it, it would be saved. You're doing no changes in this. It's just a viewing mechanism. Perfect, thank you. Great, that was a good question. So now that I have the images selected, I have made the personal and professional decision to outsource my post-processing. And I know that this is kind of like a weird situation for a lot of photographers, because people like to maintain that control, but due to the amount of how much JD and I work, how much we travel, and how much I really want to value the time that I have with my friends and with my family, that isn't my priority list. My priority list, I have defined success as being able to travel the world with my husband. I have defined success as being, I'm not lying, as being able to work from my pajamas. That is, I think that you are a flipping success if you're working in your pajamas, my opinion. You might be like, you are a failure if you're working from pajamas. I think you're a success. I think you are a success when you get to create your own work schedule. I think I'm a success if I have the time to go out to lunch with my mom when I darn well want to. Now, what I want you to do is I want you to define your version of success. Your version will look nothing like my version. But once you've defined your version of success, then you know when you're there. Because so often, you look at other photographers, and you're like, ugh, they're shooting 50 weddings, they're shooting 30 weddings, and I only have seven. What's your number? If you shooting five this, five weddings this year with your kids and a full-time job and you hit five, you're a success. Nobody's version of success is the same. So first, define your version of success. So once I have defined my version of success, and on my level of success, on my version of success, it has nothing to do with being a perfect image processor. What is my level of success? Traveling, being with my friends and family, working from my PJ's. If I am doing things that put my farther away from my version of success, I shouldn't be doing them, which is why it's so important that you should be defining what success looks like for you. So, for me, in order for me to be successful, I need to give myself time. How do I give myself time? I found a great digital lab. Now, I am not saying that they are the best. I have just worked with them for eight years, and they have yet to let me down. Leave me down, let me down? Okay, now, I work with Photographer's Edit because, for four main reasons. They are dependable. I get my images fully edited from a wedding five business days after the wedding. It is very common for me to send the entire wedding gallery to my clients while they're on their honeymoon. That looks great on my brand. They are fast. So, dependable and fast. Their customer service is amazing. I can email them. Now, people say, Jasmine, what if they don't edit the photos the way? I've tried Photographer's Edit, and it just didn't work for me. Well, okay. That's like, going and experiencing, riding a bike for the first time. The first time you rode a bike, it probably was not that great. But the more you did it, the more comfortable you became with it, and you found ways to modify. It has taken me, it took me, I don't know, five, six weddings, full weddings, that I would say, hey, guys, the green tone's not right. Hey, the contrast isn't there. Hey, can you lower those highlights? It was a constant conversation, and as my business and as my brand, as my style has changed, I've asked them to change with me. How much time I give into my post-processing company is the results that I get that are beneficial. Now, what I want to do is I want to talk about how Photographer's Edit edits with my favorite preset. So the reason why I'm happy with outsourcing my, my images is because I am able to upload my favorite presets to Photographer's Edit. Now, this is my preferences page. Now, we could have before and after samples so that you can add photos in which you say, this is how it came out, this is what I want it to look like, and here you have your Lightroom presets. You can have a color preset and a black and white. What they do is they apply your preset. So this is you, this is somebody doing your job for you. Now, will they make your photos look exactly like you? No, it's impossible. No one's in your head. Can they get them really close to what you like? Yes. That is what you're going to see in a second. Now, I wanna talk a little bit about the presets that I use. I have used for years and love Totally Rad Actions. If you go to totallyradactions.com, I use Replichrome. And there's Replichrome I and II. I have both. I still have a penchant for Replichrome I. I am a big fan of the Fuji 400H. I have made modifications. Now, I actually think that every photographer should get a preset that they like, buy a preset, but then make modifications so that it looks more like you, right? You don't wanna work so hard at creating your craft and being unique and original and then applying a preset that everybody else can use. Make a few modifications so that it looks a little bit more like your style. Now, let's move on. So, now that I have my presets uploaded to Photographer's Edit, now, this is a one-time upload for me. I uploaded them. I started with these new presets about two and a half years ago. Now, what I'll do is once I have all the raw images culled, I will upload the images, the raw images, to Photographer's Edit. I do it at night. I simply drop it in and go to bed. The next morning, all of my raw images are uploaded. I am completely done