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.