The photographer that did our wedding photos printed them on professional paper and charged for each print on top of his fee for doing the wedding. This was also before digital photos were common. We got our photos and then relatives ordered what they wanted. Our photographer never followed through on printing and sending those paid orders. Then he disappeared never to be found again.
My MIL really wanted at least one picture from our wedding. She is big into photos and extremely sentimental. We tried copying one of ours for her at Walgreens in the photo machine and got the photo police treatment. I find our situation far worse than anyone making their own copies.
For this very reason our son's senior picture will only be done by someone willing to give us the digital files and ownership of the finished work.
The ownership of prints is an old business model and needs to go away. This is vastly different than a photographer owning a photo they did themselves of something like a landscape and selling copies.
I am a photographer who loves this craft. I work hard at it to put food on my family's table. And while I sympathize with some of the stories told above (photographer losing negatives, etc.), I can tell you that scanning and printing is illegal, it's wrong, and it hurts people like me.
I agree that this is something small and easy we can all do, which has a huge impact over time.
I know from working in a coffee shop in California that the odds are stacked against the ceramic mug. California requires that the cafe charge a meal tax if served in a durable cup, but does not require this for take away containers. I think it comes to about $0.10 more on your standard cup of coffee.
Using your own travel mug, however, saves you from the tax and gets a reusable mug discount!
My coffee shop of choice happily serves me in my own mug, but they always write my order on a paper cup anyway. Any advice on how to handle a situation like that? I don't want to stir up any bad blood between myself and the baristas since I do quite a bit of work there (plus they're nice). But it certainly is frustrating when I make the effort to provide a mug and then a cup is wasted anyway.
I love this idea! I know at the local Barnes & Noble mini-Starbucks they will offer you a mug, but I've never seen any other Starbucks make such an offer.
Couchsurfing.com? Wow, the internet continues to amaze me. Kudos to Jeff Yeager for practicing what he preaches and keeping real to the cause. What a character!
As a professional photographer, I thought I'd chime in. I live in Southern California where there is definitely no shortage of photographers trying to make some money (part-time or full time). Almost all of my clients are referrals, so I don't get many people coming to me as price shoppers. As someone who came into this profession primarily because of the digital era, I know that there are so many out there that charge so little just to get a job. For me, I charge what I feel my work is worth compared to what others are charging in my market. I currently charge $450 for a sitting fee which includes one 11x14 print and a disc of 600px low resolution jpegs. Large print orders must come from me. I still retain all copyright of my images and so far it's been ok. Of course, if the market dictates that I change my practices, of course, I will re-evaluate. We'll see what happens.
But it is interesting to hear all of the different point of views on this topic.
I say: find a different photographer next-time. There are many photographers that ONLY give out CDs. Although; being a photographer myself; it feels good to see which images the costumer liked the best. That way you know whether you did a good or a so-so job. Also you don't get the same quality from a 1-hour photo lab.
Thanks for the nice comments. On the topic of opportunity in difficult times, I wrote about a recent talk my company's CTO gave on my personal blog and it really addresses that issue. Here it is . Hope you like it!
Carpools get advertised as a win-win situation. Ask an attorney or even your insurance agent about carpooling. They both reccomend against them. If you have an accident It is your insurance company that gets sued for damages in most states, Your insurance pays for hospital bill and YOU get your insurance rates jacked up. Please check for yourself. Save money by NOT CARPOOLING
If you want photographers to change their business model, then the first step is to do what you're doing for your upcoming party -- hire a photographer who will give you the rights to the pictures. This way you are entering the digital age without stealing from your photographer.
Your photographer who wanted to retain control of her images, to insure that only high-quality prints were made from them, has a good point. Your lower-quality reproductions of her work are bad advertising for her. When people see those, they don't know if it's because the Walgreens scanner is off, or because the original photographic work was of low quality.
Does anyone have a feel for if photographers have raised prices for the sittings, as a response to people ordering fewer prints (and making their own copies)?
interesting point because there are some clothing labels that says 'dry cleanng only' that can actually be washed machine or hand washed. However, some of them definitely need to be dry clean though, otherwise materials will get ruined
Indeed, the airline employee discount is the holy grail of the discount airfare quest. I have never been fortunate enough to get one, but I am still dreaming.
It is true that agents, whether a site like expedia or you local travel office, will charge a fee. I also agree that, if the price was otherwise the same, the ticket would be cheaper over if booked the airline's website as compared to the phone. When I recommend calling an airline it is to ask for fares that are not listed on a website because they are too much of an inconvenience for the average customer. Not every airline has a deal like this, but as I said, the savings if they do are significantly greater that $10.
