The session is the part you see. It’s about an hour, it’s fun, and then I drive away and you don’t hear from me for a couple of weeks.
People are sometimes surprised by that gap, so I want to show you what’s actually happening in it. Roughly speaking, the hour we spend together is maybe a fifth of the work that goes into your photos.
First: nothing gets lost
Before I leave your driveway, the cards get copied to a laptop and to a portable drive. Two copies, two devices, before I’m on the highway. That night they go to a third location that isn’t my house.
The cards themselves don’t get formatted until your gallery is delivered and backed up. It’s a boring habit and it’s the reason I’ve never lost a session.
The cull: 800 frames down to a couple hundred
A one-hour family session usually produces somewhere between 600 and 900 exposures. That number surprises people, but it’s the only way to get a good group photo — I’m shooting through blinks, half-smiles, and the exact moment a toddler decides to look at a bug.
The first pass is mechanical: out go the blinks, the missed focus, the ones where somebody’s mid-word. That’s fast.
The second pass is the actual job, and it’s the part I think is the real skill in this work. Out of nine nearly-identical frames, one of them has your daughter looking like herself and the other eight have her looking like a kid being photographed. Finding that one, over and over, for two hundred images, is where the time goes.
Why Consistent Color Editing Matters
Then everything gets set to a consistent baseline — exposure, white balance, contrast, and the color treatment that makes a set look like a set.
This is more important than it sounds. If you print eight images and hang them together, the thing that makes the wall look professional isn’t any individual photo being brilliant — it’s all eight of them having the same skin tones and the same warmth. A gallery where the color drifts around looks amateurish even when every single image is technically fine.
Fall is the trickiest season for this, incidentally. All that reflected orange light bounces off leaves and onto faces, and left alone it makes everyone look sunburned. Pulling that back without killing the fall color is most of the work on an October session.
Then the individual attention
The strongest images get worked on individually: dodging and burning to shape the light, cleaning up a distracting branch, evening out a patch of shade across four faces, swapping in an open-eyed head on a group shot where one person blinked.
What I don’t do
I want to be clear about this, because people ask nervously and I’d rather just say it plainly.
I’ll take out things that are temporary and distracting: a stray hair across a face, a bug bite, a scrape, a piece of trash in the grass, a bright sign in the background. Things that weren’t really part of that day.
I won’t slim anybody down, smooth skin into plastic, or remove the lines around your eyes. Those lines are from four decades of laughing, and in thirty years your kids are going to want to see your actual face. If there’s something specific you’re self-conscious about, tell me — I’d much rather handle it with posing and light during the session than pretend it away afterward.
Why Photo Delivery Takes One to Two Weeks
Partly volume — in October I might have four sessions in a weekend. But mostly it’s that culling with fresh eyes produces genuinely better selections than culling at midnight the day of. I make different, worse choices when I’m tired and still emotionally attached to how the session felt.
If you have a hard deadline, tell me when you book and I’ll build the schedule around it. That’s a normal request, especially for holiday cards.
And then it’s yours
You get a gallery link, high-resolution downloads, and print ordering through a professional lab if you want it. Then the real work starts, which is you actually getting them onto a wall — and I’ll be honest, that’s the step where most families stall out.
What surprised you most about that? I’m always curious which parts of this people had no idea about — let me know in the comments.