170+ Shoots a Year? Paul McPherson of Shutterfreek Tells Us How It’s Done


By Kyle Wilson

With over 1,000 weddings under his belt and a thriving photography brand, Paul McPherson of Shutterfreek is no stranger to juggling a heavy workload. But how does he manage 170+ shoots a year without sacrificing quality or burning out? In this chat with Narrative’s CEO and Founder, James Broadbent, Paul reveals the tools and strategies that help him and his team stay on top of it all. Hint: it’s not just about working harder, but smarter.

Paul, you've worked as a professional photographer for 14 years now. You've shot over a thousand weddings and amassed 180,000 followers on social media. Why is photography important to you?

I have been drawn to photography since I was a kid. My dad had a Nikon 35 millimeter that I would sneak out of the cabinet. I had no way to develop the photos. I had no idea what I was shooting until my dad would edit the film and figure out that I had snuck the camera out. 

I worked at a camera shop in Farmington, New Mexico, right out of high school, where we were selling darkroom supplies. It was at the beginning phase of digital entering the scene. I would sit and tinker with these digital cameras but they were way out of my price range. I was not a good photographer and I was an equally bad editor. I had literally no sense of style. I just had a passion to stick with it and keep doing it. 

Video was next. As soon as affordable video cameras started dropping, I got one. I started shooting break-dancing videos in the late 90s when everyone thought it was gone. I thought they were super edgy at the time. 

There are those who have natural gifts and talents and innate creativity inside them. And then there are those who have a passion to unlock those abilities through hard work. I'm one of those people. My wife, Katie, is much more naturally talented. When Katie and I married 16 years ago, we started Shutterfreek and bought our first pro camera.

Today Shutterfreek is a highly recognized brand. What is it that makes Shutterfreek different to other photography brands out there?

Believe it or not, it is 100% the way we interact with our clients. I would love to say it's because our photos are one of a kind and no one can replicate them, but that's not true. 

When we are at a wedding, we go into it genuinely wanting to make friends with every single person we come in contact with. I want to know who the parents and grandparents are. I want to know their stories. I want to know the bridesmaid, the best friend, the cousin who came from a long distance.

There's never a moment when we are not working. I hunt for experiences, emotions, reactions, connections, and relationships. They're happening every second of the event.  

I will say one other thing. When I show up to a wedding, I roll in on a Onewheel and the statement that makes… you know when Owen Wilson and his posse walk in on that funeral in Zoolander, and the whole scene pauses and the DJ music comes in? That's kind of what it's like when we show up at a wedding.

Are you carrying a boombox or anything like that? Do you hire a team to follow you? Like, is it like a flying V kind of situation or synchronized dancing or…

It's pretty intense. I'll just leave it at that. 

Talking about intense situations, you run a couple photography businesses, and you have a family. What does the average day look like in the McPherson household?

We have three kids, a golden doodle, a bearded dragon, and a hedgehog. Day to day is crazy. Our kids are almost 16, 13, and 12. I wake up early and try to get a workout or some type of exercise to get me balanced for the day. We are in go mode either with work or kids from 6.30 until 9.30 or 10 every day. Sundays, we intentionally take off. We made a commitment 14 years ago that we wouldn’t book any events on Sundays. It's been a financial sacrifice, but our family's been super blessed as a result of it.

How many shoots would you be doing in a year between weddings and your commercial business, and how do you get them all done?

We currently have 12 businesses that we are on a monthly contract with. We do 100% of their marketing and advertising, including social media management, video production, photography, and personal content. We've always had one foot in that space while we were shooting weddings. 

We thought that we wanted to go 100% weddings, and then in 2022, we shot over 60 events together and it just about broke us. We realized that while we had the option to go down that full-time wedding elopement road and do pretty well financially, it was going to take us away from our kids. And every parent knows that time keeps going faster every year. 

We turned the volume down on weddings and elopements. We're only doing about 20 to 25 a year max. As soon as we have that many booked, we're done. That's made it so that when Katie and I do a wedding or elopement, that is our escape. That is our opportunity to be together, hang out together, stay at a decent hotel, eat a nice meal, and chat in the car for hours. We put about 15,000 miles on our vehicles every six months.

AI Edits in your Style.

Get started with 1000 free credits.

Narrative Edit

So you're doing 144 shoots for commercial clients across the year, plus 20 to 30 weddings and elopements.

Correct. We have a couple of clients who are out of state and we go and shoot content for them every quarter. A lot of businesses can create the content themselves. It's the editing and the branding of that content that makes the difference on social media. So we have started training businesses to get us the content we need. 

Ultimately, we're shooting all the time. You've heard the saying that you're making money when you're in production, right? That is the indicator of how well we're doing. 

So 160 to 170 photoshoots a year, maybe more sometimes. But then, there's a lot of stuff you have to do afterwards. How are you making that work?

It is a constant flow of exchanging information between multiple people. There's no possible way we could do it, just my wife and I.

We have a few independent contractors who work with us full-time. I have a good friend in Utah who helps us with video production. Our content creator, my wife's sister, is dedicated to specific accounts and pitches in on other clients when we need help. 

My wife shoots photos and videos and does the lion's share of the culling and the base edit in Narrative. I'm a bit picky to a fault, so I'll go in and take a final glance at everything, tighten things up here and there, and get everything exported. 

We're getting to that point where we feel comfortable scaling and outsourcing some of these things because, in the end, we can put our signature touch on them. But you have to have people involved to accomplish bigger things.