Southwest does have some excellent deals. It is the perfect example of a regional airline that does not list its fares in the major national database.
Hi Kayla,
I am just starting out in photography. I am taking pictures for free for friends to build up experience and a portfolio. Do you have any suggestions?
I am an amateur photographer who mainly got into photography to save myself expensive photo fees. With five kids it makes sense...
However, that said, I don't feel good about copying other photographer's work.
I recommend joining a camera club or finding a student photographer. My most favorite images came from a student photographer who shot them for $150 and gave me the negatives...
Personally I charge $150 for a sitting and then give the customer the digital negatives reworked for the sizes they choose to print. I also tell them where to go to get quality prints.
Just like istock photo has changed the way stock photography goes, the photography industry will change - in time...
I really liked this post. This raised a great question about being frugal vs. being honest.
I too understand both sides on this issue. I used to be a photographer, though really only freelance, and no weddings or family photos. I have to say that I agree with the idea that you should be able to buy the originals for a reasonable price which really factors in the photographer's time. It's a hard business to be in to make any kind of money.
On the other hand, I have to say that the kind of money you have to hand over for a few prints of already touched up photos is ridiculous. I personally think it should be a sitting fee which includes a small package and then a reasonable price per photo after that. Being able to capture the exact moment and softening the edges is what you're paying for. Just because you want more copies of the exact same photo as you've already paid for, doesn't mean you should keep paying for the skill. At that point it should just be a little profit on top of the printing costs.
This is just my opinion. I'll have to think about these options when I get married. That's one I hadn't expected to have to ask before. Thanks.
you can always go t-mobile and use their flex pay system its prepay but you can pick any of their plans you just have to pay full price for the phone i think. if you pay full price for the phone you do not have to sign a contract you just go month to month
I have managed a photo lab and we had a very strict policy on copyrighted photos- if the paper the shot is printed on says "Professional" it is copy righted. The photo labs are the ones who are liable if they print the copyrighted material.
I also dropped thousands on my wedding photography (this did not include any prints or albums) only to drop hundreds more to get a written release for digital prints so I can make copies for whomever wants them. Don't get me wrong, I love my photographer and it was our choice to spend what we did, but I can see where someone would try and cheat the system.
Our photographer gave us a high-res DVD of all our corrected wedding photos. She even told us where to get high-quality photos printed and which settings to ask for.
We had the option to order an album from her, but we received the DVD and proofs with a month of the wedding.
Her theory is that she could let our friends and relatives buy photos from her, but her time is worth more than she'd make dealing with the hassle.
Copyright law doesn't go back to the dawn of mankind, the way laws about theft, rape, and murder do. It was invented just a few hundred years ago--after the printing press made it possible for writers to serve a mass market, and they started to become popular and to make money. That gave them enough political power to go to the government and ask for special rights--a monopoly on the right to make certain kinds of copies.
Copyright law is supposed to be a bargain--creative people get a temporary monopoly on their creations for the purpose of giving them an incentive to create new stuff. The public temporarily gives up the right to make copies, but in return gets more cool, new stuff.
Even laws about basic stuff like murder shift over time, as society's opinions change about what's justifiable and what isn't. (Is it murder if you kill in self-defense? To stop a thief? In a duel? By accident? What if the accident occurred while you were committing some other crime? How about when the executioner kills someone sentenced to death?) If we don't have fixed notions about these things, it's no surprise that we change our mind about what is and isn't a copyright violation all the time.
The most common reason that copyright law has changed is when technology made it easy to make a particular kind of copy. (For example, all kinds of special rules were written when player pianos made it possible to "record" a performance and play it back over and over again.)
I'm sure that the laws will catch up sooner or later with scanners and printers. In the meantime, I think it's pretty stupid for photographers to expect their customers not to make use of perfectly ordinary technology. It made a certain kind of sense when the photographer could keep the negative and be able to make superior copies, but now the only lever they have is making the customer feel guilty. (The law is on their side, but not in any useful way--the FBI isn't going to investigate a mom for including professional pictures of the kids on a Christmas card.)
In the fairly short term the whole model will fail, as more and more customers simply decide that it's dumb to pay big bucks for copies that are no better than they can make for themselves. Everybody will be better off once photographers start charging for the photo shoot, provide high-res digital images, and sell the prints at cost.