with that process from the wedding on Tuesday morning. There have been times during the slow season where I get all of my images back on Friday, not because I'm me, but because they deliver on what they say they're gonna deliver. Okay, so we're gonna move on next. Once the images are ready, so with Photographer's Edit, I pay for them to process my images, and then I pay for them to export my raws to .jpegs, why? I want time. So I will pay extra for them to export my images so I don't have to wait and do them at home. Once they have exported the .jpegs, they put them in their online gallery, and then I just download them. So, the following Monday, maybe that Friday, I will go, I download the images. They're all ready for me. I might go through, maybe reorder a few of them, even though they order them for me by one, time, and two, category. So they have five categories, prep, ceremony, so it'll just bulk it for, yeah. So good you can do that. Okay, you guys. Incredible, too. Right? That's the thing. We talk about, we don't have time for them, we don't have time for this. They, for free, they will categorize according to your timestamp, and then which is why it's important for you to sync your cameras with your second or third shooter. And then they categorize them, so they bulk all of them. And then I make a request, 'cause they bulk it into prep. And so there was one wedding that I got back, and all of the prep photos were together, which is awesome, but not so awesome, because JD was shooting guys and I was shooting girls, and so they got mixed up. So what I needed to do was make a note. I said, hey, guys, I just spent about a good 25 minutes reorganizing the photos. How about we get this right the next time? And I left a note, and I said, in all of my jobs, I say, please put prep photos in its own folder but have bride prep separate and groom prep. The minute I added that note, never again has it been an issue. So, again, working with the team so that they understand what you want. Now, what you're going to see are before and afters from Photographer's Edit. So you're going to see the image as I shot it out of camera, and then you're going to see the edit. Dun, dun, dun! Okay. Now, quickly, before we get there, I chose photos from five or six distinct parts of the day so that you could see how my singular action is applied and shown in different scenarios. So here we go. Let's start with bride prep. My straight out of the camera photo will always be on the left; the edited photo will be on the right. Now, what you see, I still stand by it. What they basically really focus on is listening skin tones. That's like, my, that's my jam, and I have told them, apply this preset and then really focus on what the skin tones should be. Now, as you can see, these were really dark. We were shooting against mahogany. These are darker areas. Now we're gonna move onto the bride by herself. What we did is, with this monitor, it's really highlighting the highlights. But her face was really, really brightly exposed, and then the back of her wasn't so much. And here, we've kind of blended it out a little bit, but not too much. I have maintained that I wanna shoot my pictures as I can, the best way I possibly can. Worst case scenario, worst case, is that I give my bride this photo; I stand by it, I stand by it. I am not delivering my images to an editor and say, can you work a miracle? We are the photographers. We must be in control and produce images that are 90% good, and then that 10% are the things that really fine-tune what it could possibly be from there. Let's go to a different part of the day, which is bridesmaids. Again, the thing that we're really focusing on the most is bringing up skin tones. That's what they're doing. Like, you see that the tonality has changed and there's brightness, but it's bringing up those skin tones. Now we're gonna go into the ceremony. Now, someone had asked in the Facebook group what I did to save this sky, and the answer was nothing. People ask what my metering mode is, and for about eight years, I didn't even know what my metering mode was. I was like, people are asking me. I'm like, I don't know. I'm like, I'm pretty sure it's spot metering, pretty sure. I don't use it. I use the back of my camera. And what I came to do, I was like, I'm gonna really find out the answer. So I went to my Canon 5D Mark III manual, and I was like, what is it set at? Come to find out, it's set at evaluative. Yeah, didn't know that. I was like, it's spot, it's spot. No, it's evaluative, but I never use my metering. I look at the back of my camera. Am I producing the kind of images that I want? Done. That is like, the most untechnical answer, and it will drive people batty, but it is what it is, and it's all I got. And 10 years later, I'm still okay with it. I do not use an ExpoDisc. I do not use any other tip or trick. This is straight out of the camera. There it is, boom, done. And what we're really focusing on is just bringing up the highlights. Again, very simple according to the things I want. Now here, we have the, (Jasmine sighs) bridal party picture. Now, what you'll see are basically color tonality changes. This was really, really, really green, and what they did is that kind of just ported in and made skin tones look like skin tones. Her bridesmaid love to tan. If I did not give her back a photo where they did not look tan, they would be like, what happened? I wanna make sure that their skin tones look truly like their skin tones. Now, get into the last frame, and this was at, let's see, four p.m. in the afternoon