wedding photographer fiasco...

bravobeastie

We wanted one of ours enlarged but when we took it to a photo place and they wouldn't do it (obviously the copyright) so we went home and scanned one onto normal pic size, took it back and said it was one that a guest had taken on their digi cam

totalsolutions

My DD photographer is asking £1500 and worth every penny for her wedding in June.

You can retake the photos in the book if scanning is a problem, and then photoshop?

party_of_five

Scanning the photos would be a breach of copyright and so illegal so if you are going to do it, I certainly wouldn't be mentioning it here.

Sorry, I'm a photographer and so I'm sensitive to such matters naturally, but the end of the day, you wouldn't look at a Picasso and expect to pay only the price of the canvas. The value is in the work, skill and training in creating the image. There is a weird perception that once a photo is taken it can be given away for free, but it is someone's living. You wouldn't expect to be able to take a book for free because it has already been printed.

Don't want to get on my soapbox (too late, OK) but it is frustrating for me. That said, some photographers are likely to negotiate after a period of time in terms of the negatives decreasing in value so a polite approach might be your best bet...

avidcameraman

Firstly I've been a professional photographer for 25 years first in the commercial sector and more recently in wedding and portrait photography.

When I shot pictures for commercial clients its was charged by the day or part there of, and the client was supplied with several transparencies and you were paid no more.

And I do the same now for my wedding clients they get all there pictures on a disk to do what they want with, most do take or come back for my albums because i offer this as an extra service.

But I disagree with the old school wedding photographers who want large sums for old negs which they may never have used again, there may be a need for a small charge to get the negs out of the filling system.

party_of_five

I think it is really a choice thing as to how you run your business as a photographer rather than a right/wrong thing. Commercial photography is obviously quite a different animal, and if you offer your wedding clients all images as high res as part of your package, then I guess you are including that in your pricing. I guess it is down to photographers to make it clear and for customers to check when they are booking - it is a great question to add to the list when you are booking your photographer and then at least you know where you are.

Lucky_Harry

But there's none of that nonsense with us. Our Guernsey-based photography company supplies the image DVD as part of its standard £575 package (see http://www.pleasing-prices.net/package.php?division=wedding.
), so clients can print as and when they want. Digital technology, on-line web galleries, broadband and all the rest of it have changed things forever in the photography industry, and we think that photographers who cling on to yesterday's standard (but somewhat client-unfriendly!) practices will simply get left behind.

photoperson

Can I ask a question: What's "Old School" or "nonsense" about getting reasonable payment for work you've done?? A professional photographer is in the business of selling photographs - if you want the rights to do what you want with their work you should expect to pay for it.

Think about it this analogy: you pay a painter to paint a room in your house, therefore you've paid for his services to do his work on that room. Does that mean when it needs re-painted in a couple of years time the painter should paint it for free because you've already paid him to paint the room?? Of course not.

Photographers are no different. Asking a client to pay them a fair amount for their product is not "trying to make a fast buck". At the end of the day, if you're going to complain about paying someone for something why not do it yourself??

fitshase

I think a lot of people don't realise the work that goes into being a wedding photographer. It's not just the case of turning up, taking some photos, printing them and getting paid. A friend of mine has just gone self employed and does weddings and commercial photographs. He charges between £300 and £1,500 depending on the package you want.

One of the main things people forget is that weddings are normally weekend events (and normally then only on a Saturday). If a photographer is at one wedding on a Saturday charging, say, £500 then that is the only wedding they are likely to do that day. 4 Saturday weddings a month (if they're lucky) gives £2000 a month before tax, expenses, etc. Now, some photographers are booked solid but the majority may have some months where they only have 1 or even no weddings.

Now, the work doesn't stop when the wedding is finished. They need to get the photos downloaded (and backed up - twice) and then start processing them. A wedding photographer shooting digital will normally shoot in RAW format which gives more control to correct the image if the need arises. They might then spend time converting some images to black and white, sepia, etc., depending on what the client has specified (or they might just do it to give the client more choice). My friend has just done a wedding last weekend where he took over 700 photos. Each photo file is about 6-8MB giving approx 5GB of data to process - not an easy or quick task.

Once this is done, it is the case of putting the proofs together for the client and making sure that each image is perfect.

The work then stops until the client has decided which photos they want and how they want them (black and white, large, small, sepia, etc). Now it is the time to create the album which, again, takes time as well as money (to buy the album itself).

The equipment which a photographer uses is not cheap either. A decent digital SLR is around £800. Each lens (the better the lens the better the image) can be anywhere between £200 and £1,000. A good quality A3 printer to enable them to print the images in-house (including enlargements), can be £300-£400 plus the cost of paper and ink. Now, add in the backup factor (backup camera, lenses, batteries, memory cards, etc), and the cost spirals. I don't think you'd be too happy if the photographer turned up with a £90 digital compact camera or had to stop halfway through because their camera broke and they didn't have a spare.

A photographer expects to be paid fairly as it is their job (just like anyone who works expects to be paid for the work they do). The photographs taken are not owned by you because you have paid the photographer to attend. You have paid for the photographer's service and the amount of photos in the contract. It is like buying a music CD. You are buying the physical media (photographs) and not the right to copy and distribute the product. If you want to copy and distribute the CD, you'd have to pay a lot of money to buy the rights. To get the copyright, you'd pay a lot more.

My friend charges £95 for a DVD containing the digital negatives (RAW files) of the photos chosen and consent to reproduce the images (he still owns the copyright - there is an important difference). If your wedding was a few years ago, I would negotiate the £300 as the photographer is more likely to accept some money than none at all. However, make sure that when they hand over the negatives, they also sign over the rights to reproduce the images. Just because you have the negatives, doesn't mean you have the legal right to get prints produced.

kle87

Im a photographer who regularly has wedding bookings and after the initial album cost people tend to pay 5p a print which is why photographers hold the negs back. They have to make a living. Although I sympathise I think any decent photographer would come to a comprimise with you. As for people complaining about the cost of photo disks. In my case we give low res CD's free but they can't be used to print pictures. A wedding CD will be about 700 as I would expect an average album now to be 1200.00 plus reprints to we are loosing all chance of further custom.

photoperson

Exactly.

The problem is that people see an actual photograph as a cheap thing. They look at the cost of the photo paper, which is cheap. They look at the cost of a blank cd, which is also cheap. In essence, they only look at it for its material value.

But, as mentioned before the cost in terms of skill and time of creating the photo is much higher and is completely overlooked. The hard fact of the matter is that people don't care about the effort that goes into creating something. It's nothing to do with them. All they want is the end result for as little money as possible.