I am a photographer and I offer my clients a disc of images with copyright authorization to print images rather than offering prints. Now, when I do a portrait session I take many, many images to avoid blinking/odd expressions/photo error/people not looking at the camera/etc... from the images I take I select only the best images from the session and those are the only ones I give to the customer. I do all the editing/cropping/retouching/special effects to the images the customer receives and I try to give the most varitey of the images taken from the session to the customer. For example for a 1-hour session for say 3 people I take between 100-180 photos and the customer recieves anywhere from 15-50 images on the disc. Anyways the advice I need is to the following issue...Customers are ALWAYS coming back to me and saying I know you took many more photos than what was on the disc, Where are they, I want to see them! Well its very frustrating becuase I do not know what I should say/do about it. I do not want to give a customer images that are not up to my level of quality becuase I do not want to make a bad name for myself or my work. I do not want to give a customer images of test shots or un-focused/blurred images or any other images with technically problems. I would not want to give a customer a disc with a whole bunch of identically images and so on... But I also don t want to make a bad name for myself becuase people get upset that I don t give them what they want... To tell you the truth some people are very persistant and do not give up. What should I do and how should I handle this. Sometimes I tell the customers this before the shoot but that doesn t make a difference. I should also mention that I am not charging people top dollar for portraits, in fact I charge $25 for the session which includes the disc and image rights. So its even more frustrating when I have spent 2-3 hours from shoot to finish and the customer want more more more... Don t get me wrong I am excellent at what I do and I am a professional photographer so I hope you don t think I am offering crappy images cause I only charge $25. So please help me. I appreciate all advice from the consumer end and business end.Thanks!!
I undertand what you are saying, everyone wants to take pride in their work. Maybe you can consider this.What you consider top quality probably is because your the professional. However, customers love to have a choice as to what they want.You may want to consider selling them two discs. One is the photos you choose, the other is the rest of them. Charge them for the other disc, customers will pay for the choice. You may find by using the give them a choice approach you gain better relations with your customers which only helps your business.Label the disc you choose Photograhers suggested photos .Hope this helps you to come up with a plan.
ALSO I would simply TELL after THE shoot and when they come back to pick up thier disk that YOU took many photos to avoid the errors and gitches that happen and only develop the ones that came out with top quailty that the other photo s were either too dark blurred or just garbage to give them !PUT in Wrting and give it to them knowing they only GET waht YOU develop !ENDS your Problems and satisfies your customers request for stuff that isnt GOOD anyway !HEY for $25 i wouldnt bother to ask for junk pics !
