There is a common arrangement in this trade where the photographer delivers eighty frames, and the other five hundred sit behind a print package at two pounds each. We understand why it exists and we are not going to do it. You have paid for a day of two people's attention and the day is what you get: every frame we would stand behind, at full resolution, with a licence to print them anywhere you like including Boots. What we take out is the genuine rubbish — the blinks, the near-identical burst frames, the one where a waiter walked through — because that is editing, and delivering nine hundred unedited files is not generosity, it is abdication. The number lands around six hundred on a full day. It has been as low as four hundred and twenty for a small ceremony that finished at four, and as high as eight hundred and ten for a wedding that ran from a farmhouse breakfast to two in the morning. We do not pad it, and we have never once been asked for more.

Every frame is colour-corrected by hand rather than run through a batch preset, which is most of why five weeks is five weeks. We work warm — the ember in these prints is a real bias, not an accident — and we hold onto contrast rather than lifting the shadows until everything is grey. We will straighten horizons, clean a sensor dust spot, and take out the fire exit sign that is glowing over your first dance. We will not slim anybody down, remove anybody's wrinkles, replace the sky, or take out the relative who is having a difficult day at the back of the group shot. If you ask us to remove a person we will have a careful conversation with you about it, and in nine years we have done it once, for a reason nobody would argue with. Black-and-white conversions are part of the edit rather than an afterthought: about a fifth of any gallery comes back in mono because that frame was always going to be mono, and you get the colour version of it too.

A gallery is not the finished object, and we would rather say so than sell you a download and disappear. About two thirds of our couples order an album, which Maddie designs from the full gallery as a first draft — usually around forty frames across thirty spreads, sequenced as the day ran rather than as a greatest hits — and you get two rounds of changes before it goes to the bindery in Halifax. The books come back hand-bound in cloth or leather with the date blind-stamped on the cover, and they are the reason we shoot the quiet frames as well as the loud ones: a book made only of the big moments is exhausting to look at twice. Prints we keep simple. There is a lab in Leeds we have used since 2016 and we will send you straight to them with your files rather than mark it up; a metre-wide print of a moor at golden hour costs about seventy pounds there and looks like it cost three hundred. What we will do, free, is tell you which frames will hold up big and which will not, because resolution is not the same thing as composition and the photograph everybody loves on a phone is often the wrong one for a wall.