Bride Unhappy about everything - how to handle her?

[carrie_zylka]

Hello, I am still technically a newbie to the wedding photo biz. It kind of

snowballed on me...I've been a semi-professional photographer for about 6 years

and this is the first year of doing weddings...what a HUGE difference.

 

So I did a wedding in Green Bay in May. First off let me say she booked me in

October without meeting me, without seeing an actual portfolio and all she had

to go on was my website which at the time had the whopping one wedding

(actually vow renewal) I did in July. I offered to meet her halfway (about an

hour 1/2 drive to the halfway point) to discuss her needs, what she expected,

and show her my work. She declined saying she'd seen enough and was fine with

it.

She sent me a credit card check for the full amount right away.

 

I waived the travel fee and did not charge her for the hotel room I got

Saturday night. I came early and spent 11 hours, shooting about 750 photos.

Three hours longer than in my contract and about 250 more shots than was

promised.

 

I had previously asked her to find out if flash was allowed in the ceremony and

she did not. Unfortunately I didn't think about it until that day. I asked

the pastor and he said no, no flash allowed and I was to stay as inconspicuous

as possible.

 

I got her the CD-Rom within the two weeks I'd promised her. I actually spoke

to her about a month after the wedding and never once did she express

dissatisfaction.

 

She paid for the package that included a coffee table book and a photo album.

 

After receiving both items about a week ago, this is the email I received:

 

"Hi Carrie. Hope your doing well. I am writing to inform you that we received

our wedding photo album and coffee table book. I am working on selecting the

5x7 and 8x10's and apologize for not getting this to you sooner. I've been

waiting for the photo album with hopes that in having the pictures in front of

me, I would be able to chose more easily.

 

I am sorry to say that we are very disappointed in the photos. Almost EVERY

picture is dark and cloudy/fuzzy. I thought that we might have problems in the

church as the lighting seemed a bit "yellow." I did, however expect that you

would make the needed adjustments. In saying that, I was extremely surprised

to see that the photos taken in the bars and during the reception were even

darker. I was most happy with the pictures that were taken outside (the park

and car), however, they too were NOT clear what so ever. There was NOT a

single picture that seemed colorful or vibrant in any way. The picture that I

felt was close to what I had expected was the picture of my bouquet and our

hands/rings. This is how I expected all of the pictures to be...professional,

not looking like they were snapped by some random family member with no flash.

Please explain to me what the problem was? or whether or not you were aware

that there was a problem while you were taking photos? Even after the wedding,

you had relayed that the photos were really great!!?? Were you just lying???

 

With regard to the coffee table album, I am also disappointed. It is very

difficult to see the pictures, and the layout is completely random on some of

the pages. Again there is no color and the black and white (that I LOVE) are

not clear. In all of the wedding shows that I attended, I was especially

excited to know that the coffee table book was part of the package that Chris

and I had agreed upon. The coffee table album that you sent us is nothing like

that I've seen at shows. I expected to have picture over-lays, fading, etc.

 

I would greatly appreciate your thoughts about the pictures and the comments

that I've made. I am guessing that since you (the photographer) sent me the

pictures in this condition, that we are not going to be able to print them any

clearer, colorful, etc? right? This is very disappointing at the least. I am

totally embarrassed to share them with friends and family. Please respond."

 

I responded by explaining to her that the amber cast was due to the fact I was

not allowed to use flash and there was really zero natural lighting, and that I

was totally taken by surprise especially about the coffee table book since I

showed it to a potential bride and she thought it was fabulous. I did re-order

a few of the reception photos, I believe I uploaded the originals instead of

the corrected ones, but that was only about 15 of them.

 

She then responded with this:

 

"Carrie,

Thank you for your response. I am understanding of the church lighting. I do

like the "soft" look and appreciate your efforts in creating this. I do,

however, feel that many of the pictures are not clear to the point that some

are fuzzy (due to the motion). I do appreciate that you are fowarding the

reception photos. I did notice that the pictures that you took "close-up" were

much better, brighter, and clearer, therefore would have expected the same for

all pictures.

