"Our wedding day is a planned elopement at City Hall in ********** on May 23rd, and we need an excellent low/medium-budget photographer to capture this super quaint experience for us! You: May be just starting out, or already established and don't mind doing a tiny event for a change. We: Want high quality, high resolution digital photos from a prosumer/professional quality camera. We'd like to discuss with you the option of buying the memory card in advance, and securing it after the event, as well as your individual payment for services. Prefer those of you who have your portfolio posted on a website that we can view in advance of contacting you. I'd prefer someone with an artistic eye, coupled with a commercial sensibility. The event will take 2-3 hours total. I'd like to know: Your hourly rate, what kind of camera and flash you will be using, where you are located, and if you are a student. Please respond with answers to these questions, as well as your site. Thanks!"
Maybe next we will be offered the chance to shoot with the BRIDE'S camera, and just hand it back at the end of the event!
Hey, I'm sure the newlyweds would be really happy to discover the joys of photo editing together....
Just think...they get contacted by someone who bought an SLR and - because it's an SLR - now is a 'professional' with their 18-55 for really sucking in all the wonderful light that city halls are known so well for. The green box mode will set everything - say ISO400, 1/30th wide open at f/5.6, the shooter's preferences for sharpening and contrast at the highest possible settings (because that looks sharpest right outta the camera!). Auto white balance will work great for the ceremony, especially when we're talking about JPG files...
Afterwards, the newlyweds will pick up their memory card, and hand the professional photographer the agreed-upon fee of $50. Hopefully, the newlyweds won't take the memory card with them on their honeymoon, accidentally putting it in their P&S and formatting it to clean up space, or the camera overwriting the files because of a different filing structure or something...
The newlyweds will go home and look at their wedding photos, without knowledge of backing up photos - especially important photos. Maybe they'll be lucky, and the photos will be fine...or they'll accidentally resize them all and replace the originals with 640x480 copies...or edit and save over the originals...or perhaps they will have no clue how to get the correct colors in the jpgs which were either underexposed or blurry...or maybe they'll just leave them on the memory card, which never could have problems...
I just don't see this method ending well for the couple, unless they are contacted by a real professional who doesn't want their big day ruined by someone inexperienced*.
*I'm sure that there are many photographers who could get better results with a basic dSLR and 18-55 than I could with my gear because they have an eye for weddings/portraiture and experience that I do not have. These are not the type of people I am talking about in this post....
just shoot in raw and hand it over. when they come back to say they cant read the files, charge em your regular $250.00/hr at a minimum two hour charge for the editing. Tack on studio fees and tax......
malice4you wrote:
Hey, I'm sure the newlyweds would be really happy to discover the joys of photo editing together....
Just think...they get contacted by someone who bought an SLR and - because it's an SLR - now is a 'professional' with their 18-55 for really sucking in all the wonderful light that city halls are known so well for. The green box mode will set everything - say ISO400, 1/30th wide open at f/5.6, the shooter's preferences for sharpening and contrast at the highest possible settings (because that looks sharpest right outta the camera!). Auto white balance will work great for the ceremony, especially when we're talking about JPG files...
Afterwards, the newlyweds will pick up their memory card, and hand the professional photographer the agreed-upon fee of $50. Hopefully, the newlyweds won't take the memory card with them on their honeymoon, accidentally putting it in their P&S and formatting it to clean up space, or the camera overwriting the files because of a different filing structure or something...
The newlyweds will go home and look at their wedding photos, without knowledge of backing up photos - especially important photos. Maybe they'll be lucky, and the photos will be fine...or they'll accidentally resize them all and replace the originals with 640x480 copies...or edit and save over the originals...or perhaps they will have no clue how to get the correct colors in the jpgs which were either underexposed or blurry...or maybe they'll just leave them on the memory card, which never could have problems...
I just don't see this method ending well for the couple, unless they are contacted by a real professional who doesn't want their big day ruined by someone inexperienced*.
*I'm sure that there are many photographers who could get better results with a basic dSLR and 18-55 than I could with my gear because they have an eye for weddings/portraiture and experience that I do not have. These are not the type of people I am talking about in this post.......Show more →
You saw this on Craigslist, right? Here in NYC there tends to be one or two ads posted daily that read pretty much exactly like this. Clients trying to write their own ticket is definitely not a new phenomenon.
I am a relatively new photographer. And one thing I see here over and over, are other Pros teasing and mocking people looking for a deal. As if there is something wrong with bargain hunting.
Sure doing this kind of job for $50 is stupid. That would barley pay for one of my memory cards. But I wouldn't hesitate to do it for $500. If you have no other jobs on that day, why would anyone turn down the extra money?
Just make sure the contract says your not liable for anything, and take the money before they get the card. 3 hours, $500, buy a new Extreme IV, all done.
500 bucks, no contract, 16 gig card handed over of a 1000+ raw images, then let them come back for prints after they figure out they cant handle the processing. :o)
Sounds a bit like some Graffiti seen a little while ago on a New York Subway station.
X**N + Y**N = Z**N has no integer solutions for any N > 2.
(Fermat's last theorem -- actually solved quite recently).
However before a solution was found (English mathematician Wiles) the Graffiti artist wrote on the wall
'" I've just found an excellent solution to this -- but my train is coming so I haven't had time to write it all down.".
There is no way a load of amateur shooters will produce a good wedding portfolio.
They might get the shots but there is surely a lot more to Photography than just pressing the shutter -- you have to capture and frame shots and do so many other things that a typical amateur has no idea about.
I'm not a wedding shooter myself but I wouldn't worry about these type of commercials. People WILL pay for quality work - especially if it is essentially a "1-Off" experience. If they don't then you haven't lost anything either.
They only way that this will become the future of weddings is if there are photographers that keep accepting this kind of a deal. Then word of mouth keeps this out there.
Would I do it....right now, yes. In the midst of a busy senior wedding season, probably not.
It's really not much different than working as a 2nd photographer for a seasoned wedding photographer. You shoot, hand over the images and walk off. In all reality, at $500, you're making twice as much than a standard day rate as a 2nd photographer. Which is usually about $175-250.
louis fusco wrote:
500 bucks, no contract, 16 gig card handed over of a 1000+ raw images, then let them come back for prints after they figure out they cant handle the processing. :o)
Maybe not. When I started out, photographers and labs closely controlled the hocus pocus. That's no longer the case.
I teach a digital photography workshop once a quarter. You'd be surprised at the number of housewives with P&S or Digial Rebels who have Lightroom or even PS3!
I think it's a great ad. These people know what they want and have explained it well. No indications they're looking for something other than high quality (prefer portfolio on the web). And certainly no indication they're looking to go cheap ("commercial sensibility" can mean many things). I'd also assume that if they knew enough to write this ad, they know enough to edit the photos after the fact, at least to their own satisfaction. Only problem I see for the photog is no control over the final product. Also, if no self-respecting wedding photographer would (or should)touch this (which is what it seems most posting here are implying), then what's the problem with the scenarios of doom you are forecasting?
I don't find it to be all that far fetched, I know there are "shoot and burn" photographers who just burn the images to a disk and hand that over. If you use a 1 series camera you could write to two cards, keep one for yourself (portfolio use) and give the other to the client. You'd probably want to do some chimping to get rid of clearly out of focus or poorly exposed shots but it seems feasible. It's not something I would personally do, but I'm sure they will find someone who will.
