There's a huge difference between using gaffers tape, cinefoil, bungies, or Home Depot clamps to supplement professional gear and hacking together your own rubbish "beauty dish" or SB or SB grids. All it will take is one person to trip over your stand for you to see how poorly your two hours of DIY work will hold up. When that SB crumples and tears instead of just flexing and bouncing back like a normal SB would, you'll wish you'd done the right thing from the start and bought that $100 SB or BD instead of wasting your time on crap that doesn't even work right.
It's like the whole tripod upgrading argument, except this time they're trying to use 2x4's instead of $10 Walmart legs.
Cordell, it's a sad but true thing that people are too often caught up in perception. If you want to get business you have to manage that by being able to look impressive. If you want to stay in business, you also need to be impressive.
People have problems with exponentials and intangibles. This is why they find it difficult to pay people for information, expertise, etc. That's an intangible. The same people that don't want to spend a couple hundred for an image will drop more for a cell phone. They simply can't pinpoint a fair price for an intangible. The market varies far too wildly because the providers of these services find it as difficult to price their work as buyers do.
So, you can fight it, and perhaps lose clients. Or you can play to it, and profit. Choice is yours.
shatterkiss wrote:
Sure, I get hired based on what results I'm capable of. But the real question is, would they hire me again after the first gig? And with any client their final satisfaction with your service is going to be a matrix of a number of factors...personality, how comfortable/happy they were with pricing and the business side of the process, your demeanor and comportment during the job, how they felt about the balance of pricing to value. Everyone defines "value" differently, and that's where an issue like this arises.
I've definitely had clients fail to hire me again because they felt that, at the rates I charged, I should have had better gear. In some cases that may be based on their knowledge of equipment (I call it "knowing just enough to be dangerous") or the quality of tools being visible in the final product...or just based on not showing up with enough stuff. I can roll in with 4 Profoto heads and still not make the right impression because the client would have been more jazzed with 1 head and 3 assistants. I have one client that's more impressed when I can do more with LESS equipment, because it means logistics won't be as much of an issue for her - I can shoot her jobs in smaller spaces with less setup time, which means lower corollary expense on things like hotel meeting rooms. Honestly, you never know.
That said, I've never seen the situation where a client is more impressed with me showing up with DIYed and MacGuyvered gear. It may be a fun exercise for your off-hours, but a client generally will feel like they're paying you to own the right tools for the job...or to not be taking the job....Show more →
shatterkiss,HEY:
I must say,any client that won't take you (in this case I'm talking about you) on base of the gear you use is probably making a mistake.I'm amazed by the pictures in your flickr and they are very inspiring.
About the softbox tut I wrote and linked here,I feel that I have say again:
This softbox isn't in exchange for pro equipment (photographer's level and pro need).
After all you don't imamging that I get to client house with carton box as a softbox and some clips to hold the backgrounds.What those DIY tut (mine and other on the web)
simple offers a cheap opportunity for people that already have the basic gear (today almost any photo amateur owns a DSLR and an of camera flash ) to test their abilities and expand their creativity.I probably don't have to tell the differences between the results of popup flash photography and of camera flash photography. I do not advise photographers to use this kind of equipment for proffesional work.