in Sonoma. You saw that, against popular belief, I do know how to save skies. I choose not to. You saw in the ceremony, I know how to shoot that way. But given this light, my only other option was to have the sun on my client's face directly. They would be Cheeto orange, they would be extra sweaty, they would be squinting even more, and they would just not be a good situation. I made the artistic decision to blow out my sky. I am okay with that. But guess what? I saved the detail on her dress. I saved the detail on her flowers. I saved her skin. Is there a hot spot? Yes, but what do I wanna do, travel with a 30-foot scrim? Never. I saved everything in Taylor. I have a highlight on his shoulder. I saved most of the leaves. I did my best. We're gonna talk about how we find natural reflectors. Now, why this photo was able to work was because this floor right here was illuminated, and this floor was almost like a terra cotta color, which is gonna be reflecting light back into her. This floral bouquet is what color? White. It reflected the hints of light back onto her face. That's why I was able to say confidently, listen, this is probably not the best photo in the best light I've ever shot. Would I prefer to shoot this at the golden hour on sunset, hmm, three hours later? Yes. I did not have that option; I stand by this one. So, what I'm gonna do now is I'm going to open up a photo. So now that you know what my before and afters look like, I will only bring a photo in Photoshop because they're edited pretty much the way that I like them. I'm gonna show you, I'm gonna open up Photoshop right now. I'm gonna show you what I do in Photoshop to make small modifications. These modifications will only happen if the wedding goes for submission, if the images go into a wedding album, or if the images go online. By and large, so one thing that I noticed that I was like, irked by, I was just like, why is this rock still here? And I was like, I know I took that out. But I just actually just went and grabbed the photos from the Photographer's Edit edit to show you exactly what it was, no retouching on my end. But when you'll see this photo online, this rock and that rock were taken out. And what you're gonna see me do now is like, the most basic Photoshop retouching, but I'm gonna show you kind of like, what that is. So, I have a few images in Photoshop here. Now, when I have all of my edited photos, I get the edit photos, and I put them into an iView catalog. So I have the raw images in their own catalog. Then I have the exported, retouched .jpegs in their own catalog. What I have are a few sample photos here, and what I'm going to do is I'm going to highlight them all, so Apple A, and then I'm going to open them directly from iView into Photoshop. Now, if this gets remedial, if this is boring, if you wanna poke your eyes out, please let me know. Like, this isn't for me, you know? Like, please. The stuff that I do is so basic, and I promise you, I will probably get like 15 emails later being like, do you know there's an easier way to do that in Photoshop? I know; I just choose complex. Okay, so what we're gonna do is I have four photos. Kinda show you basically things that I would do. Now, here's a photo. Does anybody notice anything with this photo, just off the top of their head? What happened here? That, but what I didn't realize, this had fallen. It was windy, and so it fell forward, okay. I shoot this, and I, you guys saw on the previous lesson, I had like five seconds. So I'm going, and then some camera guy, I'm running up to the front. He's like, hey, do you know it fell down? And I was like, (Jasmine gasps) it did. And then I was like, people had already sat down. I'm like, I gotta handle this in post. Let's handle this in post. So, what I'm going to do is I'm gonna use a shortcut J, and that's going to bring up my patch tool. Now, I have my patch selected on destination. It could be source or destination. For now, I'm gonna choose destination. And what I'm going to do is I'm going to try to go around this and see if we can just basically clone it on the other side. So basically, I'm just riding a little circle around this. So, it's like, you know, you become a photographer, and you just never think that this is gonna be your life, right? (audience laughs) Whoops, hang on one sec, hang on one sec. There it is, okay. So now what I wanna do is it looks pretty good, except for this area right here. It doesn't look blended it. So what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna press S, shortcut, and make it a little bit smaller. I'm gonna press the Alt key, I'm gonna select what I wanna copy in, clone it out, clone that out. So cool. So, as I'm cloning areas, I wanna clone the things that are around it. So here, we have peaks of trees. Grab that, clone this over here, 'cause we wanna make this look as real kind of as possible. Now, do I think I'm a good retoucher? No, not at all, not at all. But I know what I need to do to get it done. And would I do this for the wedding submission? I heard back from the photo edit from the Knot, and she said that from what we saw so far that they definitely see this getting featured in the national magazine, so, I'm excited. (audience applauds) I'm excited. So that goes, so, this is it up close. Now let's peel it back. That's the original, that's the original picture. So, we just fixed it. So that's a small thing that I would do. Cool. Let's go into another thing that I would do, which would be very much a photo that would be included. Because the Chateau St. Jean was a major sponsor for the event, if I could find signage, verbiage, wording that can incorporate details and those elements, that's what they're going to choose. When JD arrived early and I was shooting the bride, he went around property and took pictures of signs of Chateau St. Jean. That works, if needed. But to find something, a natural element that incorporates the two of 'em, you're killing two birds with one stone. But this is one thing that I noticed with this photo that our lovely third shooter Tammy had captured when we were shooting the ceremony. So, I noticed that there's, it's not centered. