During the average portrait session I take something like 120 photos per child. When I have discarded all the test shots and obvious misses (closed eyes, weird expressions etc) I have something like 100 usable photos left. When I started making portraits my opinion was that the parents and children should make the selection between all the shots. They received a large amount of photos from me to review. Over time I have learned that this is wrong. They came to me to get a problem solved – the problem, that they can’t make a portrait like I can. By sending them a huge pile of photos, far too big to have been processed at all, I’m just creating a new problem to them: They have to spend hours looking back and forth in the collection to make up their minds on very, very small differences in the photos and often they will get distracted by small imperfections that would not be visible in the final portrait anyway.
Only the parents and the children themselves can decide what expression is the right one, so they should of course have some choices. But you’re not helping them at all if you send them a lot of almost identical images. You’re the expert in expressions, so among the series of very close to identical shots select only those you like the most. Today my rule of thumb is, that they should receive something like 20 percent of the images for review and selection. Not more than 2-3 images for each setup and pose. Limiting the number of photos for review enables you to process them some more before the review – process them much closer to the final result, and making it a lot easier for your clients to decide what they want.
