Flavell Studios

Flavell Studios

This is such a common and natural question for clients to ask as understandably, there's an uncertainty from the client's perspective of what to expect, especially if it's their first time engaging with a photographer. 

The answer to this question isn't so black and white, and it widely differs from photographer to photographer. But you will find that the majority of photographers will decline to share their RAWs, even with a price tag as it's considered only half of their art form. Photographers will shoot their subjects with the final edit in mind, so their RAWs are not a proper representation of their work, which is why they don't like releasing it even if a client promises to give the photographer credit. For an example, a world class chef may give you the ingredients to their famous dish, but what you cook up isn't their work anymore, and they probably wouldn't want their name placed on a final dish that they didn't actually cook. 

But that said, I can totally understand where clients are coming from when they ask this question as they're usually thinking, "I remember a shot where we did 'x' or someone did 'y' with 'z' but I don't have that photo here, so I want all the RAW photos". But TRUST me when i say this, a photographer is going to deliver ALL of the best shots to you, and any shots where the camera may have missed focus and is blurry, or people are blinking, or even if the pose turned out to actually be really unflattering, then we aren't going to deliver those photos as we want to give you the all the BEST photos possible. 

That said though there are studios who have different methods and processes, and sometimes the type of photography really determines those processes as well. For example, a studio that does mini family sessions where you have a set number of images to choose from, they may sit down immediately after your session so that you can view ALL of the RAW images and choose which ones that you want edited and delivered. But a wedding studio can't offer this as we take THOUSANDS of images on your day and it honeslty takes us hours of carefully sorting through those images to make sure all the best ones are chosen, and all the unflattering shots with blinks and camera errors are sifted out. Trust me, I'm not going to be keeping any of the worth while images to myself because I want YOU to have as many of your precious memories as possible!! :) 

One of the other things that is quite unknown as well is what actually is a RAW photo?? A lot of people assume that a RAW photo is simply an image that isn't edited, which it true... but these RAW images aren't something that you can download straight onto your phone or laptop and start editing. These camera raw files contain unprocessed, uncompressed grayscale picture data from a digital camera's image sensor, along with information about how the image was captured which is known as metadata. So with all of that jammed into these files, they're actually pretty hefty in size, and not only that, but these types of files need particular softwares in order to be opened and manipulated. Alot of these file types differ from camera to camera as well, you can expect to see CRW, CR2 or CR3 if the camera used was Canon. NEF or NRW if your photographer shot with Nikon, and then there's also Sony which is my choice of system, so I'm dealing ARW files, but Sony also has SRF and SR2. 

So I suppose if you're a client who is asking for RAW files because you feel like there's particular shots that weren't included, by all means feel free to ask the photographer about those shots! I promise we won't bite or get mad! Haha at least I promise that I won't! Because your photographer may have a reason why those shots weren't included. For example, someone may have walked in front of us, the camera missed focused or misfired, or even some other type of error which sometimes CAN happen. Or perhaps it could just be simply missed when they were sorting through your images! And in that event, I'm sure they would be more than happy to finalise that image and include it with the rest of your gallery :)