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to first center it or center it as much as possible. I basically just went to the crop tool, and what I wanna do is just look on the sides of each of the box. That looks roughly about what I should be. I have my aspect ratio set at four by six, which is how the image was captured. I'm gonna come back down to corp. Now, I'm not gonna ask you what you guys see is wrong in this photo, 'cause I'm sure you guys will find something else wrong. So I'm gonna tell you what's wrong. It's that umbrella. The umbrella is really distracting to me. So I'm gonna deselect, so Apple + D, to bring my image back. Now I'm going to do this absolutely ghetto fabulously, but this is how I know how to do it. I'm gonna go S, and I bring up my tool. And I make my tool a little bit bigger just by simply using the brackets. So I'm gonna push the bracket, I'm gonna press Alt, I'm gonna pull up an area, and all I'm gonna start doing is going over. And yes, I know that there are people who can do this better. There's a video on YouTube from CreativeLive where all these like, Photoshop gurus have to use Photoshop 1.0, and it's really funny, and I'm thinking, oh my God, they are like, dying as they use Photoshop 1.0, and that's how I roll in Photoshop 6.0. Like, I use Photoshop 6.0 like it's 1.0. So, but hey, it gets the job done. I'm gonna be here in full light, and you see that I'm coping over that little white spot. I'm gonna go back over that in a sec. Now I'm pulling aggregate information by the things that are around it instead of just using all of the same color. So you see this is a lighter green and this is a darker green. I'm pulling things around that darker green to make it look how I want it to. Now, see these two little white spots? To me, they're distracting. I'm gonna go into this darker green area, and I would probably do this a little bit nicer, you know, if I had more time, but that's a general idea. We have a question. We'll make sure that you have a mic. We have one question back there, and we have one question up here. Do you find that it's worth it to do it on your own, or would you rather not, like, does Photographer's Edit do things like this, where they'll remove? Yes. So why not pay them to do it, instead of taking time out of your day? That's true, that's true. So, what I'm showing you are hypothetical situations of what I would do, and I value time, but guess what I also value? Money. That's right, boo. So, I'm gonna do what I can, because this right here, if I wasn't talking you through it, it would take me less than a minute. Am I editing all of the photos? No. Am I editing even photos that are going into the gallery? Only if they're in the favorites folder, you know? And what goes in the favorites folder are images from the slideshow. Do I want the images in the slideshow to be really nice? Yeah, I do. So once I've edited them for the slideshow, I can double-dip, put them in the favorites folder. I'm going to talk about how I use the favorites folder into the wedding album when we talk about that in a second. You're just getting ahead of me. But does that work? Yeah. Okay, cool. But lemme take it back. So I did a shoot that I talked about earlier when we showcased the lesson on how to shoot ceremony details and how to shoot reception details. Now, we were commissioned by the Lodge at Torrey Pines in La Jolla to shoot their marketing campaign. Well, unbeknownst to us, they had a big golf tournament. I think it was something famous; I don't know anything about golf. Are you nodding? What is it? My dad's a big golfer; I don't know. Okay, so let's just say it was famous. It was there. Okay, and it was there and it was big. Well, they had all of these bleachers set up in the background for spectators and press, and they were massive. And they were supposed to be removed two weeks prior to our shoot. Well, we get up to the shoot, and what do we see in the background? Massive bleachers as part of the whole background. And they're like, you can just Photoshop that. (audience laughs) So, in that situation, I have to set expectations. And I was like, okay, so, we weren't expecting there to be about 300 feet of bleachers in the background, so what we're going to do is I'm going to shoot this entire session, and I'm not gonna be concerned with it. Once we choose the images that you would like to use for marketing purposes, or if you decide to pursue a submission, you let me know, and I will handle them. Okay, well, I edited the images. I got them to the gallery. They chose their favorites. I think I sent around 300 photos. They ended up selecting 125. So, I had to go through, and of the 125, about 70% had the bleachers in the background. And so I was like, lemme just see how hard removing these bleachers would be. About 15 minutes into one photo, I was like, I give up. Like, this is ridiculous. So I uploaded, and so the way that Photographer's Edit does it currently now, although they're in the process