Why Wedding Photographer Eilish Burt Keeps the Blurry Frames

Eilish Burt keeps the photos many photographers cull first. The wedding and portrait photographer from the Bay of Plenty in New Zealand shoots in a vintage, film-inspired style, and for her, the out-of-focus frame is often the best one in the set.

In a recent webinar, Eilish took a styled shoot of roughly 1,500 photos into Narrative and culled it on screen. Here's what she relies on, what she skips, and why her style survives the cull.

Why she shoots for feeling, not perfection

Photo by Eilish Burt

Eilish has run Eilish Burt Photography since 2017. It started with photo shoots around the farm with her cousins, posted to Tumblr. The look she was drawn to then hasn't changed much.

"I've just always had a unique love for the vintage side of photography," she says. "I'm a hopeless romantic. I've always loved that look of grain, even the sepia, the vintage black and whites, those tones."

Photo by Eilish Burt

She doesn't shoot to trends, and she doesn't think other photographers should either. "It is easy nowadays to pick up a mean preset online and have a good camera and take some all-good photos," she says. "Having your point of difference from the start is what's going to make you stand out."

That instinct shapes how she works on the day, too. She never scouts a wedding venue in advance, because the light on a scouting visit is rarely the light she'll get on the day. "I genuinely am just led by feeling," she says.

Her culling workflow, start to finish

Before Narrative opens, Eilish copies the memory card to an external hard drive and keeps the card as a second backup. She works from the hard drive, never from her computer's desktop.

From there, her cull runs in two passes:

1. First pass, one star. She goes through every frame and presses 1 on the keyboard for the ones she wants to keep. On this shoot, about 1,500 frames became 488 one-star picks.

2. Second pass, two stars. She goes back through the one-stars and gives the "tip-top ones" a two-star rating. Those are the photos that go to Lightroom.

She culls in Loupe View, one photo at a time. "I'm 100% looking into each individual photo," she says. "Each of them offers something so unique, and sometimes it takes my whole attention for each photo to see that."

What she relies on in Narrative

Eye and focus checks on group photos. Narrative's Face Assessments show a green indicator when a subject's eyes are open and in focus. Eilish uses them most on the shots that are hardest to check by eye.

"For me, I don't have the best eyesight," she says. "So it's great for those big group photos at weddings when you've got big family portraits, just to be able to see that green indication there, whether all the eyes are open, the focus is on. I love that feature for that reason."

Her own preset, trained on her edits. Eilish trained a Personal AI Preset in Narrative on the preset she has refined over years. When her two-star picks go to Lightroom, her edit is already applied.

"Narrative has learnt how to edit like me, essentially, because it's had thousands of photos to work from," she says. It also straightens the horizon and adjusts exposure the way she would have.

She still finishes every image herself. "There's some photos where I think more grain will be good, or maybe the greens could be a bit more intensified," she says. "But for the most part, Narrative has done a chunk of it that I would have normally done anyway."

Seeing the edit before she decides. Narrative's Pre-edit Panel, currently in beta, shows her AI Preset on an image during the cull, before anything is sent to Lightroom. For Eilish, that changes some decisions. "Sometimes it does just take having your preset on the photo to see: no, that's really worth keeping, or that's definitely not how I wanted it to portray," she says.

What she skips, and why that works

Not every feature suits every photographer, and Eilish is open about the ones she doesn't use.

AI First Pass.

Narrative's AI First Pass ranks the frames in each scene into color-coded tiers, from Best in Scene (blue) down to Undesirable (red). Eilish doesn't let the ranking decide for her. "If I'm being honest, that doesn't influence me really at all," she says.

Her reason is her style. Narrative may flag a frame because it's out of focus, but that's often the one she wants. "For me, the out-of-focus image is what I like most," she says. "The out of focus really works well with my vintage style."

In Loupe View and Scenes View, flagged frames stay visible by default, so they're still in front of her during the cull. "Those ones I'll just mark as a two, because I want those," she says.

That's the difference between finding blur and judging it. If you need to catch soft frames fast, see how to identify out-of-focus photos. If blur is part of your look, the flag is information, not a verdict.

Scenes View and the grid.

Scenes View groups similar frames so you can compare them side by side. Eilish thinks it's "a great way of culling" and showed it during the webinar, but she sticks with Loupe View out of habit. The grid view is a no for her: "Grid, I think, would be a bit too overwhelming for my brain."

Close-ups of faces.

She doesn't use the Close-Ups Panel to zoom in on eyes. On her images, the point of focus is often somewhere else on purpose. "That focus is probably more on her hair," she said of one frame. "The way I shoot, I'm always shooting kind of out-of-focus shots, because I aim for it to be more of that vintage style."

One cull decision, explained

During the webinar, Eilish compared two headshots from the start of the shoot. They were nearly identical, but only one made the cut.

"The lighting was a bit too dark on the model's face, and it's literally just a subtle change of moving her face toward the light a bit more," she says. In the keeper, there's "that accent of light on the right side of her face." In the reject, "no lighting is present really on her face."

Focus didn't decide it. Light did. For a run of three similar headshots, she kept the two where the model looked straight into the camera. "She's looking right down the barrel," she says. "You can get more of a sense of her look."

Later in the shoot, one model's look didn't match the light, ethereal setup that worked for another. Eilish moved her into the Airbnb bedroom, used the single window and a dark blind as a backdrop, and slowed her shutter. "I knew it just would look really good in post-production with my edit on top," she says. "It's a lot more grungy."

That's the pattern across her whole cull. Narrative flags what it sees, and Eilish decides what each frame is for.

💜 Try her look: Eilish created Lovers Grain, an AI Preset for Unscripted and Narrative with "warm, sun-kissed tones and soft vintage grain." It's free on the Standard plan and above.

📸 Try it yourself: Narrative offers a free trial, no credit card required, on the Ultra plan, so you can run your own shoot through the same two-pass cull. Start your free trial.

👀 Watch the full conversation: This article is drawn from a live Narrative webinar with Eilish Burt. Watch the full webinar on YouTube.

🎼 Read the first webinar recap: Concert photographer Christina Demertzi on the fastest way to cull concert photos.

About the webinar guest: Eilish Burt is a wedding and portrait photographer based in the Bay of Plenty, Aotearoa New Zealand, shooting in a vintage, film-inspired documentary style. She has run Eilish Burt Photography since 2017 and is a guest speaker at events. Find her on Instagram @eilishburtphotography or at eilishburtphotography.com.