Photography

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A place to politely discuss the tools, technique and culture of photography.

This is not a good place to simply share cool photos/videos or promote your own work and projects, but rather a place to discuss photography as an art and post things that would be of interest to other photographers.

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Just need a little clarification (alien.top)

submitted 9 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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My wife and I are expecting our first child. My in-laws got us a maternity photo shoot which costed $1800 for 2 hours. It included make up for my wife and access to a wardrobe. Everything was great the pictures were beautiful when shown. But now she sent us a proofing of about 300 photos to choose 15 for further editing and touch up. All photos she sent have watermarks and are blurry and don’t have the sharpness like when she was taking them and showing us. We asked about this she stated it’s common. Because people try to steal extra pictures by screenshot. We asked about adding a few extra. She wants $100 per 1 photo $300 for 5 and $800 for 20 I was so confused. And asked what happens to the photos we don’t get she said they will be deleted. To which I said but why couldn’t we have the unedited photos if you’re going to delete them, there’s a lot of really good pictures we like. She paused and said that just how things are done and this is standard. Idk it’s really making me want to never deal with a professional photographer again. Cause it seems like a money grab to me. Am I wrong?

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[–] [email protected] 0 points 9 months ago

Yes this is a very common scam and its pretty digusting. $1800 is very steep for the actual shoot, usual studios market these "expensive" photoshoots for cheap or free but then will charge an insane markup on prints, usually refusing to provide high resolution / digital copies at all.

This is more typical in the "studio" model, as a general rule you want to ask what you will be delivered, $2k+ would generally get you a relatively good freelance photographer who would aim to give you around 10-15 image full size for you to print as is.

Photographers are almost never going to give you unedited photos or a huge batches of photos, between 5 and 20 is about usual.