Photos That Did Not Make My Cut, However That Were Chosen By My Clients
As a photographer, you are trained, or train yourself, to learn how to take 'tak-sharp' photos, but also to provide artistic quality and creativity to make your photos pop and appeal to your clients or the casual viewer. Generally speaking, you assume tak-sharp and artistic quality would go hand in hand, but often times I find myself surprised by what my clients choose, and why.
As a part of my practice, I will sort through photos from every shoot and select the ones I feel are the best of the group and prepare them to share with my clients. I have also learned the value of providing ALL of the photos from the event in digital format so my clients have everything I produced. Following are some of the photos I actually did not choose for my final presentation(s) however my clients found them in the files I provided and selected them as part of their purchased package.
 
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This photo was not part of my final selection because it is not sharp to my standards. Because I took the shot in very low light, with no flash, I had to bump up my ISO setting quite a bit, which caused more noise than I generally like, so smoothing out during post processing created the softer look you see here. Although a nice shot, I didn't feel it portrayed a professional image that I felt comfortable charging for. Ironically, my clients chose this one because they felt the lighting captured the moment along with the composition and the artistic quality of the high contrast black and white output. |
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This photo was not part of my final selection due to the darkness and high contrast. The final picture was a little softer and lighter. Again, this photo was taken in low light with a high ISO setting, however I was still able to keep it pretty sharp during post processing. I was also not wild about the background in this photo, even in the final image. This too was a nice shot because I had good models, but I didn't feel it portrayed a professional image that I felt comfortable charging for. My clients because they felt the higher contrast helped capture more of a realistic presentation of the event setting itself - they ultimately used this photo as the main photo on their holiday cards and continue to use it as part of their email greetings. |
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This photo is a photo I took of my son after one of his band concerts while he was standing out in the hallway outside the band room. When I originally took the shot, I liked the composition but really nothing else about the photo (the grain from the ISO was too high, the photo was too dark, etc.) so did not originally include it within my portfolio. Over a few months I kept coming back to this one and made some adjustments to smooth it out in post processing and lighten it up. However with all the adjustments I made, I actually came back to the original photo right from the camera, and found that I really like this shot. I how not only have this one as a part of my portrait portfolio, but also as a part of my homepage slideshow. |
All of this really goes back to the old adage, "Beauty is in the eye of the beholder". Even though these photos did not make the first cut, there was something about them that caught the eye of the client or myself, something that helped make that connection to draw the viewer to say, "that's the one".