“The Economy and Photography”

by Jim White

I would be lying if I was to say that the current economy hasn’t impacted our business, it has.  Yet we have evolved our business and still find that our clients still want quality products.  Sure price is important especially when times are uncertain.  We began offering ala carte pricing to our clients early this year.  This way they still get incredible quality and the ability to order only the prints they really want.  Should they want to invest in a professional wedding album later, that is always an option.

My point is folks, I understand that everyone is trimming back on expenses and weddings are very expensive.  Do not make the mistake of hiring an amateur to photograph our event that will be a milestone in your life.  The event happens so fast you’ll barely remember all the details.  Let me capture the emotions and events that will last forever.  While your work on reducing the menu, and finding cheaper locations for the reception, I’ll work with you on pricing and create packages that fit your budget and needs.  Give me a call.

“Give me a Disc”

by Jim White

Why don’t professional photographers provide the disc or the digital negatives to their clients? Is it because they want to gouge the client later down the road for more photos or sell huge quantities on the internet?  The answer is fairly simple.   We do not make huge sums of money selling additional prints, in most cases we provide additional package discounts for more photos later; most of the work is already done at this point anyway. 

Personally we have no objections to clients gaining access to the digital negatives.  We are primarily concerned about our reputation and future business.  For example: if we provide our photography un-edited to a client, can I expect them to correctly adjust color temperature in all the photos? Can I expect them to correctly crop, straighten, compensate fill lighting, remove noise, smooth blemishes, and eliminate poorly composed photos? Moreover can we expect a client to spend good money on professional printing services or chance our reputation and future business on a discount one-hour photo center or worse an ink jet printer?

It’s not that we wouldn’t love to do the “here’s a disc and see ya later” routine, heck it would save us about 8-hours of editing time, but literally all of our business is derived from word-of-mouth.  When someone views your pictures and says WOW that’s a nice print who did it?  We want that name to be “Jim White Photography”.  We do not want a perspective client seeing a green lopsided print that was done on an inkjet printer that was low on red ink and have our name associated with it.  Certainly this makes sense from any business minded person.

If you want all the digital negatives to put in a fireproof lock box for safe keeping you are more than welcome to have one, but please let us provide the prints or use our site to ensure what you see on the computer is what you get in your hand.