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!
From the photographer’s point of view, we’ve all had that client from hell that demands endless changes and revisions. But we’ve also had times where we’ve just had an off day, or we’ve mis-read what the client asked for, or the printers made an error. It happens.
I usually have a ‘3 edits’ clause in a contract. If you’re not happy with the images and want changes made, I’ll do that for you, twice. After that, there is an additional cost for further edits.
I have that in my contract because the photographer I was assisting for when I started had the same clause in her contracts, and she was way better at the business side than I.
This is the way! I work mainly in video now, but my standard is one round of major re-edits and 2 minor re-edits for free. It’s in the contract they sign and it’s one of the few things I point out to every new client. “Obviously we want to get your desired effect on the first try, but every once in the while we might miss what you are looking for. We offer X re-edits, and after that I charge X/hr. So it’s important that we nail down exactly what you are looking for with these photos/video/etc.”
Since I started doing this I very rarely even have to do the one major re-edit. If you tell the client upfront that they need to communicate exactly what they want, because it could cost them money if they don’t, they are normally pretty good about it.