Photography has become commonplace, virtually everyone loves taking photos and most people do a pretty decent job at it. However there are times when you want to hire a professional photographer to create extra special images for your family. You want to display some incredibly beautiful, emotive images that capture who your family is at this moment in time, you want those photos to represent something spectacular, you have this vision of gorgeous albums, a stunning framed portrait in your foyer, an outstanding gallery wrap canvas hanging over your fireplace mantle.
You begin calling to interview photographers and inevitably you explain to them that you want to print these images yourself. You’re looking for the photographer that will create those beautiful, evocative images for you, unique to you and your family and you want them to hand over the images for you to print. Somehow you’ve come to believe that getting the disc of images is best because you control the process and it’s cheaper to print yourself.
What?! Come again?
This scenario is very representative of the photography market today. Somehow people have been brainwashed into believing that digital files are the best option when, in fact, they are not. Digital images are MEANT to be is a temporary method of storage: all too many things can go wrong with digital media leaving you in a lurch with a ton of images that were never printed; images that will never be displayed in your beautiful home; images that will never be archived and made permanent. Lets face it, for many people, after you get back your disc from said photographer, the disc goes in the drawer to never see the light of day…maybe JUST MAYBE to be unearthed (if you’re lucky) in a year or two with an “I meant to print some of these…” utterance.
Why some photographers do not sell digital images or sell them only at a premium price
Full service photographers care about the entire process. They take time to ensure their images look as perfect as humanly possible, from the time of shooting (capturing that perfect moment!) to delivering a finished product (your image printed as a large 30×40 canvas or perhaps a custom album with beautiful matted prints for gifts!). What this means is that the overwhelming majority of professional photographers take every step of the process seriously. From the camera equipment and lens choice they shoot with at your session, to coming home and downloading your images and editing those images on a calibrated monitor (many photographers pay for special equipment and software to custom calibrate their monitors with their professional lab of choice, this can be a painstaking process for many photographers because not all professional labs print images the same).
If a photographer sells digital images this is where the process stops. Sure they created and edited images and turned them over to you, the consumer. So what happens now? The final product is no longer tightly managed. Chances are you don’t have access to a professional lab. Chances are even greater that your monitor isn’t calibrated so when you view the images your photographer sent you…you’re already at a disadvantage. Triple whammy that if the lab you choose hasn’t calibrated or changed chemicals in awhile… you can end up with prints that are completely awful. All that for a set of professional images not worth displaying.
This unfortunately is the difference between beautiful images custom created for you painstakingly by your professional photographer and lackluster images printed up by the local drugstore. The photography may be phenomenal but if your lab processing is off the image may as well be taken by an iPhone camera!
The full service photographer is an artisan. They want to retain the image to present you with the absolute best quality image possible. The image they create for you is part of their vision and this vision is only fully realized when you take delivery of your beautiful photographs.
Imagine…
Let’s say you don’t bother printing up those photos for yourself and those images stay in the drawer for a period of time. Perhaps these images are of your newborn baby girl at 7 days old (and now she’s 12 going on 13 years, not months, old!). You want to create something really special for her 13th birthday so you finally take that disc of images out of that drawer and put it in the CD tray of your computer to get them printed. In the CD goes as you wait…and wait. No images found. Hmmm… Pop out that CD tray, make sure the CD is inserted and again…waiting…waiting. In reality your images went POOF! They are nonexistent. This particular CD-R from your daughter’s newborn session doesn’t even show any data on it! There is no data on this disc!! Now you’re freaking out. So then you call the photographer to order another disc from them to get to your home ASAP but when you call the number it is no longer a business number. Then you go online to find that photographer only to find that they are now out of business! You have no way of getting a hold of that photographer and you had all these amazing images of your daughter you want to print an image for her for her 13th birthday and there aren’t any!! Your scrambling because now you’re sufficiently freaked out. You went to this photographer for the first two years of your daughter’s life, frazzled and more than a bit freaked out you start pulling CD-ROM out for each and every session from those two years and poof! one after the other the images on each of those CDs has somehow disappeared! It’s the photographer’s fault! It’s a defective disk! The photographer is a scam artist! A thousand thoughts whirl in your head when the sad reality is:
THAT DISC WAS NEVER MEANT FOR LONG TERM STORAGE
Sounds implausible? It isn’t. It’s actually a well known fact that CD-ROM and DVD-ROM discs are not meant as a long term storage solution.
Quality should trump quantity every time. Often photographers receive the questions regarding digital files and then “How many images do I get?” What a silly question really. Unless you plan on wall paper plastering your walls with photos from your session the question shouldn’t be: ”How many images do I get?” but ”How much will I love my images?” ”Will I want to display my images?” The answer should be yes. The photos you put on display in your home should reflect the character and beauty of your family and be captured in the best manner possible and should be reproduced on fine quality professional photo paper or canvas.
A wannabe-hobbyist photographer may say: “You’ll get 50 images (and based on the law of averages) you’ll like some of them.”
A true professional photographer will be confident in their skills enough to say: “You will love your images, all of them.” and assure you the images captured at your photography session will be of the finest quality, reproduced in print on the finest paper by the finest professional labs available to them.
This article was written by Marianne Drenthe of Marmalade Photography http://www.marmaladephotography.com and can be found at the Professional Child Photography site at http://www.professionalchildphotographer.com