i get the sense that a lot of photographers out there are working from this perspective of trying to eek out every cent from their customers. charge by the photo, by the edit, by the retouch, and throw in expenses to boot. and bizarrely, make the clients wait some arbitrary amount of time before sending off the final product.
the truth is, i could probably get away with doing that, too. it’s status quo. but quo isn’t a q that i want to include in my business vocabulary. i’ve decided that my practice is going to be focused instead on three other q’s: quality, quantity, and quickness.
when i was arranging the photo shoot that i completed earlier this week, the client seemed surprised that i would be combing through the photos and sending off final edits within 48 hours. she said that she generally receives a link to an online album where she can select the photos she would like edited and then later the photographer will send her those images. to me, that just seems so old-fashioned and unnecessarily slooooowwwwww.
the way some photographer talk about editing, you would think they’re taking their digital negatives into a dark room. but the truth of it is, lightroom and other raw-to-jpeg editing software makes workflow extremely fast.
the antiquated slow-photo camp is only going to continue losing share as people get more and more used to the instant gratification that they can get from having a friend snap a photo of them with their cell phone. even more than that, a lot of cameras nowadays come equipped with wifi and bluetooth and allow instant sharing of photos straight out of camera. some even come with presets that let photographers do basic edits right then and there, and with lightroom cc mobile, you could feasibly take someone’s photo in raw format, export it to your phone or ipad, and then run a quick edit and send out a finished photo within a matter of minutes. so really even my own 48-hour guarantee is going to be antiquated in a few years. so i’ll need to make sure that once i join the mirrorless movement i am closing the gap and pushing for a 24-hour guarantee.
i would give photographers the benefit of the doubt and say that they’re excused from turning around edits quickly because maybe their calendar is full and they are taking thousands of photos per week. But I work 60-plus hours per week on non-photography work and so i don’t see myself as being any less handicapped than a busy photographer. besides, i used to be an editor for eight local newspapers and i was turning around thousands of photos per week while also producing written content to fill those pages. all of my edits were done the day of the event because otherwise there was no way i could get my papers to the printer on time. so i stick to my no excuses stance.
the bottom line is that quality, quantity and quickness are marketable skills that can be monetized, and once word gets around that i am delivering on this level, i can monetize it.