I decided to start this customer education series with one of the topics I see very often–customers wanting full resolution images on a DVD, and their photographers not “including” it in the package or not offering it at all. This topic can be explained from several different angles (e.g., profitability, reputation and copyright amongst others). First of all, if your photographer does this, be glad, as this means he/she cares about the future of his business and images and will be around for a while. So below are some points you may consider the next time you are presented with this situation.

Profitability: We, photographers, are image makers, and our revenue comes from selling images that you can proudly hang on your wall. If you are expecting your photographer to “give” you a CD with the high resolution images, then you are expecting him to forefit any revenue from your session or event. How much longer do you expect him/her to stay in business while giving away his/her main source of income.

Reputation: This one is entirely particular to my studio, and I know some other good photographers do this similarly. We give our hearts and souls in all the sessions we photograph, learning the craft, retouching images, and all other aspects that go into a final product, therefore giving images on a DVD opens the door for a client to print and possibly display and image that we have no control of the final product. When a DVD with images is purchased from us, we do not allow anything bigger than an 8×10 to be printed from it, nor do we allow to public display of these images without our authorization. This is mainly protecting our reputation as image makers. If a client intends to print anything bigger than an 8×10, then it’s probably going in somebody’s wall, on a generic frame, without my signature, my retouching, and more than likely without our printing standards, and this is not acceptable. No amount of money collected during the sale of a DVD is worth a badly printed picture of your work hung on somebody’s wall for the next 20 years.

In our studio when an image is purchased for a wall portrait, we retouch the image to perfection and print it with labs that understand our standards, and if it’s not perfect, we don’t deliver it until it is. Our eyes are trained to see things in the images you may not see when printing your 8×10 at Costco. We print on the best paper in the industry, frame it with acid free mats and non-glare glass, and frames that compliment the images, but most of all with a signature in silver ink that proudly represents an original finished piece of art, and I hope that’s the way you look at your photographer’s work and respect it as such.

Until next post.