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Selling the Disk!


carolinastudios

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<p>I am curious to see what other pro photogs think about selling the digtal negatives after a wedding, i.e. selling the disk? I HATE selling the disk but I find that a lot of brides request it so my disk is VERY expensive. I just hate the thought of my work getting printed at a very low end printer.<br>

What do you think?<br>

Thanks!</p>

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<p>I feel the same way about it and have seen many threads in the past on other message boards about the topic. I will readily agree with everything bad about selling the disk (bad printing, no retouch, massive distribution online, de-value of our work, etc...). However, I think that this is an idea who's time has come. We now have an entire generation of brides who don't know what it means to buy film and pick up their pictures from the drugstore. For a 22-year old bride, photography is something you view on their computer and share with friends. This will not change. There are still plenty of people who refuse to offer the disk but eventually they will fall away as a new generation of photographers take over who never print pictures. I don't like it but I can't stop it so I might as well accept it.</p>
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<p>I give the disc with every single one of my packages, even the lowest end ones. It's what the brides want and expect these days. As far as massive distribution of my work, I see that as a plus. It's gained me referrals up the ying yang. Just one bride putting my work on her Facebook garnered three new weddings.</p>

 

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Betty wrote - "It's what the brides want and expect these days." They ask me too, I know they want them. We don't care! Actually we do care, because we don't want the couple making prints at 1 hour photo places. The result are usually poor at best. I've heard this several hundred times that the brides will hire others that will give them everything. Actually we haven't lost a client yet this year. We've booked every wedding so far. We go into detail why we don't let our work out and I guess the brides feel ok with it. For example if you tell the bride her prints are archival archival, won't fade after 1 year or 2 they don't mind spending the money for quality work. That seems to be the key - quality work.
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<p>You can have something in your contract that says that your work must be printed at a professional lab. I list all the places in town available to the B&G.<br>

*My heart dies a little bit each time when I see someone picking up their wedding photos at Costco*</p>

 

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<p>I offer the disc as part of the package. i am finding that the B&G love to have the control over who prints the pictures, after they have chosen the initial thirty i offer as part of their package. For those pictures i use my preffered printer. They also love to put the pictures up on facebook and flickr like the previous writer i have booked weddings from a market place i would not have normally had access to its a no brainer good solid leads for nothing (relatively speaking)<br>

I feel as if some of the printers are losing out but you can still get high end printing at a reasonable cost when printers realise there is a drop in the volume of wedding printing they will adjust accordingly. in the past my after sales profits from reprints on any wedding have not reached the cost of what i charge for the disc and i price the disc according to what file sizes the client requires, so you facillitate menu pricing on your disc enableing you to upsell and retain maximum profit, instead of it slipping away</p>

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<p><em>"I HATE selling the disk but I find that a lot of brides request it so my disk is VERY expensive. I just hate the thought of my work getting printed at a very low end printer." -Gillian<br /></em><br />Life's too short....let go of the HATE, don't worry be happy! Just educate your brides and point them to good quality printers. Also, raise the price of the disk to the point where selling it becomes enjoyable. Easy peasy..........</p>
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<p>I don't sell the disk: I give it to my brides. It's my business model. I take the photos, and provide 'em on a disk. I do not seem to be alone. Every bride I've worked with has asked for this and nobody acted as if they thought it was an odd request. In short, I think it's right that this is where the wedding business is going, at least for the majority of clients.</p>

<p>You could add a clause to your license saying they can't use a budget printer - but that clause would be very difficult to write sensibly and in any case, it would be pointless. You can't control what the clients do with the images once you give them the images. I do provide a fairly detailed (but clearly written) end-user license right on the disk. I'm pretty sure nobody ever reads it. I told them when we negotiated in the first place that I will retain the copyright but they will be able to use the images pretty much any way they want, and I suspect that's all they remember or care about.</p>

<p>Remember, it's not just printing that matters. Many brides (and their families) will be viewing photos on bad and/or uncalibrated computer displays or television screens.</p>

<p>The sad truth is, I'm not sure that the brides I'm dealing with are all that concerned about the esthetic quality of the photos. They'd like the photos to be fantastic, of course. But I have just about come to the conclusion that brides would rather see unprocessed photos quickly than to wait weeks for fully and beautifully processed photos. I'm not sure they can really tell the difference.</p>

