"Shoot and Burn"
Are the prices of some wedding photographers too good to be true?
Or, are the rest of us exorbitantly over priced?
With digital cameras filling the bags of most wedding photographers these days, there has come about a new phenomenon some have termed "shoot and burn". It's the scenario where a photographer shoots your wedding for a steal of a deal, burns a CD or DVD with all of the images and hands it over at half the price of their competitors. Great deal, right? Or so it seems, until you decide to get some really nice prints made and you find out that the files need to tweaked, adjusted, color balanced or worse yet the exposures are too far off to produce a nice print.
As an educated buyer of photography, you should know that most professional photographers spend 4 to 8 hours editing and adjusting the digital files after the wedding, before they go to the lab for printing... or at least before the final album prints are made. Some shooters claim they can do it 3 hours, which I can believe, but only after developing a lot of skill through experience and I might add, accurate exposures. The idea that you can just send those little files right off the card, to any old lab and expect to get beautiful results is based on unreality.
You should also know that making proper exposures with the digital camera is much more demanding. In the making of a properly exposed image (that will print beautifully) there is much less latitude than with film. In other words, your exposures have to be right on! It's a fact. Ask any pro that has experience with both film and digital. They'll tell you the same thing.
So, when you are shopping for your wedding photographer, sometimes a "Great Deal" may not be such a hot idea. If the price seems too good to be true, it probably is. As a smart buyer you should ask a lot of questions and look at a lot of prints. Price and compare. Look at the results. I can't tell you how many recently married couples I've talked with, that come up to me while I'm working and tell me how disappointed they were with their own wedding photos. And, it's usually because some photographer pulled the "shoot and burn".
Buyer beware!
Or, are the rest of us exorbitantly over priced?
With digital cameras filling the bags of most wedding photographers these days, there has come about a new phenomenon some have termed "shoot and burn". It's the scenario where a photographer shoots your wedding for a steal of a deal, burns a CD or DVD with all of the images and hands it over at half the price of their competitors. Great deal, right? Or so it seems, until you decide to get some really nice prints made and you find out that the files need to tweaked, adjusted, color balanced or worse yet the exposures are too far off to produce a nice print.
As an educated buyer of photography, you should know that most professional photographers spend 4 to 8 hours editing and adjusting the digital files after the wedding, before they go to the lab for printing... or at least before the final album prints are made. Some shooters claim they can do it 3 hours, which I can believe, but only after developing a lot of skill through experience and I might add, accurate exposures. The idea that you can just send those little files right off the card, to any old lab and expect to get beautiful results is based on unreality.
You should also know that making proper exposures with the digital camera is much more demanding. In the making of a properly exposed image (that will print beautifully) there is much less latitude than with film. In other words, your exposures have to be right on! It's a fact. Ask any pro that has experience with both film and digital. They'll tell you the same thing.
So, when you are shopping for your wedding photographer, sometimes a "Great Deal" may not be such a hot idea. If the price seems too good to be true, it probably is. As a smart buyer you should ask a lot of questions and look at a lot of prints. Price and compare. Look at the results. I can't tell you how many recently married couples I've talked with, that come up to me while I'm working and tell me how disappointed they were with their own wedding photos. And, it's usually because some photographer pulled the "shoot and burn".
Buyer beware!
posted by Larry at 5:21 PM
4 Comments:
I can't agree with you more. As a person who just recently went through all the growing pains of setting up a pro studio I can vouch for the fact that a shoot-and-burn is almost a gimmick.
The hours a photographer spends in front of a freshly calibrated monitor powered by a beastly computer running hundreds or thousands of dollars worth of software is something that a cusomter should not sacrifice for the sake of having their photos a week or two earlier. No consumer wants to do all that for themselves. Not to mention the fact that most consumers don't have a speedy workflow which will make their task even harder unless they want to go back and rehire the photographer to finish the job.
I offer my clients "proofs" of their photos at the wedding (for a charge) and then resume normal ops the next day with all the editing and revising.
Actually, most people don't rush to get their photos printed and photo books designed right after the wedding. Some wait for years. So it's better to have your wedding photos in your possession till you are ready. And, with the abundance of online Digital Imaging services, you can get better (and cheaper) photo editing and custom photo book design from specialists trained in desktop publishing and retouching.
Good point. Some people do wait for years and never get the album built. Having been one of those folks, I don't have a finished album and I wish I did. For years I offered just a set of prints with my wedding photography and I watched those boxes of prints sitting on a closet shelf or drawer. All of my packages include a basic album just for that reason.
It's also a good point that their is an abundance online digital services... but cheaper is often is not better. And it's one more thing that you'll have to deal with if and when you decide to make an album. Buyer beware.
It's been my experience that when couples get married today there are just sooooo-so many details in starting a life together that album building goes to the back burner. So if you really want a wedding album get it taken care of sooner than later.
Don't get me started! I shoot with pro-grade cameras, edit with pro software and print at pro print houses, and have invested almost $25,000 in my business this year just to have the mom down the street with the Canon Rebel shoot and burn for under $100. The influx of "moms with cameras" and shoot and burn photographers is slowly devaluing photography. It seems like so many consumers don't even recognize sub-par photography; they just want a cheap deal and their files on a disc. Argh.
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