I am not complaining about the picture selection of the coffee table book and

yes I acknowledge that I trusted you to select the most appropriate pictures.

You did not, however, address my questions about overlays and fading. Have you

seen this and do you understand my question? Again the pictures are very

dark. For example, I love the picture of Chris and I at the very end (toasting

with our flutes), but there is no clarity and it is very dark. Ours skin looks

gray."

 

 

 

So, finally (and thanks for bearing with me) my question is this:

#1 Do I offer to redo the photo album and the coffee table book?

#2. If so, should I demand the originals back?

#3. She I have totally discarded any single photo that was even the slightest

bit blurry due to motion (for future reference)?

 

Here is the link to the photos, http://www.photoreflect.com/pr3/ThumbPage.aspx?

r=1&e=2948207

 

Please tell me what your take is on all this.

Also, any future advice would be fantastic, thanks, Carrie

 

[bdp]

She's pretty accurate. Your ceremony shots are under-exposed and tinted. You can white balance them easily enough in PS or LightRoom. The formals after the ceremony are also tinged adn can be fixed.

 

What type of post-processing did you do on these? What was your camera/flash setup?

 

Never give out a photo that you wouldn't want everyone to see. If it's blurry, and unless it's for a reason, and you can't fix it, dump it.

 

I would redo your photos and correct the color balance and see how well they lighten up and offer them.

[mike_barrett2]

The link doesn't work.

 

Also, how much did she pay, it seems at least somewhat relevant in what her expectations were.

 

Mike

[mike_barrett2]

Maybe its my machine, I'll try another.

[mike_barrett2]

link doesn't work for me. Tried it on 2 machines. It says the photos are unavailable.

 

Mike

[darrengold]

This is the link you need

 

http://www.photoreflect.com/pr3/ThumbPage.aspx?r=1&e=2948207

[dilley]

you have to cut/copy the full address to see the photos

[dilley]

Hey Carrie,

 

First off, sorry to hear this. It is always my worst fear that I will get this response from wedding clients.

 

I looked through the first 50-60 photos from the link. I don't know how representative of the work you showed her is, but it doesn't seem horrible to me. It does seem to be lacking contrast and some vivid-ness and be a little dark (perhaps just my monitor) and also some of the white balance issues could have been corrected in post process. I do agree that some of the black and whites seem odd, not sure how you converted these, but the skin tones are a little darker than I would expect. These are all simple to correct in photoshop.

 

It seems that, since the bride did not mention her displeasure initially, she is not too unhappy with them, perhaps just more displeased with the book.

 

If it were me, I would probably offer to remake her coffee table book (or whatever it is that she has now) with more of the graphic style she likes. I would also spend some extra time adjusting color/contrast of the photos in the corrected album. The cost probably won't be too high for you, and should go a long way to making her feel more comfortable about the photography.

 

As for getting the originals back, I would say it is up to you. If you think you can use them as self promotion, or if you think that she is only trying to extract more albums from you, I would probably ask for them back. If not, I would let her have them as a further gesture of good will.

 

To take another standpoint, I might also ask what is in your contract regarding your albums. Did she expect to have input into the layout/design? Had she seen your album work before? Are you able to design the type of album she is looking for? Album design is a whole other skill set from photography, and people often feel strongly about what type of albums they want to offer, so you should decide if what she is looking for is something you want to pursue.

 

As for your larger advice questions, I would say that wedding workflow is a learning process. I don't know what your workflow entails now (photoshop processing for whitebalance? any retouching? etc) and you may want to focus on your color correcting and post process work as your next step. As for when to ditch a photo and when to keep it, it is very subjective. I probably would have weeded a little more from the photos I saw (one of the bridesmaid procession photos she is very close and blurry, but I don't think it adds much to the overall feel of the day). Again, it is just a learning process and you have to discover what you feel comfortable with. I often offer people two online galleries: One with the best 200 photos, another with all the photos (500 or so, and anything that is sensitive: heavy drinking, getting dress on, etc).