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<p>I will just reiterate some of the ideas above...</p>

<p>We give away the retouched final product on DVD's as part of every package we offer. I barely print my own photos, why would I expect that brides and their families would want to do the same. Times have changed. It's 2009 not 1989. We view most of our photos on our PC...that is where you edit them right? That is where they live right? Our marketing strategy is heavily web based. We are tied with twitter, facebook, our blog, and our website. Our customer base is of generation tech. They want to be able to post their images on their own social networking site and show them off to ALL of their friends. Which simply means you can't print them off and run them around to show everyone. They want to do it via the web which transcends land, water, and time. I can view my friends recent wedding photos at 2 in the morning when I am typically awake suffering from "got stuff to do and not enough time to do it" syndrome. But if they only had prints, I couldn't run over to their house at 2 in the morning and view said photos.</p>

<p>I understand some of the concerns about prints at "bad" printers, but ultimetly you are delivering on what the market is asking for. The market is trending towards edgier modern photography and away from traditional portrait photography. Young brides want thier photos to look like they were pulled from a magazine, not pulled off grandma's wall. The market is trending towards online delivery of photos even. We are on the verge of delivering all digital negatives via the web and not on disc at all. </p>

<p>While I understand that it is your work and you created it and all the fun stuff....it was their day. Let them have it if they want it. They pay enough to have us their and capture the images, I won't make them pay to print the photo of Grandpa up out of his wheelchair dancing for the first time in 20 years or the picture of long lost relatives from Italy that were just recently found. The day has so much meaning for the people involved and as we run our business's we tend to lose site of that. Some of us do...we refuse to. The moments of the day and the pictures of them are about the emotions and the memories. They all belong to the bride and the groom.</p>

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<p>We INCLUDE a high-res disc of fully edited images with every package. I don't think it's right to keep something that important to someone's life away from them, for their own security. We include in the cost of the package what we would charge for the disc. I suggest you simply add that cost of the disc in your packages and start charging that amount.</p>

<p>Not only do you get happier, more confident and secure clients but you sell the disc with every package. And, in my opinion it's simply the right thing to do.</p>

<p>Best,<br /> David.</p>

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<p>The way I figure it people don't naturally want to have bad images. The only reason they end up with poor images from self-printing is lack of awareness.</p>

<p>What we do is supply images that will look as close to perfect as possible. They're all colour managed and correctly profiled, and targeted at sRGB to accommodate most mini-labs. We do a couple of test prints at local mini-labs to check color correctness.</p>

<p>Then we supply the disk with an inlay card that explains how to get good prints made, and we give a checklist of things for clients to to ask when printing, such as only to accept prints made on Fuji or Noritsu equipment, to ask that the operator turn off colour adjustments, and have everything printed on crystal archive paper. We also enclose a few prints we've made ourselves that they can use as proofs.</p>

<p>We also sell fine-art enlargements (usually silver prints or C types on fibre) and we make it very clear that prints done on the high street are not going to look like anything like that. People often come back for them even when they have their disk.</p>

<p>In my opinion, supplying images on disk can be a good thing. If done with some care and management of expectations it need not compromise your work. The major benefit is that by charging for the disk you can remove the overhead of supplying small prints and gain a substantial increase on the bottom line.</p>

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<p><em>Life's too short....let go of the HATE, don't worry be happy! Just educate your brides and point them to good quality printers. Also, raise the price of the disk to the point where selling it becomes enjoyable. Easy peasy..........</em><br>

I agree with David, educating your bride and groom by pointing them in a good direction for prints is key. I always caution them against places like Walmart or Walgreens, who tend to deliver oversaturated prints.<br>

I point them to MPIX or Ritz, who offer better quality at a decent price. I find people like the ability to share the pictures online, not so much the printing ability. This is why I give the disc with the package. The more they show the pics online the better it is for me.</p>

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<p>I think you'd be even more surprised at how few people ever actually <strong>see</strong> poorly printed images, ask "who was the photographer" and then decide not to hire you because of the poorly printed image. I think it's astronomically low. The subtleties we stress and strain over often don't even occur to many wedding clients. After all, these are often the same folks who can't hear the difference between a poorly encoded MP3 and a CD, who don't understand why a photo might have a bokeh'd background, and couldn't tell the difference between a pharmacy print and a lab print. Maybe I'm overgeneralizing, or underestimating our clients, but many clients just are not that discriminating.</p>

