The company my photographer is through told us we would have a disk of all our wedding day pictures within 90 days with 150 that will be specially edited to print at our discretion. I really didn't think much about the edited pictures until friends of mine who were married asked if they showed us proofs to pick which ones I wanted edited. I wrote an email asking the company if we could pick the which pictures were edited as we may have differeing opinions on what photos are more "album worthy" than others, and this is the response I got:
" If you would prefer to pick the images yourself, you are certainly more than welcome to. Typically, we leave that to be the duty of the photographer. This is mainly because a photographer can easily take 800-1,000 the day of the wedding and will be able to be more accurate on selecting which images would be the best ones to work with. A normal eye may look at a raw image and decide this one should be edited, but a photographer may look at that image and decide it wouldn't edit well, that a similar, but different, image would edit a lot nicer in the longrun
Aside from that, picking only 150 images from a disc of a thousand is actually one of the more difficult and time consuming parts of the job. Those are the two reasons we typically do that in house, as asking you to do so would be like passing the duties on to you that you're paying us for.
Having said that, if you prefer to do it, you're certainly welcome to. The only thing to keep in mind is that we cannot guarantee that we'll be able to match your requests on every photo. Your selection wouldn't be a set list of "for sure's" - it would more serve as a push in the right direction as to what you want. Honestly, the key to receiving the best quality of work is to hire the right guy who you feel comfortable has listened to you and can judge what you would want accurately, then to let him do the job he knows how to do... But if you prefer to "take the helm" so to speak, you're certainly welcome to do so. Just let me know if you'd like to."
What I am getting from this email is they will let us pick our pictures if we insist, but they basically think we aren't able to pick which pictures are best for our album and that even if we do pick the pictures, they aren't promising we will get the exact ones we want. Is this normal for a company to not let people pick the pictures they want or tell them they won't get the specific ones they ask for?
I get the whole editing thing where some pictures will look better than others, because I am a graphics design major. But still... How do you tell a paying customer they might not get the exact pictures they want, but the pictures they "feel" are better?