I had an interesting experience with a large shoot.

I was approached by an organization to do a picture directory. It involved about 150 families. I had to come up with a pricing scheme. Some people told me to charge the organization a flat “Day Rate” and charge people for packages…Hmmm…interesting, but since I had never done anything on that scale before I didn’t know how efficiently I could do it and didn’t feel that would be fair to the organization. Ok method 2; a sitting fee which could then be applied to packages that get ordered over a certain $$ amount. Sounded like the best option…Well…Not really.

In comes Olan Mills, the international company…They charged nothing, no flat day rate, no sitting fees, and provided the directories to the organization for FREE! They relied on the package orders (very pricey ones at that) that they took right at the shoot. Needless to say there was no way an independent photographer like me could compete with that, especially printing up 150 FREE full color photo directories.

Companies like Olan Mills and Lifetouch Studios make it difficult for independent photographers to do larger scale jobs which is where the $$ is.

I’ve also had people have the nerve to email me and ask me straight out if I would send them full size files because they couldn’t print the ones from my site(s) big enough…Hello? Of course they wanted them for free too.

It’s frustrating indeed.

That then relates back to Pauls comment – this certainly creates the general feeling, that a photograph is pretty much worthless. And, to be frank, a lot of them are. In my mind, the problem is really how to separate – during marketing – the usual snapshots from high quality photos (high quality in terms of technicalities and artistic value).