More is better?

Lately I've been getting a number of inquiries from brides looking for a CD with all their images. Which in the outward appearance might sound like a great idea, however there are a number of things that people don't consider when they demand for a product like this.

Let me explain what you generally get from a photographer when you ask for a CD like this. Often what you get on the CD will be all the images straight off the camera, there will not be any touch ups, color corrections or editing of any kind. The photographer simple does not have the time to correct several hundred to thousands from your celebration.

Sometimes it’s difficult to understand what exactly the photographer does to the images before they are printed until they are compared side by side. So I have done that exactly for you below, the image on the left is just off the camera and the image to the right has gone through my normal editing process (aka touched up).

Okay so you see the difference but maybe that’s not enough. Let me tell you what I’ve found to be the motivation for getting the CD. I find it varies from person to person, but most reasons seem to fall into one of the three following:

• The want to own the copyright of the images
• Don’t want to pay the photographer's print prices
• Freedom to print the images anytime, for archival purposes

First let’s talk about the copyright... Federal copyright law indicates that by the act of a person capturing an image to some type of medium (film or digitally) they are the owner of that image. The owner of the image is free to sell the copyright of the image to someone else however most photographers will not do that. It’s more likely that you are actually getting a “license” to use the images for personal use. What a license does is grants you permission from the owner of the work to do certain things with the images, in my case my license given with every CD grants the client permission to make reproductions of the images for their own personal use for the life of the CD. There is no ownership of the images given there.

Second some people feel that they can save money by buying the CD and then going to the supermarket where they can have their photos printed for low price. The thing is, they will end up paying about the same amount or more to get a CD and print them on their own then they would picking the favorite images and having the photographer deliver the photo as a finished product. Often the photographer will price the CD at about the same amount of money you’d normally spend on getting printed products. If that doesn’t make sense think of it this way… We will make the same amount of money off you either way. Yes, that's right... us photographers are in business to make money, just like every other business… mostly because we still have to pay the rent, loans, gas and of course for our daily meals just like everyone else. If we gave away our work there would be no way to pay the bills.

The last reason I’ve found to make the most sense and can relate to more than the others. Some people are just interested in holding onto the images for archival purposes. If this is the case then talk to your photographer because there might be a better solution to this then just buying a mess of un-edited photos on a CD. Because of this reason I’ve started to offer a CD for a reasonable price of only the images the client orders in prints. By doing it this way, they get a finished image and they get their CD with the touched up image on it. Everyone is happy.

So the point of this post is to hopefully educate people about this. Of course I’d like for you to purchase finished products in the future instead of the CD however you should consider yourself in the know and can make your own decision.

Happy Groundhog Day!

MSN Live Search is a Joke...

As a lot of my friends know I geek out about this whole internet thing and recently have been perfecting the search engine optimization for my websites.

One site that I have been working on was actually designed by someone else. I just do the monthly house keeping on it. The owner of the site was concerned about how certain keywords weren't bringing her site up in MSN's Live Search results which is her preferred search tool. **Let me interrupt here and say that I've never used MSN search, I've almost always relied on Google.** Well, after a little hesitation I agreed to see what I can do to fix the problem, after all I bill hourly so what's the problem...

So after a short little search I find a place that you can submit a site to Live Search and of course you would think that would do something... after submitting it and watching the site logs for about a week I saw no hits from the MSNBot crawling the site. So a I did some tidy work to the Keywords and page content to see if that helped any but nothing...

Finally I came across this link at the bottom of the Live Search page that says "For Webmasters" I clicked the link and followed the instructions of setting up a tool that is supposed to help improve your site listing with Live. And you know, after a week or more you would expect that something would happen but nothing did. Which shocked me because of course I was comparing everything to Google and how fast a site gets indexed by them. Well after looking through the links inside the webmaster's tools site I noticed some information that wasn't there before. It indicated that the last crawl to the site was back in November 2007, yes... over two months ago and when it crawled it only indexed one page. This was frustrating, so I submitted the url and a new sitemap and waited a few days, still nothing.

Well after not knowing what else to do I continued searching the internet for help with this thinking that maybe I had done something wrong until today. I found a forum hosted on Microsoft's website specifically regarding MSNBot and the webmaster tool I have been using and the first page of forum topics nearly every single post was someone having the same problem that I have been experiencing. Checking in most of the threads for an answer to to this problem it turns out that NO ONE knows what's wrong with it and there has been no official response from Microsoft about it, at least none that I can find. Go Microsoft, yet another successful waste of corporate money! It's as if there is no real logic to what sites it indexes and what sites it excludes, all I know is that I'm not the only one who can't get them to index this site.

As a result, I emailed my client explaining this situation and notified her that I will no longer optimize for Live Search. I also suggested that she start using a different search tool like Google or Yahoo... which is the whole point of this post today, to tell all you people out there in internet land to STOP USING LIVE SEARCH! It sucks!

Please use Google or even Yahoo but for the love of Peter Paul and some guy named Mike NOT LIVE.