As a small business owner that has to constantly adapt to changing markets, I think the key here is photographers trying to hang on to an old business model. My wife and I hired a photographer with a photo journalism background, and paid quite a lot for it. But we paid for talent, and got amazing pictures that captured the moment of the day that we could digitally use in a variety of formats. Who cares about their photo printing abilities anyway. The results we got were fantastic. We never intended to print very many pictures in this new digital age anyway. In the new digital age of cheap production, a photographer who wants to charge $600 for an hour of sticking a kid on a velvet sheet and squeaking a rubber ducky, and then charge 20 or times what it costs for prints, will probably be out of business in a few years. Adapt and prosper, or go under. Just like any other business.
Our wedding photographer made it so all of our photos were OURS. I wouldn't work with one that didn't. He kept nothing and we got a copy of every shot he took--whether it was our fave or not. Then we ordered copies of those we wanted. We also got all negatives. It was part of a package deal. He always worked like that and, frankly, I can't see why others don't. They don't own my image. I paid him for his time and for the professional printing of what I wanted, and everything is mine. Fair is fair. He obviously agreed.
Our wedding photographer, like most, held the negatives to his photos. As poor college students, we couldn't afford to buy them (at the time, it was barely within our reach to have a professional photographer in the first place), and by the time we were better established and able to buy the negatives (which would have cost 2x more than what we'd originally paid him), his studio had moved, or closed, or SOMETHING, taking our photos with it.
I don't for a minute think that this is a fair situation. We paid him hundreds of dollars for one hour of his time (we were only able to afford two 12-shot rolls). Isn't that fee his compensation?
I haven't thought about this for a long time, but it made me very mad when we discovered that there was no way for us to purchase our photos (and even if we found him now, we're long past the "deadline" for how long he said he'd hold the negatives).
Lots of photographers will sell you their negatives or digital prints (after a certain amount of time) for a price. If you want pictures galore off of your sitting, just ask your photographer how much it would cost to buy their "originals" (or digital copy). Most photographers will make some kind of deal for a price.
Even though the pictures are of your family (and/or kids), the photographer also is protecting their work by not having/letting you take their work (your pictures) and posting them elsewhere or selling them to someone else. And mostly likely, you're not selling your own family's photos... BUT you could be (to a stock photography site or something). That's just a photographer's POV.
The photographer that did our wedding photos printed them on professional paper and charged for each print on top of his fee for doing the wedding. This was also before digital photos were common. We got our photos and then relatives ordered what they wanted. Our photographer never followed through on printing and sending those paid orders. Then he disappeared never to be found again.
My MIL really wanted at least one picture from our wedding. She is big into photos and extremely sentimental. We tried copying one of ours for her at Walgreens in the photo machine and got the photo police treatment. I find our situation far worse than anyone making their own copies.
For this very reason our son's senior picture will only be done by someone willing to give us the digital files and ownership of the finished work.
The ownership of prints is an old business model and needs to go away. This is vastly different than a photographer owning a photo they did themselves of something like a landscape and selling copies.
I am a photographer who loves this craft. I work hard at it to put food on my family's table. And while I sympathize with some of the stories told above (photographer losing negatives, etc.), I can tell you that scanning and printing is illegal, it's wrong, and it hurts people like me.
I agree that this is something small and easy we can all do, which has a huge impact over time.
I know from working in a coffee shop in California that the odds are stacked against the ceramic mug. California requires that the cafe charge a meal tax if served in a durable cup, but does not require this for take away containers. I think it comes to about $0.10 more on your standard cup of coffee.
Using your own travel mug, however, saves you from the tax and gets a reusable mug discount!
My coffee shop of choice happily serves me in my own mug, but they always write my order on a paper cup anyway. Any advice on how to handle a situation like that? I don't want to stir up any bad blood between myself and the baristas since I do quite a bit of work there (plus they're nice). But it certainly is frustrating when I make the effort to provide a mug and then a cup is wasted anyway.
I love this idea! I know at the local Barnes & Noble mini-Starbucks they will offer you a mug, but I've never seen any other Starbucks make such an offer.
Couchsurfing.com? Wow, the internet continues to amaze me. Kudos to Jeff Yeager for practicing what he preaches and keeping real to the cause. What a character!
As a professional photographer, I thought I'd chime in. I live in Southern California where there is definitely no shortage of photographers trying to make some money (part-time or full time). Almost all of my clients are referrals, so I don't get many people coming to me as price shoppers. As someone who came into this profession primarily because of the digital era, I know that there are so many out there that charge so little just to get a job. For me, I charge what I feel my work is worth compared to what others are charging in my market. I currently charge $450 for a sitting fee which includes one 11x14 print and a disc of 600px low resolution jpegs. Large print orders must come from me. I still retain all copyright of my images and so far it's been ok. Of course, if the market dictates that I change my practices, of course, I will re-evaluate. We'll see what happens.