 

Best of luck on your year!

[nancy s.]

Mike.. you need to copy and paste the link and include the code at the beginning of the next sentence.

 

Bob is correct. You needed to use Photoshop on these before releasing them. In the church you could have set the white balance to a custom setting or (not as good) you could have used the incandescent setting in the camera software.

 

Do you use flash? While that may not be possible at the ceremony, you can re-inact a lot of the ceremony if the Pastor will cooperate and use flash and be where you need to for photos. A lot of these look like they needed flash in addition to photoshopping.

 

If you don't know this.. flash freezes the subject. Flash photos are double exposures.. the first exposure is what the flash illuminates and the second exposure is what the shutter speed allows for ambient light.

 

I would redo the work for her with serious culling and post processing.

 

Of course, the bride was in error in not meeting you in person to discuss what she wanted before hand.

[carrie_zylka]

Hmm, great advice from everyone!!

I will go ahead and offer to redo them both for her, I guess my first mistake was that this was my first real indoor wedding and I had just bought the 430EX Speedlite about two weeks before. I definitely should have practiced some more with different settings.

I only have photoshop elements but I would assume I will be able to do some additional processing using that.

 

I think her expectations were of those who do this for a living, have thousands and thousands of dollars worth of equipment, and spend a great deal of money to produce a great coffee table book or leather perfect bound album.

I did try to express to her that I was not in that league. I will assume responsibility for not being clearer with her.

All my other brides so far have been extremely happy with their product so I will just swallow this one.

 

I'll tell you one thing, I give you wedding photographers a ton of credit!! I'm going back to musicians, models and horses in 2008!

:)

[picturesque]

I would re-process all of the images for color balance, saturation and sharpness. Up to you about re-doing the photo album and coffee table book. She should have spoken up after seeing the CD rom and when you spoke to her the month after. As for the book layout, it is unfortunate she didn't meet you and see your work. I would ask her for the link to an album layout style she likes and see if I could do something similar, IF you decide to re-do it. She does seem to be fairly reasonable and even-toned, though, and that is good. You need to analyze the repercussions of NOT re-doing the prints and album.

[mike_barrett2]

Carrie,

 

I got the link to work. There was a space in it. Here is the corrected link

http://www.photoreflect.com/pr3/ThumbPage.aspx?r=1&e=2948207

 

I know this is going to sound harsh but it needs to be said...

 

This bride has EVERY reason to be upset. You didn't deliver as promised. I looked at your images on your website. Although limited, there is some nice work there. She had every reason to expect a similiar result. Not one of the hundreds of images even come close to that standard.

 

Shooting weddings is all about producing a consistant result in a variety of lighting conditions and often under extreme pressure. These images show that you are not ready yet. It doesn't mean you can't learn the necessary skills. However, until you do you would be best advised to not put yourself in this position again.

 

The lighting of the ceremony is the least of the trouble here. The cermoney shots that are taken with available light only are between the processional and resessional. You need to adjust your white balance for tungsten light, move your ISO settings up to 800 or possibly 1600 and shoot as wide open as possible. They should be shot on tripod and your shutter speed as high as possible. Typically these are shot at around 1/30th of a second ISO 800-1600 at f4.

 

The thing that really the issue is that the formal shots taken in the sanctuary have virtually the same lighting as the ceremony shots. They are all soft because they were shot hand held at too low of shutter speed. Even if you only had an on camera strobe, you could do so much better. You need to learn this stuff!

 

If you were to set your on camera flash at F5.6 your shutter speed at 1/60th to 125 and your flash compensation at -1/3 to +1 (depending on subject and distance) at 400ISO you would get a consistant sellable result. Really, you should have seen that you were getting very poor lighting and made the necessary adjustments. The key is you need to know how to adjust according to the situation. That is were learning and practice come in.

