Okay, so the creation of a pricing structure is extremely difficult.  You don’t want to charge too much for your services but you also don’t want to undervalue your skills and offerings.

One of the hottest debates these days involves the concepts of prints vs. DVDs.   Pre-digital a photographer’s livelihood depended on print sales.  Physical keepsakes that had a tangible value.  These days, more and more clients are asking to simply have all the photos on a disc so that they can use them on their Facebook/MySpace profiles or to e-mail to family and friends or to post on their blogs or whatever else they may wish to do with them INCLUDING get them printed at such places as Walmart, Costco, London Drugs or wherever.

Now, some photographers only give out finished images that are printable at a maximum of 4×6 while others actually give away the RAW files (some give them away for FREE!).  I am in complete disagreement with the RAW files being sold for ANY price.  By doing this you completely undermine your craft by allowing the client to display distorted versions of your work that effective stop being your work!  As soon as a client loads an image into Photoshop and makes a change they have begun to misrepresent your work.  Regardless of how good or bad of a job they do it is no longer an example of the work you do and is potentially damaging to your entire career!

In the case of selling prints that are printable to 4×6 I also see this as a disservice to yourself because as long as they have a file, they can print it at ANY size they want.  Naturally, as soon as they print larger than the 4×6 file you gave them, they start to degrade the quality of the image.  And a 4×6 file actually looks not too bad printed at 5×7!  But at 8×10/12 it really starts to get soft and once again becomes a VERY poor representation of your work.

Some photographers have found work arounds and have developed new pricing models that work well for them and keep themselves fairly compensated for their work.  I have a couple ideas on how we might handle the situation at our studio but we will need to have a pow-wow to try to determine scenarios that could make the various obtions simply not feasible.  Maybe two or three option will need to be put in place.

Yay!  The web site is slowly coming together.  Only about 30 or 40 more iterations and it should look exactly the way we want!!!

Also, we are getting close to nailing down our wedding package pricing so be sure to check for that soon along with updated Portrait/Commercial/Model/Actor portfolio shoot pricing.

And if you aren’t already following me on Twitter, what the heck!?  Get with it!  There’s a link around here somewhere to help you out with that.

UPDATE!!! – Web site is progressing nicely.  Just have to finish up the Illusions page and nail down the Wedding Notions pages and we’ll go 100% live.  What does that mean?  Well, by having a completed presentation destination we can begin taking bookings and out clients will actually have a place to go to review our work, gauge our pricing structures and gain a little insight into the services we can provide our new friends.

So please, if you or some one you know is the market for photography, please send them our way!  Thank you.

YAY!  Long weekend!  I REALLY, REALLY want to finish the web site.  Tonight if possible but tomorrow for sure.  It’s gone on long enough now.

I got an e-mail today from Photography Mentor.com.  They’re having an open house this week so swing by and check them out.  This is a nice video http://photographymentor.smugmug.com/gallery/7156059_EpX6z#473108482_HkPgv-A-LB

I get a lot of spam.  I mean A LOT!!!  Most of it I have not subscribed to.  I do have a few things I get because I asked for it but I rarely take the time to go through them.

One thing I got that I checked out was this comparison between the Canon 5D MkII and the Nikon D3X and I can’t decide if I’M the drunk one or if the reviewer is.  He says Nikon wins wins due to having a more pleasing pattern of noise at high ISOs.  What the hell!?  As far as I can tell the Canon has less noise at 6400 than the Nikon does.  The only thing that bugs me about the Canon is that it’s darker at each ISO than the Nikon.  I’m sure if you boost the brightness to match they would be fairly similar.  I might try that tomorrow if I get a chance.

At any rate, you make up your own mind.

http://www.prophotohome.com/canon-5d-mkii-mk2-nikon-d3x-review-image-quality

Yay!  Mel is setting up a blog too.  Now we get to see more about what goes on in her mind.  Could be freaky.  Could be scary.  Will definitely be fun!  Check her out with the link on the right!

And for the record, the extent of my convincing her was “Hey, do you want a blog?”  “Okay!”

Holy! Five days since my last post!  I suck at this.  Gonna have to work on that.

Well, as some of you may have noticed, the new Second Sight Studio web site is up and running…Mostly.  I still have a couple pages to build but I was getting concerned that the tool I was using to set up the galleries would cause browsers to freak out so I uploaded early.  Soon though. Soon.   Maybe this weekend.

I have to say, the new partnership I’ve entered into with Mel could become something truely awesome.  We discovered tonight that our individual brains work well together for fleshing out ideas and expanding on them to an awesome logical or humourous end.  Now the trick is to see if we can make some of these ideas reality!

Also, we had the first ever Photographer’s Pheeding Phrenzy Saturday.  Wasn’t quite the huge turnout I had hoped for but ended up being about what I initially expected.  Met some great people, hope to meet with them again sometime soon.  I might plan another one for sometime in March or April but I imagine that a lot of people will get busy with their wedding shoots once the weather starts to improve so turn out might go down unless we do it during the week.  We’ll see.  There’s always options.

Anyway, enjoy what there is of the new site.  Bye for now!

I’m beginning to psych myself up for my 365 project by watching the work of others doing the same thing.  If you look near the top of the page you’ll see a link to a list of 365 Projects.  Very interesting stuff.  My project won’t be able to start for quite a while yet but the fact that others are attempting it is inspiring.  I’ve been trying to do mine for 7 years now.

On another note, I just found a cool site with lots of potential in regards to printers.  I haven’t spent much time there but it’s about time someone had a decent printer web site to look up reviews and and tests.  Check it out.

http://www.printerville.net/

So I’m really getting frustrated with my lack of available time to do things I both want and need to do. 

One such thing is the rebuild of our web site.  It’s so tedious and annoying because anything I might want to do with it will take longer than what I’ve already commited myself to.  What I’m doing with it right now is really very simple and basic.  It should have taken me less than two days to build it as far as I’m concerned.   Of course nothing can go smoothly can it?  Two things I decided I wanted to do (partly due to requests by my friends) have turned out to be really bloody annoying.  For one, I would need to learn Flash pretty heavily and just don’t have the time right now.  All I want is a nice slide show that uses whatever pictures are contained in a given folder.  I don’t think it can do this, I think any medie must be preloaded into in the .swf or whatever.  The second thing is the basic highlighting of links.  I told the CSS to have the link be Dark Red, the hover link to be White, the active link to be Light Blue and the visited link to be Dark Red again.  The problem here is that the links work just fine as long as the visited link isn’t assigned a color.  But as soon as I tell to be Dark Red all colors go Dark Red.  I need to set that color cause otherwise visited links are purple and that color just doesn’t quite work with the page.

In regards to my camera drool the other day, I’ve found a couple movie links for things created on the Canon 5D MKII.   Enjoy!

Reverie

Fusion is Now

Also, if you’re new to photography, check out a podcast called The Art of Photography.   Very good information about the basics.