had a situation last week that kind of caught me off guard. shot a commercial property for a client, nothing crazy, maybe 80 photos and a short walk-around video. we'd talked beforehand and i thought we were on the same page about a 48 hour turnaround for edited deliverables. i get home, start culling, and theres already a message from them asking if i can have anything over by end of day because apparently they had a listing going live sooner than expected.

i ended up rushing it and honestly the edits were fine but i was stressed and i dont think i did my best work. also felt kind of annoyed even though i get it, things change with listings. just wasnt prepared for it.

so now im trying to figure out how to handle this better going forward. do you guys put turnaround time in your contracts? charge extra for rush delivery? i have a pretty basic contract right now that doesnt really cover this stuff and i think thats the problem. would love to know what other peoples workflows look like, like do you edit on location, batch process everything first and then fine tune, what software, all that

yeah get it in the contract, full stop. i have a standard 48hr turnaround written in and anything faster than that is a rush fee, i charge an extra 40% for same day or next morning delivery. at first i felt weird about it but honestly clients respect it more when things are clearly laid out. nobody has ever pushed back on the rush fee when they're the ones who need it fast.

for workflow i shoot tethered when i can and do a rough cull on my laptop before i even drive home so i'm not dealing with 400 frames later. lightroom for stills, usually export a first pass for the agent quickly and then do finer adjustments if they need anything tweaked. video takes longer obviously so i always flag that separately in terms of delivery time.

honestly same day edits for a full shoot is kind of unreasonable unless they're paying for it. i had a client do something similar, texted me like an hour after i left asking for "just a few" of the photos and then kept asking for more until it was basically everything. now i literally have a line in my intake form asking for their listing date so i can flag anything tight upfront. catches it before it becomes your problem at 9pm