I recently did a couple shoots with my husband for our anniversary and was super excited to book this local photographer. We agreed on a 3 week turn around for final gallery and paid upfront $320 for 30-40 final images. The shoot went well, even gave her a new location for future shoots and gave her a mood/inspo board of what I was going for.
Anyways first issue that happened was after the 3 week mark came (a Wednesday) I heard nothing and waited until the end of the week giving hear a few days of grace to give me an update. I reached out on Monday and heard back later that day basically saying she was behind and was sorry for not communicating. I understood bc life gets busy but was a little upset bc it shouldn’t be the clients responsibility reaching out to check in.
Finally received the final galley but was so upset at the shots that were picked and some of the editing. Several pictures had this motion/blur effect for still images that had no movement, she included Black and White images which I never agreed to the final gallery and she had the worst cropping ratios to several pictures. Where if I wanted to print a 5x7 the image would not be fully printed. I emailed her politely saying that neither my husband nor I were fans of certain pics and asked if resizing/re-editing could be done. She said that the ones with motion blur effect were done with camera and nothing could be done with those and that if I wanted re-edited pics it would be an additional $75 for a “Artistic Rights Fee”.
Now I just wanted to know if that fee is a common thing in the industry? Especially knowing your client was unsatisfied with your work. I feel a bit cheated expressing that we didn’t like certain pics and that if we wanted anything done it would be extra $.
I posted examples on my page for reference to this post. Thanks!
So did you pay $320 for the shoot and the edited images? If so, it’s likely you are working with an amateur…a bad one judging by the photos. She tried to do black and white to compensate for terrible light and exposure, probably bad focus, too. Black and white can hide a few things. She probably didn’t shoot in raw, making it all the worse. She tried photo techniques (the spin) without practicing enough first… turned out crappy. It’s fine to try, but if it doesn’t work you don’t show the client. If her work was better on her page, it may have been from a photo workshop where someone else set the scene, created lighting, etc. And then they took the pictures and included in their portfolio. Try again with a different photog. Don’t recommend this one to your friends.
I’ve seen this one, I usually refuse to edit someone else’s photos but a friend of mine came to me with some absolutely terrible wedding photos. They were sooooo bad. I went to look at the photographer’s work on his Facebook page (this was in the mid 2010s) and there were some really great photos, but the ones that were good were all in a studio with models and grouped together. Usually you get a little info from posts, but these were just photos with no captions. The rest ranged from mild cringe to just ok–nothing that came even close to the handful of well lit and composed studio shots.
She got married the day after Christmas which severely limited the pool to choose from, but she trusted his work based off those stunning studio photos. I didn’t add any artistic effect, just clean edits for color correction (white balance was way off, she really wanted a white dress) some skin editing, crop/straighten and noise correction. Dude had an older crop frame and cranked up the ISO to the cameras max and let’s just say camera sensors have come a long way since then. I usually rename photos when I export, these were all original file names and for the most part sequential. Some of them were barely in focus so I’m guessing he just tossed a few of the worst and delivered everything else. There were maybe two that looked edited and it was BS Pinterest crap with words on the background. It was bad. Also an absurdly high number of photos of people who were taking pictures with their phone or the bride scrolling FB while getting her hair done. Like some weird passive aggressive thing about the phone photography at weddings trope. But I did make a couple black and white because it was just easier than the huge amount of time it would have taken to fix them properly and I was doing it as a favor.