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.