of changing it, is you send the photos, and then they give you, they will say, it will take us this long, and this is our hourly rate. So once I got back that quote, I was like, aw, man, this is kind of expensive. But then I thought, would I rather spend $250 instead of losing hours on a shoot? Like, it just made no sense. And, they would do it so much better than I would. You guys saw my editing skills, right? Like, so I decided to pay them. And I didn't put that as a cost of business. I put that as a marketing expense. These images will be used as marketing, so I'm gonna chalk it up and itemize it as that. Is that okay? Yeah. Cool, let's go here. How many images do you typically deliver to your client? That's a great question. Somebody left a comment in the Facebook group and said, Jasmine's probably, between Jasmine, her second shooter, and her third shooter, will probably produce somewhere around 6,000 images. And they weren't that far off. Between three shooters and, at the end of the day, I ended up shooting 10 hours. It was around 5200, 5300. We were shooting a ton, and, you know, you're getting these photo requests from different organizations. Like, also, there, for those of you who weren't aware, and we'll probably get into this is, not TLC. Yeah, TLC's Cake Wars, the bride and groom went in advance to do an episode filming of Cake Wars, and they chose their cake and their cake flavor in advance. Then they were going to reveal the winner at the wedding, do the cake tasting. So TLC had their Cake Wars camera and press there for the cake cutting, and they had to get footage for their show, and I'm supposed to be shooting. So who wants angle one? Guess. TLC Cake Wars. And I'm just like, so they set them up, and I don't know if we'll get this in camera, but I was like, Samantha and Taylor, can you step forward towards me? Can you turn towards me? Okay, awesome. So, right before they're gonna do the cake, like, I got them to where I needed to be, so then I resumed camera one. Like, I know it seems sheisty, but everybody, I mean, I'm just a squirrel trying to get a nut. You know? (audience laughs) So, we moved them, and so, where was I going with this question? How many photos, that's right. So we had all of these extra photo requests. So did we end up with more photos than we typically take? Yes. We average around 100 images an hour. So for an eight-hour wedding, my clients are getting around 800 images. We were shooting 10 hours, plus we had extra photo requests. The clients will get a gallery of around 1300 images. That's a lot, but the way that we break up the day, which is what I'm going to show you in a gallery, yes, please, we're gonna pass the mic to you. Oh, you have one, great. So, at what stage in your career did you make the decision to start using Photographer's Edit, and about what percentage of photos do you personally edit yourself that you give to clients? Fantastic questions. Now, remind me if I don't hit them all. First, I made the decision to outsource my images the second wedding I ever shot. (audience laughs) Smart. Yeah, because, here's the thing. I started my business saying, like, I wanna be a photographer, whee. What I didn't realize was that I had to learn how to edit the photos. I had to learn how to pay taxes. I had to learn QuickBooks. I needed a bookkeeper. I had to learn Photoshop. I had to learn how to be a wife, 'cause I just got married. I had to learn how to shoot my camera. I had to learn how to work a part-time job. I had way too many things to do. And so after I shot my first wedding, I was just like, I don't know how to edit things, so I'm gonna do it how I think I should. So I had 700 photos that I edited one by one in Photoshop. I did it wrong, obviously, but that taught me a big lesson. I don't have 15 hours to spend on each wedding that I shoot. So then I made the decision, I have to find somebody to do this for me. Now, I was working with like a mom and pop, a mom and pop photo processing. She was a photographer who needed to make money on the side. So I'm gonna get into that in a future lesson in regards to pricing. I'm gonna talk to you about what that dynamic was. But I made the decision to outsource my first year of business. I moved to Photographer's Edit my second or third year of business. So I've been with them for seven or eight years. How many images am I actually touching? Great question. I will only touch the images that will go online. And what goes online? Blog images, social media images, and images in the slideshow. Those are all one and the same. Slideshow is the biggest, blog second biggest, social media smallest of the three, but they're all deriving from this large edit. How many favorites, how many images go into the favorites folder? About a hundred. So, if my client's gallery is about 800 images, I have six sections in the gallery, which I'm about to show you. There's going to be, plus my favorites, going to be around a hundred images in each folder. So while people might hear, wow, Jasmine's clients get 800 images, that's a lot, well, yes, but if we break them into folders, my clients are not overwhelmed looking through 75 to 125 photos. I tell them to grab a glass of wine, and every night for a week, go through one folder and choose your favorites. That's kind of how we expedite what that looks like, cool? So, you saw me using iView Media Pro. We got back into Photoshop. In case you're keeping notes, this is the linear trajectory. Now, once I have all of the images, that is Ashley! Ashley is here. Well, you can't really see her. That's her, trust