Yes, that would still be weird tbh. Can you imagine a bakery or indeed pretty much any other business actually saying this to a customer? A baker would not present the other cakes to you as an option.

It happens in photography sometimes for justifiable reasons (particularly if there is extensive retouching required) but it’s not a familiar business model to most people so it’s unsurprising that people aren’t familiar with it and find it a bit gross.

I mean I think you’ve hit on why this analogy doesn’t work - the photographer’s products are specific to the client, the bakers are not (and have lost value by the end of the day). No baker would bake a bunch of extra cakes for an order just in case the person happened to buy one.

I think if I went to a baker and they made a bunch of cakes for me and then said here are the cakes in your package and I’ll just throw these other ones away if you don’t pay an extra fee for them I would find that a bit weird? And would probably go on r/baking and be like ‘is this normal?’

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.

I dunno where you buy baked goods man but my local bakery gives stuff away for free or heavily discounted at the end of the day

100% agree that the better you know the sport the better you can anticipate and the better you can shoot. I used to do university sports and shoot everything - I knew soccer extremely well and could be there and done in 5 minutes confidently, but every time I would have to shoot lacrosse or boxing or something it would be a nightmare the first time.

The Lindsey Adler posing book is good as a photographer and I suspect you could take a lot from it when being photographed as well.

As a different suggestion, the portrait photographer David Suh has an really good TikTok channel, or at least did a couple years ago, where he both demonstrates poses and poses random people in public, often with great results. He was a great manner about him so you might find those videos helpful and entertaining.

Yeah I found the grouping was useful but I also used it a lot at the time for very quickly eliminating obvious flaws. Agree that it can’t help as much with overall quality choices, and it was a slightly awkward fit for my workflow.

I tried Aftershoot for a bit when I was doing family shoots earlier this year. I didn’t stick with it but I found it useful for detecting closed eyes, missing focus etc. Not sure how well it would work with an existing Lightroom library but it has a free trial

What are you taking photos of?

A friend did this semi-successfully in the early 2010’s.

He spoke a few different languages, including helpfully Arabic and French, and would fly out to somewhere at the first sign of troubles kicking off, work and charm and convince his way to the front and then ‘embed’ with people who wanted to get their pictures out there. He sold photos to the wires and to some newspapers directly and normally managed to cover his costs but not make much ‘profit’. I think one or two amazing shots could raise most of the money for a trip.

Over time he got to know people and they would ask him to go to places and be more explicit that they were interested in photos, “Are you thinking of going to Syria” etc. He also built up relationships in country, so he would have ‘fixers” or similar - particularly if someone was happy about a big photo that had been in newspapers. A lot of this was the Arab Spring aftermath which sounded chaotic as hell, loads of militias roaming around Libya and Egypt etc. He almost got killed a couple of times in quick succession and decided to stop, it didn’t seem like there was an obvious route to a staff position or being better protected or paid.

To be honest hearing him talk about killed any sense of romance and adventure about it. It sounded incredibly grim all the time, living in squalor often with horrible people who generally didn’t care about him and hoping not to suffer an unpleasant death.

Make sure you soft proof and do colour management properly for prints - good labs will have instructions on how to do this, paper profiles etc. Here’s WHCC for example.