What happens to the photographs after the light goes

The card comes out of the camera before we leave the location, usually while you are still standing there working out what just happened. It goes into a reader in the car and is copied twice, onto two separate drives, before the drive back to Agrigento. Nothing is deleted from that card until both copies have been verified. This is the least romantic paragraph on this website and it is probably the most important one, because the single irrecoverable failure in this work is not a weak frame. It is a card that stops reading on the way home.

In the days that follow, the set is cut. You will not receive every frame, and you should not want to. A sequence shot at 19:30 on a cliff contains blinks, test exposures, half formed expressions and eleven near identical variations of the same second. Delivering all of it would simply transfer the work of choosing onto you. We select, and we tell you in writing beforehand roughly how many images a commission of that shape produces, so the number is never a surprise. If a moment exists only in a technically imperfect frame, that frame stays in.

Editing here means exposure, contrast, colour, straightening and removing dust. It does not mean replacing the sky, thinning anybody, or cloning tourists out of the Valley of the Temples. If a location is busy at the hour we chose, the answer is to choose a better hour, not to repair it afterwards in software. Sicilian limestone is warm and throws that warmth back into faces, which is a large part of why the light here looks the way it does in October. Our colour work is mostly about protecting that quality rather than inventing it.

You get a small preview quickly, usually within a few days, because the waiting is the hardest part and a handful of images to send your family solves most of it. The full set takes longer. The delivery window is written into your confirmation before you agree to anything, it is stated in weeks rather than vaguely, and if we are going to miss it you will hear from us before the date rather than after. Peak months run slower than February and we say which is which. A realistic window in writing beats a flattering one in conversation.

Delivery is a private online gallery reached by a link and a password that only you hold. Everything in it downloads at full resolution, with no watermark and no restriction on making your own prints. The gallery stays online for a stated period and we tell you clearly when that period ends. We keep our own backups for longer, in two places, one of them offline. Even so, download your files when they arrive and keep them somewhere that is not only your phone. Cloud accounts get locked, and phones go into the sea at Punta Bianca.

We do not release raw files, and it is fairer to explain why than to hide behind a policy line. A raw file is not a photograph. It is unprocessed data from before the decisions that make the image ours, and releasing it means our work can be published in a state we never approved. If you have a specific need, a very large print, an unusual crop, a black and white version of something delivered in colour, please ask. Those requests are normal and we handle them. The one we decline is the entire set, unedited.

If you want to judge how a full commission reads rather than how a highlights selection reads, look at /gallery and follow one commission from the walk in to the final frame. The quiet images between the obvious ones are the ones you will actually be living with in ten years. Highlight selections are built to persuade. A complete set is built to be looked at slowly, and it tells you far more about whether someone can work an entire hour than three lucky minutes ever will.

All of the above is how we work by default, and none of it is fixed by us alone. If you need files faster because of a family situation, or slower because you would rather not see them until you are home and settled, tell us at the start and we will arrange it. If there is a question about delivery we have not answered here, write to us and ask it plainly. We would much rather have that conversation now than an uncomfortable one in September.