My wife and I are expecting our first child. My in-laws got us a maternity photo shoot which costed $1800 for 2 hours. It included make up for my wife and access to a wardrobe. Everything was great the pictures were beautiful when shown. But now she sent us a proofing of about 300 photos to choose 15 for further editing and touch up. All photos she sent have watermarks and are blurry and don’t have the sharpness like when she was taking them and showing us. We asked about this she stated it’s common. Because people try to steal extra pictures by screenshot. We asked about adding a few extra. She wants $100 per 1 photo $300 for 5 and $800 for 20 I was so confused. And asked what happens to the photos we don’t get she said they will be deleted. To which I said but why couldn’t we have the unedited photos if you’re going to delete them, there’s a lot of really good pictures we like. She paused and said that just how things are done and this is standard. Idk it’s really making me want to never deal with a professional photographer again. Cause it seems like a money grab to me. Am I wrong?
This is a standard model - I think it feels gross to you because the pricing model wasn’t explained to you up front. For maternity and similar shoots there is often quite a lot of post-production which means that only selected images get fully edited, and the extra price is paying for that editing work. Lots of family or wedding photographers use a different model because there is less high-touch editing involved on the final images (though this varies by photographer of course).
For me the bigger issue is that the previews are blurry? Watermarking is quite standard but you should be able to get a good sense of the images you are selecting by the previews.