So there's this absurd number of photo shoots that you're doing each year. That’s a huge amount of culling and editing. What does that workflow look like, and how has Narrative enabled you to do that?

Narrative Select has been an absolute game changer for our workflow. I can cull an eight-hour wedding in roughly 20 minutes. I would say that's 3,000-4,000 photos from an eight-hour day that I can cull down to about 700 images.

Wow, that's incredible. How are you doing it so quickly? And why is it different?

Narrative can stack images that are either duplicates or very similar. In every shoot, we have 10 to 20 photos of the same thing. By clicking one arrow key, I've just gone through 10 to 20 photos in a split second, and I don't even have to think about it. I don't even have to look at those photos. In fact, I don't even look at the wedding anymore as a chronological sequence of events. It is more about groupings of photos and what is considered a keeper within those groupings. 

It's shifting the thought process from ‘I need to look at every photo in this spread to determine which ones I'm going to edit’ to ‘I need to look at this general grouping of photos, which is a fraction of the total wedding.’

The thing I love about it is you have that control. If you just need someone smiling at the camera, it's a group shot, then the AI will do an excellent job of finding the best image for you. But suppose there's a lot of movement, like a champagne bottle flying, and you wanted it flying in a particular direction. Then, you can dig deeper if you want and find it. It sounds like that's working for you, and culling a wedding in 20 minutes is incredible.

There's no lag time when looking at the images, and that's critical. Even on our new MacBook Pros, if I'm culling in Lightroom, it is significantly slower, and there's no grouping. The grouping of like images is the magic in Select. 

You mentioned editing. Narrative Edit is a product that we released recently. It learns your editing style by importing a catalog of images that you've previously edited. Once you've completed the selection phase in your workflow, it applies that edit so that when you arrive in Lightroom, the images are already edited and adjusted for you. I want to hear what that's done for you because I've had these text messages from you, and you're just like, this is amazing. Like, what's going on?

For the last wedding that I sent through it, I would say I was perfectly fine with 80% of the edits. That was insane to me because if I were to try to replicate the same thing, like copying and pasting a preset onto a mass number of images, the ratio of good images would be like 10%, and then I'd be tweaking everything else. So, having a learning AI tool apply an 80% successful edit to an entire spread is mind-blowing. 

It's actually learned the specific color profiles that I like to use and that I like a tiny bit of grain. It's gotten to the point where I'm amped to do an edit to help it continue learning just to see how it will do better on the next wedding. It has reinvigorated my passion for editing.

My wife is a lot slower on the editing side. She's also trying to edit something that I will approve of. So for her to be able to apply this edit to photos and know I'm going to love it right out of the gate has been a game changer. Editing photos isn't a daunting task for her anymore. She can apply that base and then go through and do the tweaks. It's so awesome.

This is what we're hearing people say, as you said, 80% of the images are edited. Now, I have more time to improve my photography skills, work out how to get my next photography booking, update my website, or just work out how to be a better photographer.

While I have the energy to go hard, time is the only obstacle I have in terms of how I can grow things. 

Before Narrative, we were working all day, breaking for dinner, and then we were still editing all night to try to turn over weddings. Narrative has freed up time for family and time to take on more production, which has increased our revenue capacity.

I was at a point where we were ready to start farming out all of our editing to a company and go through the painstaking process of having them learn our editing style and try to match it. It starts adding up if you're outsourcing all of that. We love retaining control, and we love the efficiency. 

There's a cost of using it as well [after the free trial]. Can you justify spending?

Comparing pricing is apples and oranges, though, right? If I were to send a wedding off to be culled and edited, I'd be out $300 to have it done. The cost of Narrative Edit is a fraction based on the time savings.

We've spent thousands of dollars purchasing other photographers' presets, mostly just to see what their editing style will look like on our photos. Edit is a really cost-effective way to jump into some of these other styles and apply them to your photos just to get a sense; maybe there's something in the edit that you really love, or maybe there are a few things that don't jive that well with the way you shoot. 

I've heard a rumor that you're launching an Artist Style with Narrative. To train your first style, you need 2,500 edited images. Some who don't have that many images will be able to use the Shutterfreek style, which is pretty exciting. You've trained it off 12,000 photos? 

By next week, we will have pumped well over 15,000 images through it. We've wanted to launch and sell our own presets for a long time for Lightroom, but I think this is an even more effective way to share what we've learned about how we compose images and get the tones. It's super exciting.

Paul, thanks so much for jumping on and chatting with me today. Really excited to hear how you keep building your business. And thanks for all your support.

Well, thank you for transforming our business. I cannot emphasize enough how important Narrative is in your workflow. There's no way we could do what we do without it. 

Paul and Katie McPherson are owners/founders of Shutterfreek and are based in Farmington, New Mexico. They have been shooting weddings and elopements for 16 years. Over time, they have diversified and now spend the majority of their time creating lifestyle content for commercial brands, but will always live to tell love stories. Their greatest miracle is their three children. Find them at shutterfreek.com and on Instagram (@shutterfreek).

Get Narrative Edit for free to revolutionize your workflow and get notified when we release the Shutterfreek Artist Style. 

This interview has been edited and condensed. Check out “The Photographer’s Problem: A Narrative Podcast,” streaming now on YouTube or Spotify, for the full, unedited interview and more inspiring stories from the evolving world of photography.