<p>And, if you're providing color-corrected and finalized images, the chances of them getting the colors screwed up go way down. As Nadine says, most images don't get printed, and many are used/viewed online. I do ask them to provide a link back to me if they use them on Facebook or other sites.</p>

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<p>"I just hate the thought of my work getting printed at a very low end printer."</p>

<p>I would guarantee that it is anyway. $99.00 scanners and $49.00 inkjets. You're fooling yourself if you think the average John and Jane are not cranking out copies for family and/or posting scans. I'm with Steve Nuzman. It's not 1989. Times change and businesses must adjust. Would you rather have bad scans which print and display horribly, or inkjets / photos being displayed on poorly calibrated monitors from originals floating around? </p>

<p>I was married in 1993, my wedding was shot on film. I NEVER look at them. I don't even know where the album is. If I had digital prints, I would see them more often when browsing Picassa, AND OTHERS WOULD SEE THEM TOO.</p>

 

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<p>Now I'm not a professional, and in Europe the market for wedding pictures seems a bit more "tame" than in the US, but some recurring points always strike me as being weird reasons to not give your customer what they eventually will want in this day and age (the digital photos):</p>

<p>1. The bad prints. Sure the pro labs do better, but if it's really really bad, the couple will notice, and think "hmmm, weird, they look good on the PC and the prints the photographer gave". Why would they immediately think that your skills as photographer are the problem? Give your customers (and their intellegence) some credit, and point them to the better affordable printers as a token of good service.</p>

<p>2. Uncalibrated monitors and TV - if you're delivering sRGB profiled pictures, they will look reasonable on most consumer devices. That's what sRGB is good at. When I calibrated my screen for the first time properly, I was amazed at the difference and yet also amazed how little implication it had on most of my pictures. They improved, but they were not way off before. And I'm quite sure this is the norm, having seen several low-end monitors before and after calibration.</p>

<p>Finally, a really good picture works no matter what, even when colours are less than optimal. There is always a market for quality work.</p>

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<p>Howdy!</p>

<p>Nicole said:</p>

<p>*My heart dies a little bit each time when I see someone picking up their wedding photos at Costco*</p>

<p>Costco actually does really good work, provided you profile their printer yourself (which I have done), print on Fuji Crystal Archive Lustre, and override their automatic color correction, which is easily done.</p>

<p>What Costco does NOT do is adjust your color and contrast, retouch, and provide that extra level of service that a pro provides. Therefore, although I occasionally print at Costco with excellent results (it's not my main provider), I hang onto the digital images for two years, to encourage customers to order prints. It's the best of both worlds.</p>

<p>Later,</p>

<p>Paulsky</p>

 

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<p>Thanks. I like all the responses. I know, Hate is strong :) but I know that even with education brides will still go and print where they want. My reputation is very important to me and I don't believe I have ever lost a client due to the fact that my disk is expensive. Some care some don't. I think if i lived in a market that had higher wedding collection prices then I might consider including the disk with the package. But i'm not going out for 6 hours for a wedding with the disk for $1000. <br>

I saw the Belly's to Babies tour with Sandy Puc a few months back and a single image of hers is $800 on disk and you can't print anything bigger than a 5x7 on it! I know that she has earned the right to do this because she is AWESOME but I see her point. The industry is going that way but it doesn't mean we have to go with the flow. I think I can have some sort of control. </p>

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<blockquote>

<p>You can have something in your contract that says that your work must be printed at a professional lab. I list all the places in town available to the B&G.</p>

 

</blockquote>

<p>How on earth would you be able to enforce that? What are you gonna do, get a warrant and search the home? I don't think so.</p>

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<p>Tru David. And you can bet I will sell it for a price. I guess it's just hard because I got into this business because I am a photographer first and a business person second, that's why my husband is a business person first it helps with balance b/c I wouldn't make any money if I did it my way :) My art and the way it is presented to the world is one of the most important things to me and I believe selling the disk devalues what we do as artists. I know it's the way the world goes but I guess I've always gone against the grain.<br>

Thank you all. You all have wonderful opinions and it gives me something to think about :)</p>

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