 

The outdoor shots and reception have there own issues but I am sure you get the point.

 

It appears that these shots were all taken in program mode on auto white balance. That is not professional. That is what Aunt Kathy would do.

 

There is a lot of things you can learn on this forum to help you become a competent wedding photographer. If this is something you want to persue, then start soaking it all up!

 

As for your question as to how to handle this...

 

It depends on if you want to continue persuing weddings.

 

If not, return a portion of her money and forget it.

 

If so, then spend the many many hours necessarry to make the images look as good as possible, recreate her album AND return all of her money with your sincere apologies for not producing work up to YOUR standards you have for yourself.

 

If you want help in what you can do in photoshop to help these I would be happy to assist. But know it will take a very long time and won't be real fun. But its situations like this that will make you better in the long run.

 

Mike

[carrie_zylka]

I can definitely take what you're saying to heart. I don't think I'm really cut out for being a wedding photographer. I honestly think I got myself in way over my head!!

 

But a wise man once told me...the only way to learn is to shoot...

 

Apparently I took that to heart!!

[mike_barrett2]

Carrie.

 

Thanks for not thinking I am just an @ss!

 

It is a tough situation. People always say that you should assist first. However, finding someone who wants to train their future competition is not easy. My thing is learn a fail safe then experiment. And, do not advertise anything on your site that you can not consistantly recreate. My advise to you after you get past this is take weddings off your site, learn as much as you can from reading and practice on FREE gigs until your comfortable with the basics. Then, start small and learn as you go.

 

Michael

[carrie_zylka]

Like I said, it all kinda snowballed on me, I was happy doing bands and horses until one horse owner said "hey do you do weddings?" and put that stinking thought into me head which translated into "hmm, if I can shoot inside a crappy horse ring, I should be able to shoot great photos in a church...how hard can it be???"

HA! Wake up call for me!!

I really honestly do enjoy taking the photos, I have a blast at the wedding ceremony and I love creating great photos. But...I think I'm just honestly not cut out to be a wedding photographer...maybe a lanscape artist...no contracts...no people yelling at you...

:)

 

Again, I do appreciate the feedback, good or bad.

How can I fix it if I don't know it's broke?

[eric merrill]

Carrie:

 

"This is how I expected all of the pictures to be...professional, not looking like they were snapped by some random family member with no flash."

 

I looked at a sampling of the pictures you posted. Looked at a few thumbnails and a few enlargements.

 

I would suggest a heavier editing is in order before showing pictures to future clients.

 

I'm going to pick 303 to use as an example. For starters, that's not a very flattering picture of the lady in the center. There's a piece of overexposed face in the right. Why is that in the frame? The window frame in the background is crooked.

 

This is something I'd expect to see from a relative. Not from a professional. You're only as good as the worst picture you show. Don't show this kind of picture.

 

The outside pictures have people with raccoon eyes and hard shadows. The inside formals have hard shadows cast from your flash. The inside ones have a yellow cast. Doesn't matter if you can use flash or not. A yellow cast is usually not flattering. Again, I would expect to see these in photos taken by friends and families with point and shoots.

 

I know you can do better. The photos on your web site are quite a bit better than these. Not sure what happened, but there's a disconnect between what you're showing and what you delivered.

 

 

Eric

[jimstrutz]

The most glaring things wrong that I see are the color balance and exposure. Both easily fixed. As far as the softness goes, it's hard to tell anything from these small pictures, but often adding in some additional unsharp mask will help. Depending on your software, you could just batch process them all,a nd see what you get. Then go back and hand tweak the ones that still need more color and exposure adjustments.

 

There are other issues though. The are a lot of feet missing from otherwise full body shots, and generally there is too much head room as well. It looks like you were centering the viewfinder around their faces, which is usually the wrong place to point a camera. There are also a fair amount of ceremony shots where you cut off the outer most person. Most of these have the camera tilted a bit too. You can fix a lot of this by simply rotating and cropping, but 500+ images will take a while. But since the bride paid for them, I think you should do it.