me. (Jasmine laughs) So, yeah, I use Pixieset. Pixieset has been the cornerstone and the foundation. I know that there's a lot of questions in the group about it. I'm more than willing to ask you about them. I am not promoted to talk about them. I talk about them because I think that they're awesome. And I know that the people who do use them feel equally the same about me. So this is a sneak peak into my back end of Pixieset. So when I log into my account, I will see my most recent events up at the top. I love the clean interface. I love the search icons. I can quickly go through here. I like the idea, the idea of getting notifications every time some sort of activity is going on in my gallery. Now, one thing that I think is really important as a wedding photographer is you need the ability to sell prints. Now, I am not a product photographer. I'm a service-based photographer. We're gonna get into what that looks like in a future lesson. But as a service-based photographer, I will have products, but I don't want to be the purveyor of them. I don't wanna provide them. So what I do is I use Pixieset, and the clients can order prints directly through my gallery. Now, my gallery is not branded as Pixieset. It's branded as Jasmine Star Gallery. So, clients will go there, and when they order prints, that print order goes directly to White House Custom Colour, and it is drop shipped to my clients. So when I wake up in the morning and I see a $200 transaction, I'm like, happy Monday to me! (audience laughs) That's the kind of business that I want. 'Cause remember, my definition of success is PJ's, travel, and money, right? Like, I hate talking so honestly, but is that not why we do, can we not get paid for our art in a way that is effective for us? This is the kind of business I wanna run. The best part of it is that I work with White House Custom Colour. So, if there is ever an issue with the print, and there never has been, I can call White House Custom Colour customer support, and they are just on it impeccably. Now, one thing that I really like about Pixieset is that they don't charge a commission on the prints. That's a big factor in why I decided to choose them. Let's kinda get into what we're going to look at now. So, I will create a new gallery for each wedding that I do, and I simply drag and drop all of the images here. So I get the edited .jpegs that Photographer's Edit had edited, and then what I'll do is get 'em in a gallery. Now, this is what Samantha and Taylor's gallery looks like on the backend, and here you'll see my images broken up, too. Favorites, bride prep, groom prep, ceremony, bride and groom, portraits, reception. And then I also include their engagement session, but it's gonna be at the bottom. Now, the way that the ordering appears is important to me, because when social media blogs into their gallery, the first thing I want them to see is not bride prep. It is not groom prep. It's not any portion of the day that hasn't been heavily curated. What I want them to do when they log into the gallery, which is what I'm gonna show you right now, is I want them to land on their favorites page, because their favorites page are my favorites page and the best representation of their day. I'm curious what your personal preference is, why Pixieset over Pass. Why I choose Pixieset is because it's branded in a way that's completely my own. My clients do not have to download an app to download the images. It's directly to their computer. At the time, when I made the transition, Pixieset was a much cleaner representation and mobile-friendly. It wasn't Flash-based. At the time, they were taking commission, and I did not want it to take a commission. I wanted to work with my lab, White House Custom Colour. There were a lot of reasons why I made the transition, and what I can say about working with Pixieset is that I haven't had a single complaint from a client, and I think that's very valuable. Yeah, cool, thank you. Awesome. Ashley has a question. Let's pass the mic. What size are you uploading to these? 'Cause I've changed mine like a hundred times. Yes. So I'm assuming this is how you deliver to the client? No flash drive; this is how they get their images? My clients, I run a service-based. So I'm not sending a USB or a disc of anything. Yeah, I've done both, I've done one. I'm just like, I did 3500 pixels and then, you know, 8x12s. I will occasionally, there was a time where I was doing 12x16 at 240 DPI, and right now, I'm resting at 8x12 at 300 DPI. So if they wanna print it bigger, like, six months down the road. Finish it. What do you mean? So what if the client comes back to you like a year later and wants to make a huge print? I would tell 'em to make it a canvas, because I can change the DPI to 150. You, okay. So, just in case you guys don't know, you don't have to, when you're making a canvas, you don't have to upload it 300 DPI. You can make it at 150, and it'll look impeccably well, just due to the nature that it's not a print. So, if they wanna do anything, 8x12, and I have seen huge photos at 240 DPI, and they're beautiful, and they're fine, and we are not putting our images, I have to be very careful. We are not putting our images in a gallery, nor as we doing gallery wraps, you know, on a billboard. We're putting them in client homes underneath glass in a frame. Nobody's with a magnifying glass being like, you know what, this pixel seems a little... (audience laughs) So you don't save your raws? I know you've said that in the past. I don't. I save my raws for six months. And I'm like, I've saved all mine. Here's the thing. I have never in 10 years had a client come back and by like, I need this raw file. One, they don't even really know. An educated client would know what a raw file is. And if I actually work for a photographer, I do save the raws for a little bit longer. 