But it is interesting to hear all of the different point of views on this topic.
I say: find a different photographer next-time. There are many photographers that ONLY give out CDs. Although; being a photographer myself; it feels good to see which images the costumer liked the best. That way you know whether you did a good or a so-so job. Also you don't get the same quality from a 1-hour photo lab.
Hey Myscha and Bob!
Thanks for the nice comments. On the topic of opportunity in difficult times, I wrote about a recent talk my company's CTO gave on my personal blog and it really addresses that issue. Here it is . Hope you like it!
Carpools get advertised as a win-win situation. Ask an attorney or even your insurance agent about carpooling. They both reccomend against them. If you have an accident It is your insurance company that gets sued for damages in most states, Your insurance pays for hospital bill and YOU get your insurance rates jacked up. Please check for yourself. Save money by NOT CARPOOLING
If you want photographers to change their business model, then the first step is to do what you're doing for your upcoming party -- hire a photographer who will give you the rights to the pictures. This way you are entering the digital age without stealing from your photographer.
Your photographer who wanted to retain control of her images, to insure that only high-quality prints were made from them, has a good point. Your lower-quality reproductions of her work are bad advertising for her. When people see those, they don't know if it's because the Walgreens scanner is off, or because the original photographic work was of low quality.
Does anyone have a feel for if photographers have raised prices for the sittings, as a response to people ordering fewer prints (and making their own copies)?
interesting point because there are some clothing labels that says 'dry cleanng only' that can actually be washed machine or hand washed. However, some of them definitely need to be dry clean though, otherwise materials will get ruined
Indeed, the airline employee discount is the holy grail of the discount airfare quest. I have never been fortunate enough to get one, but I am still dreaming.
It is true that agents, whether a site like expedia or you local travel office, will charge a fee. I also agree that, if the price was otherwise the same, the ticket would be cheaper over if booked the airline's website as compared to the phone. When I recommend calling an airline it is to ask for fares that are not listed on a website because they are too much of an inconvenience for the average customer. Not every airline has a deal like this, but as I said, the savings if they do are significantly greater that $10.
Southwest does have some excellent deals. It is the perfect example of a regional airline that does not list its fares in the major national database.
Thanks for all the comments everyone!
Hi Kayla,
I am just starting out in photography. I am taking pictures for free for friends to build up experience and a portfolio. Do you have any suggestions?
I am an amateur photographer who mainly got into photography to save myself expensive photo fees. With five kids it makes sense...
However, that said, I don't feel good about copying other photographer's work.
I recommend joining a camera club or finding a student photographer. My most favorite images came from a student photographer who shot them for $150 and gave me the negatives...
Personally I charge $150 for a sitting and then give the customer the digital negatives reworked for the sizes they choose to print. I also tell them where to go to get quality prints.
Just like istock photo has changed the way stock photography goes, the photography industry will change - in time...
http://thelegacylady.typepad.com/lamoreaux_originals/2007/11/fall-photos...
I really liked this post. This raised a great question about being frugal vs. being honest.
I too understand both sides on this issue. I used to be a photographer, though really only freelance, and no weddings or family photos. I have to say that I agree with the idea that you should be able to buy the originals for a reasonable price which really factors in the photographer's time. It's a hard business to be in to make any kind of money.
On the other hand, I have to say that the kind of money you have to hand over for a few prints of already touched up photos is ridiculous. I personally think it should be a sitting fee which includes a small package and then a reasonable price per photo after that. Being able to capture the exact moment and softening the edges is what you're paying for. Just because you want more copies of the exact same photo as you've already paid for, doesn't mean you should keep paying for the skill. At that point it should just be a little profit on top of the printing costs.
This is just my opinion. I'll have to think about these options when I get married. That's one I hadn't expected to have to ask before. Thanks.
you can always go t-mobile and use their flex pay system its prepay but you can pick any of their plans you just have to pay full price for the phone i think. if you pay full price for the phone you do not have to sign a contract you just go month to month
I have managed a photo lab and we had a very strict policy on copyrighted photos- if the paper the shot is printed on says "Professional" it is copy righted. The photo labs are the ones who are liable if they print the copyrighted material.
I also dropped thousands on my wedding photography (this did not include any prints or albums) only to drop hundreds more to get a written release for digital prints so I can make copies for whomever wants them. Don't get me wrong, I love my photographer and it was our choice to spend what we did, but I can see where someone would try and cheat the system.
