John Patrick wrote:
Colin, you're way, WAY too cheap. Fix that and the problems go away.
John
I will go back and figure that out. I was def. way too nice to this family.. basically 3 families (couple and 2 kids, couple and 1 kid, grandparents) and unlimited pics for 140. At least I'm learning what I did wrong.
John Patrick wrote:
Colin, you're way, WAY too cheap. Fix that and the problems go away.
John
CoLmes wrote:
I will go back and figure that out. I was def. way too nice to this family.. basically 3 families (couple and 2 kids, couple and 1 kid, grandparents) and unlimited pics for 140. At least I'm learning what I did wrong.
Colin, I looked at your prices on your website. After travel, shooting, and editing, you would have a better pay rate working at McD's. Please raise them for your sake.
John Patrick wrote:
Colin, I looked at your prices on your website. After travel, shooting, and editing, you would have a better pay rate working at McD's. Please raise them for your sake.
John
No joke. Your portfolio looks good. I've seen people charge that much per image much less for the entire shoot and a CD with everything. Charge those rates just to take the photos and then offer a CD for about 5x as much ore more. Sell prints at a good rate if clients don't want to spend that much.
At your current pricing you are losing money wether you know it or not. Taxes, insurance (you do have insurance, right?), gear, expenses, etc usually cost about at least $30 an hour and you are probably spending a few hours shooting, editing and delivering.
I think the first mistake was to shoot 1000 images. I am not sure how that can be done with any thought to the image. More of a quanity over quality way of shooting. Because they know you are shooting like crazy this leaves them thinking you did a really bad job because only 60 are worth looking at. What I usually do is shoot 60 then sit down with the client and select the best of the images. Do a complete adjustment on each of those. Maybe 6-10 depending on the fee charged. They can see the difference in finished images mostly in the small details and final crop. Things like skin re-touching, stray hair removal etc. Since none of my original 60 are bad
(would have removed OOF prior to showing) I give them a copy if the want it. Just makes them feel like they got more for the money. Some then pay for extra re-touching and finishing on some of those after they have more time to look or show to other family members.
I would look for a lot more then 60 out of the 1000 so the client thinks they had better results. Hope you did not tell them how many you shot.
jefferies1 wrote:
I think the first mistake was to shoot 1000 images. I am not sure how that can be done with any thought to the image.
The kids, 3 months 1.5 and 3 years old. One would look, the other would not. One would smile, the other wouldnt.. that was what made the high photo count. I snapped a lot just in case all 3 would smile and look at the same time.
mdude,
I get what your saying, unexpected work on additional images that require more work than the original set should get a premium for the work needed....agreed.
Not sure what the usage of the two posted images are (i.e. first delivery, second delivery, non-delivery), but there seems to be a significant color variation in the children's skin tones between the two images. Wondering if these are sooc, corrected, uncorrected, or to be corrected images?