'Cause, you know,. I think I've only saved them in case they came back and wanted something bigger that that .jpeg. Have they come back and wanted something bigger than an 8x12? No, but my computer's just full. I can't even put one photo on it. Right, here we go, freedom. Get it, and if they're older than a year, 'cause baby steps. Like, for me, it's six months. For you, anything over a year that a client has not. What we're giving our clients are big files, massive files. Most clients are ordering 5x7s and Christmas cards. Like, that's what they're ordering. So let's kind of move into the gallery. Now, I wanna show what the gallery looks like. All of my galleries are password protected. My client seems to like that. So, if you order, if you purchase this course, you will get access to this gallery, and you will get the passcode. So let's pop right in. Now that we're in the gallery, the best thing that I like about it is that it's a scroll gallery. It's very similar to the way that maybe Pinterest works, and clients are able to favorite their photos by using, and clients and vendors are able to select the heart icon. And this is the thing that I want my clients to work through as they go through the options. So, now we have gone through my workflow, we've gone through the culling, we've gone through the editing, we've gone through the Photoshopping, we've gone through the upload process to Pixieset, now it is time for me to release the gallery to my clients and what you will get is their specific, their specific web address. Now, my addresses are gallery.jasminestar.com, forward slash, whatever I named that gallery, and those galleries belong to me. It's still a brand that's continuous. Now, what I'll do is I will send a template email outlining how to download their images, how to share their images, how to print their images. I must educate my clients to order prints, right? I want them to have prints, but I don't want them taking them to Costco or Walgreens. Do I hold it against my clients for doing that? No, that's where everybody gets their prints done. I don't expect anything otherwise until I educate them and say, there's a reason why these print labs have great machines. It's the paper quality. They are true to color. When you tell your clients those types of things they then understand that paying a tiny bit extra for your print versus taking it to Costco makes a difference. Now, once I send the template email to my clients, I will then send a template email to the creative team. I am sharing the images with my clients, and then I am saying, just the next day, sending it to the creative team. I ask the bride, is it okay if I share the images with the vendor team? I have never had a bride who has said no, you can't share the images. So, once I get her approval, even though it is in my contract to share the images with them, I just wanna make sure that she knows that other people will be sharing them as well. Now, both of these email templates can be found and they're available at jasminestarstore.com. I have said template, template, template, template so many times today. If that's what you want to do, I think that would be beneficial, because they're effective, they are efficient, and it saves the time in my inbox, because having time is my version of success. So, in closing, once I have the galleries, then I send it out to my clients, I've sent out to my vendors, I get notifications when each gallery has been downloaded, who's ordering prints, how many times it's been downloaded. It has a category for each wedding. Who has created a favorites folder, who has ordered prints, and who has downloaded. I want to know where the images are going, because this helps me end up marketing who I need to market more to. And all of this is happening. I wake up to new thank you, thank you, notifications. But here's the thing. I wanna bring you up to date with how sharing with the creative team has worked from the Knot Dream wedding. So, this is a few things that the vendors, I just sent the gallery to the creative team two days ago. You continue to amaze me with your grace and speed. You have mastered efficiency to get the perfect shot without exhausting the couple while maneuvering around 12 video cameras at the Knot Dream wedding. Sorting through your images brings a sweet roller coaster of memories and joy I experienced at the Dream wedding. Having a strong photographer as a partner on the day makes my job effortless and enjoyable at the same time. Thank you. That was from the wedding coordinator, Jeannie Savage of Details, Details. This is another one. I must say that the entire team is oohing and aahing over your photos all morning. I hope we get the chance to work together again soon in the future. Happy wedding season, Teresa from the Fairmont Hotel in Sonoma. They catered the event. Jasmine, thank you for the generosity in sharing. I delved deeper into your tweets and blog, and I just adore how open and down to earth your posts are, and how you capture the aura of just the right moment in your photography. So, I will now look forward to more of your aura, the distinctive atmosphere or quality that seems to surround and be generated by a person, thing, or place. Mira from Peony Acres. I wanna say that your photos are absolutely stunning. Amazing