When you hire me as a professional photographer, what you get is largely dictated by what you need and how you'll be using the final images.

In order to achieve that, I'll understand what your aims are, what style you're looking for and how the photos will help you to achieve your future objectives, whatever they may be. On the other hand, you might just want some pretty pictures to look at on a rainy afternoon, that's fine too.

I'll attend your event for as long as we agree and take as many photos as I can of the people, things and activities that you are interested in. How many exactly? Well, that depends on what's going on. At a recent live music gig in a small local venue I took 600 photos in about 3 hours.

The next stage is the hard part - for me. Out of those raw photos, many are simply unusable for various technical reasons. Someone has their eyes closed, something weird happening in the background, that kind of thing.

Those 600 photos from the recent gig were reduced to 200 by the time I had finished the first round of curation.

Next, I'll select a shortlist of the very best. At the recent gig, the band had four members resulting in a shortlist of 20 photos, some of each band member and some of the band together on stage.

Finally, I'll do some light editing of the shortlist to further tweak the styling and presentation and then that's it, the whole set of usable photos gets uploaded to an online gallery where you can view and download as many images as you want. If you want any further edits at that stage, for example conversion to black and white, then just ask.

As you can see, taking the photos is the easy part!