“And we need the pictures delivered the next day!!!”
Sometimes an event such as a business conference will want finished pictures delivered the day after the event. Certainly it’s no problem to deliver a handful of images the same or following day if the event needs them for a press release or its social media. But when a day-long event expects hundreds of pictures to be delivered the next day, or even the next morning, then there’s going to be a problem.
Let’s do some simple arithmetic. If you’re expecting 100 finished pictures and the photographer spends a minimal five minutes per image then that’s 500 minutes, just over eight hours, of non-stop work. If you’re expecting 200 or 300 photos then that can easily amount to at least two or three days of work.
If you want only basic corrections and don’t expect anything fancy then it’s quite possible to batch process a few hundred pictures in several hours.
But if you want the hair hanging in your CEO’s face to be removed, the weird shadows caused by your lighting to be fixed, the emcee’s crooked tie to be straightened, all the on-screen PowerPoint slides to be corrected for colour and brightness, your on-stage signage to be straightened, and unique captions added to each image, then it’s going to take much, much longer.
Sadly Photoshop doesn’t have a magical button that fixes everything in one click. There’s no enhance button.
Conference photographers often quote a delivery time of five to ten business days.
Polishing Your Business Image
A good rule of thumb is that one hour of photography requires *at least* one hour of editing. I tend to use two hours of editing per one hour of photography.
If you need something retouched, removed, or altered, then depending on the extent of retouching, this could require ten minutes to an hour of extra work *per photo.*
When planning photo coverage of your business conference, convention, or other similar corporate event, be sure to budget a reasonable amount of time for photo editing. Adding exclamation marks to an e-mail won’t speed things up.
If you do need lots of pictures quickly then we should bring in an onsite photo editor who can edit as the day progresses. I’ve done this at a few events. Pictures can be edited and delivered almost immediately.
A photographer’s job is to deliver the best pictures and not any and all pictures. Rarely, if ever, will a professional photographer give you unedited or unfinished pictures at the end of an event. Instead, a professional will have the finished pictures ready in X number of business days.
Think of unfinished pictures as a first draft or an unedited manuscript. Just as a manuscript needs to be edited for spelling, grammar and readability, photos also need to be edited, or polished, so they look good and send the right message.
Business pictures need to be polished because your corporate image demands it. Unless your company is about fast and cheap.