work. Jennifer from the Knot Magazine. I don't read this to say that I think I'm great. I'm reading this to say it is so powerful to help others build their business. We are the gatekeepers to documenting how their work came out. We must share, and when we share good, good comes back as a result. In a future lesson, you're gonna see how we used all of these images and how the vendors team used the images in marketing, in a future marketing course. It is about creating photos. It is about making your clients happy. But it is about also helping other people as we move along, and I believe that this is something that we can absolutely all do. So, final slide of this presentation before we get into a few questions. It's the wedding workflow wrap-up. Now, you've seen what a wedding looks for me, from the beginning, from the middle, from the end. In previous lessons, you learned how to prepare clients for expectations, I'm sorry, prepare clients for success, manage their expectations, deliver on a timeline that you're proud of, how to shoot with intention, how to personalize the images by way of their story. You wanna use this wedding as marketing collateral and to connect with other vendors, and you saw, in this particular lesson, saw my entire workflow. Now that you know everything, how I run my business, I hope that you are empowered to apply all of it or just some of it to your business so that you guys can grow and succeed. We have just a couple minutes for Q&A, if you guys don't mind. So we're gonna go to, I think there's a mic here. And, great. When you're culling the photos and you're picking and choosing, do you ever get the brides coming back saying, I saw you clicking away all day; I wanna see every photo you took? How do you deal with that? We dealt with that by managing expectation, right? So in the beginning, in my collection menu, I itemize how many images the client will get. So, if a client comes back to me and she says, I wanna see more photos, outlined in the contract, you were gonna get between 800 and 900 photos. If I met that, then I am not under any obligation. But most of the time, if there is a photo that's one of a kind, even if I don't think it's that great, and you will see that quite a bit in the Knot gallery, it goes into the edit. My clients aren't missing chunks of their day at all. That's why I get a little bit leery, I had read in the Facebook group that there are photographers who give their clients 200 images or 300 images, and I just think that you run the propensity of really misleading a client, unless you're saying, this is all you're gonna get, like outline that again and again. I feel like, I have never had a client come back to me and say, I feel like I'm missing a photo. If it's a one of a kind, automatically gets into the gallery. The only thing I'm really doing is I'm, if I'm shooting the bride and I take like, eight frames of her in the bridal portrait, she's gonna get one. You know? Like, I'm just curating it down. But anything that's original automatically goes in there, so I don't have a client come back to me. Cool. Question? How many hours do you think you spend on one wedding from start to finish, like meeting with clients and editing and things like that? Okay, so let's talk about this. This is where we're gonna end it; this is great. So, let's see. I flew to Seattle on Wednesday, and let's see, at five p.m. on Tuesday, I opened my computer and my Keynote. Weeks of work preparing for these lessons was gone. Okay, I'm not gonna get into that, but just know that there was crying, gnashing of teeth perhaps. There may or may not have been some cursing involved. (audience laughs) I was on the phone for two hours with support, and this has never happened to me. I am fastidious about backing up and saving, and something happened. I had to say, and in retrospect, I can talk calmly about it, but I was not calm. But, I had to say, I make the decision, right now, to choose positivity. I make the decision to say, there's a reason why this happened. And the reason why it happened is because I can answer your question with assurance that, and I just realized. I'm like, I didn't put it in this Keynote. How many hours it takes for me in a single wedding is 31 hours, 31. Wow. 31. I outlined how long it is for a client meeting. I outlined how long it takes for me to cull. I outlined how long it takes for me to drive to my average engagement session. How long does it take for me to drive to the consultation? How long does it take for me to drive to the wedding? How long am I culling? How long am I Photoshopping? Social media takes up almost as much time as me actually prepping and culling my images. My social media pushes take around two or three hours. But because I'm not editing my photos, I have a workday that can facilitate that type of growth. That is a decision that I'm making, because, I don't know if you guys can feel, but maybe I need to change the energy, because these sections about workflow and sections about pricing, they make my skin crawl. It's not a strength of mine, at all. When we talk about marketing, whoa, bring out the lasers and the horns. That's gonna come in a future lesson. That's my juge. And if I, remember, I wanna chose things that I wanna choose, and I hope that you guys feel empowered to make those same decisions. Run the type of business that you want to run, and if workflow is your juge, rock it and own it. But if it feels just as tiresome as it does for me, do what you can, and then release the rest. Thank you guys so much; I appreciate it. (audience applauds)