 

I wouldn't give up on wedding photography though. You can learn all of this stuff, and do it better next time. But I would advise doing a couple of free weddings until you are confident of this not happening again.

[danny_kizzee]

yeah you set yourself up here. i agree w/the first response. donot upload what you donot want to edit. i learned that the hard way. use lightroom to wb. the bride sounds like she is being nice at least. its never fun when someone out of the blue doesnt like our work, even when we bust our tails to get it done. but take it as a learning tool.

[mike_barrett2]

Jim,

 

I am pretty sure that there is camera movement here due to too slow of shutter speed and not enough flash to frreze the subject. That jives with the comment of the bride about the close ups being better. Unfortunatly, that is something that unsharp mask won't do much for. As far as adjusting in lightroom or photoshop...

 

I believe a professional has 2 real choices

 

1) shoot jpeg and adjust your white balance (custom white balance)with every change in lighting. Adjusting jpegs corrupts the image!!

 

2) shoot raw and do your white balance after the fact

 

Personally, I've done both and think RAW is 1000% easier.

 

But that's just me.

 

Mike

[carrie_zylka]

But if I would have used a higher shutter speed wouldn't I have had super grainy pictures with lots of noise instead of blurry ones?

 

I have never actually shot in RAW.

 

I don't have a MAC and always just assumed that RAW images are huge files and my computer wouldn't be able to handle processing them.

[mike_barrett2]

Cathy,

 

You are confusing shutter speed with ISO equivelant. Higher ISO (say 1600) does produce more noise. However, noise is always associated with higher ISO, even with film!! However, noise can be dealt with by things like noiseware that is a plug in for photoshop. Camera movement is the worst kind of problem.

 

Raw is something that is easy to learn. The file sizes are bigger than jpegs but memory cards are cheap. It has nothing to do with a mac. I am a PC guy all the way. Since you shoot cannon, you probably received a free copy of DPP raw conversion software with it for free. It is a great program! I use it (actually my office girl does) every day!

 

Go to this link to learn more about raw among other tips.

 

http://capturelifeinpixels.typepad.com/

 

Sorry I haven't updated this site for a while!

 

Hope this helps,

 

Mike

[mike_barrett2]

Cathy,

 

Look for the posts November 8th in particilar.

 

Mike

[mike_barrett2]

For anyone interested, here is a link to free tutorials and more information on Canon's DPP (Digital Photo Professional Raw Conversion software.

 

http://www.usa.canon.com/content/dpp2/index.html

[lightbox]

Carrie - sorry about the bad situation. You'll get through it. No matter what, it's not a fun place to be, but the advice given above about learning (fast) how to re-edit the photos, redo it all and give them a refund sounds good to me - even if you don't want to stay in the business. ...and take up everyone's offer to help you re-edit. People here are awesome at that - very, very helpful.

 

I'll leave the technical stuff to everyone else, other than to say that you should learn the following:

 

Flash (strobist.com, also look into a bracket and planetneil.com)

 

Posing and general wedding advice (book: Wedding Photography: Art, Business and Style)

 

If you don't have fast glass, (F2.8 or faster) get it - even 3rd party stuff is better than slow stuff in a dark church.

 

Post processing - just get lightroom and learn it. (Photoshop Elements is fine but there's a reason it comes free with scanners...)

 

Don't forget - these forums are indexed by google. Be careful posting client communications. I don't know why people post actual emails from clients. If they google you, it's going to make things WAY more interesting. :-)

 

I think the last tip should be the first thing in the 'newcomers, read this now!' thread.

[elnoralouisa]

I agree with the Lightroom suggestion. Go in there, and you can change the WB on every one of these, and they will look a million times better. Maybe some cropping, etc. Might be a few hours of work for you, but I think the base pics still have some good potential there.