I don't think anyone will yell at you... I know about feeding families! Thanks for sharing your experience.
Linsey Knerl
Our photographer gave us a high-res DVD of all our corrected wedding photos. She even told us where to get high-quality photos printed and which settings to ask for.
We had the option to order an album from her, but we received the DVD and proofs with a month of the wedding.
Her theory is that she could let our friends and relatives buy photos from her, but her time is worth more than she'd make dealing with the hassle.
Copyright law doesn't go back to the dawn of mankind, the way laws about theft, rape, and murder do. It was invented just a few hundred years ago--after the printing press made it possible for writers to serve a mass market, and they started to become popular and to make money. That gave them enough political power to go to the government and ask for special rights--a monopoly on the right to make certain kinds of copies.
Copyright law is supposed to be a bargain--creative people get a temporary monopoly on their creations for the purpose of giving them an incentive to create new stuff. The public temporarily gives up the right to make copies, but in return gets more cool, new stuff.
Even laws about basic stuff like murder shift over time, as society's opinions change about what's justifiable and what isn't. (Is it murder if you kill in self-defense? To stop a thief? In a duel? By accident? What if the accident occurred while you were committing some other crime? How about when the executioner kills someone sentenced to death?) If we don't have fixed notions about these things, it's no surprise that we change our mind about what is and isn't a copyright violation all the time.
The most common reason that copyright law has changed is when technology made it easy to make a particular kind of copy. (For example, all kinds of special rules were written when player pianos made it possible to "record" a performance and play it back over and over again.)
I'm sure that the laws will catch up sooner or later with scanners and printers. In the meantime, I think it's pretty stupid for photographers to expect their customers not to make use of perfectly ordinary technology. It made a certain kind of sense when the photographer could keep the negative and be able to make superior copies, but now the only lever they have is making the customer feel guilty. (The law is on their side, but not in any useful way--the FBI isn't going to investigate a mom for including professional pictures of the kids on a Christmas card.)
In the fairly short term the whole model will fail, as more and more customers simply decide that it's dumb to pay big bucks for copies that are no better than they can make for themselves. Everybody will be better off once photographers start charging for the photo shoot, provide high-res digital images, and sell the prints at cost.
As a small business owner that has to constantly adapt to changing markets, I think the key here is photographers trying to hang on to an old business model. My wife and I hired a photographer with a photo journalism background, and paid quite a lot for it. But we paid for talent, and got amazing pictures that captured the moment of the day that we could digitally use in a variety of formats. Who cares about their photo printing abilities anyway. The results we got were fantastic. We never intended to print very many pictures in this new digital age anyway. In the new digital age of cheap production, a photographer who wants to charge $600 for an hour of sticking a kid on a velvet sheet and squeaking a rubber ducky, and then charge 20 or times what it costs for prints, will probably be out of business in a few years. Adapt and prosper, or go under. Just like any other business.
Our wedding photographer made it so all of our photos were OURS. I wouldn't work with one that didn't. He kept nothing and we got a copy of every shot he took--whether it was our fave or not. Then we ordered copies of those we wanted. We also got all negatives. It was part of a package deal. He always worked like that and, frankly, I can't see why others don't. They don't own my image. I paid him for his time and for the professional printing of what I wanted, and everything is mine. Fair is fair. He obviously agreed.
Our wedding photos are irretrievably lost.
Our wedding photographer, like most, held the negatives to his photos. As poor college students, we couldn't afford to buy them (at the time, it was barely within our reach to have a professional photographer in the first place), and by the time we were better established and able to buy the negatives (which would have cost 2x more than what we'd originally paid him), his studio had moved, or closed, or SOMETHING, taking our photos with it.
I don't for a minute think that this is a fair situation. We paid him hundreds of dollars for one hour of his time (we were only able to afford two 12-shot rolls). Isn't that fee his compensation?
I haven't thought about this for a long time, but it made me very mad when we discovered that there was no way for us to purchase our photos (and even if we found him now, we're long past the "deadline" for how long he said he'd hold the negatives).
Lots of photographers will sell you their negatives or digital prints (after a certain amount of time) for a price. If you want pictures galore off of your sitting, just ask your photographer how much it would cost to buy their "originals" (or digital copy). Most photographers will make some kind of deal for a price.
Even though the pictures are of your family (and/or kids), the photographer also is protecting their work by not having/letting you take their work (your pictures) and posting them elsewhere or selling them to someone else. And mostly likely, you're not selling your own family's photos... BUT you could be (to a stock photography site or something). That's just a photographer's POV.