Proofless Weddings

[David_A_Smith]

For my weddings I offer “ Non-proofs” and proofs on CD.
The couple come to the studio after their honey moon and plan their album from the pages I have pre-made. As an aside to another topic here on image quality, because I am choosing the images I want to use, I only need to make any nessacary corrections to those images that I will actually print,( maybe 50-75) not all 400-600 images I may shoot.

Once the album extras are paid for, they come back in around 3-4 weeks to collect the album and proofs.Paper proofs are approx 2” thumbs which are printed on plain paper on an inkjet printer with the image number underneath. The Proof cd has a watermarked low res image of all the images taken plus the page layouts in the album also of course in low res. I also have a reprint price list and order forms on the cd in word and PDF formats for the clients to print out or email to me.

In my market, re-orders have been falling substantially since before the days of digi and despite a number of initiatives, I have been unable to turn this around as have many others in my market. As such, I have structured my wedding coverage’s to make my money from the B&G and not rely on re orders.

One of the initiates I employed for reprint orders was to distribute cards at the reception telling the guests where they can see the wedding pics on my web site in 24-36 hours. I do this in a shopping cart style format so any reprint orders can be made online. This has been highly successful in my sports and events work but not for weddings. While everyone has remarked what a great idea this is, it has failed to generate any orders other than from parents or very close family of the couple who usually make a list and send it in with the B&G.

I has been a great selling point with booking brides however who love the idea of being able to able to sit in their hotel room anywhere in the world and see their wedding pics only a day or 2 after the event on their honey moon. Wedding guests also seem very impressed at being able to see the pictures so quick, thus the value in this exercise is far more a promotional one than actually increasing reprint orders.

Problems I have had have been a couple of clients complaining that when they make prints off the CD, the water mark “ spoils” the image although all seem to have failed to notice the crap quality of any print larger than a postage stamp. While I am confident that I have explained the use of the cd very clearly, I believe it is a case of some people with severe cases of selective hearing who think they are getting a way to make free prints. A note of the use and purpose of the CD for viewing rather than printing purposes on my contract seems to have laid this complaint to rest of late.

Other than this, having no Photographic proofs has not been a problem at all. As most people have already seen all the pics before the couple pick up their album, they are not reliant on paper proofs. I am actually thinking of dropping the inkjet proofs as well although I may make them up as proof sheets in >jpg format and put them on the CD so the couple can make proofsheets themselves if they like.

As with most things, a lot of how successful a concept is depends on how well you sell it. Some of the advantages I tell my clients are a cost saving for something they do not need, Having no proofs means not having to go to all the friends/family to show them the pics and having the proofs means no bulky books to carry around, just a single CD. I also mention that looking at the CD proofs even on a laptop screen yeilds a much larger images than any photo proof they would get.

Something I will have to spend time on this year is figuring out how to put the images on a DVD that plays like a slide show, hopefully I can add some music to as well. ( any hints or suggestions?) I have noticed more DVD players are able to read image disks and have their own slide show feature although I am not aware they show the image number which would be preferable.

I think these days many couples are ready to embrace the digital age and are more than happy not to worry about photo proofs. If you want to go that labour and cost saving way as a photographer, all you need to do is sell it to your clients. If anyone really wants paper proofs, Never say no, just tell them what you charge for them! ( BIG Dollars!)

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We specialize in wedding photography and our average bride is spending $4500 for our services before enlargements. There is one question that always works it's way into our first meeting "Do I get to keep my proofs and are they "REAL" pictures. At this point I tell my clients that yes we include proofs as real pictures for them to keep at no additional charge but ask that they respect copyright laws. We do this very softly as we want to provide them with proofs no matter how much extra work it is. We feel very strongly about the communal sharing of the proofs between families. If it hurts my after sales that's OK as I have built that cost in to all our coverages. Since were story tellers and not traditional photographers our proofs show a cronilogical sequence of her day which we view as a heriloom in and of itself.

My feeling if your afraid of scanning, raise your prices and change your clients, then forget it and work on the art.

[SteveEllis]

You all have given me some things to think about. I have a couple of brides that we just finished their weddings and I know them well enough to get some input from them. I may try this, although I imagine they are probably biased since they have booked me and have gotten paper proofs.

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One of the initiates I employed for reprint orders was to distribute cards at the reception telling the guests where they can see the wedding pics on my web site in 24-36 hours.

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David, I am curious as to what you post when you do this. Do you post all 400-600 images and do you do corrections on them first? I'm not sure I could pull off a 24-36 hour turnaround, but it is an interesting sales idea.

I have also toyed with the idea of just giving them all of their images on CD and let them do whatever they want with them, since I have also started pricing myself to make enough money on the "shoot" itself instead of relying on post wedding reprint sales. We have seen a drop off in those sales as well. Any toughts on that option?

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Something I will have to spend time on this year is figuring out how to put the images on a DVD that plays like a slide show, hopefully I can add some music to as well. ( any hints or suggestions?)

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I use a product called Pictures ToExe. It is only $30 and it allows you to make slide shows and screen savers of images and add music to it as well. The thing I like about it is that it allows me to make an .exe file with all of the image data in one file, so that there is no access to the images.

It also has the ability to create these on CD or DVD, but I have never tried it as a DVD. I ususally just do a CD for them to view on the computer, but now that I have brought that up, I think I will try the DVD just to see how well it works.

[SteveEllis]

Hi Bart,

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At this point I tell my clients that yes we include proofs as real pictures for them to keep at no additional charge but ask that they respect copyright laws. We do this very softly as we want to provide them with proofs no matter how much extra work it is.

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It sound like we are in the same frame of mind on this and that is the one big problem I have with going proofless. We also let them keep the proof albums and as I tell the brides, "You may not want a photo of Uncle Tim eating cake in your Wedding Album, but you probably would like to have it to know that he was there 10 years from now when you look back on this day".

I have always felt that they have paid me to "document" (probably not the best word) their wedding and they should have something to show for it. That has been the big factor in my setting the price to where I don't have to worry about whether they reorder.



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My feeling if your afraid of scanning, raise your prices and change your clients, then forget it and work on the art.

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We don't scan very often. Almost everything we shoot is digital. I just seem to be spending more time getting the images ready for proofing and that, I suppose, is what is really bothering me. It is mostly that since we went digital we have also started offering multiple photographers and our number of images per wedding have increased dramatically. The other problem is arranging the images to get them proofed takes a while, but we have just about solved this problem in our workflow as well.

So now I'm thinking I should just keep offering what I already do and just raise my price enough to where I feel the extra time is worth it. Oh well, more to think about.........

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My feeling if your afraid of scanning, raise your prices and change your clients, then forget it and work on the art.

[/ QUOTE ]

We don't scan very often. Almost everything we shoot is digital. I just seem to be spending more time getting the images ready for proofing and that, I suppose, is what is really bothering me. It is mostly that since we went digital we have also started offering multiple photographers and our number of images per wedding have increased dramatically. The other problem is arranging the images to get them proofed takes a while, but we have just about solved this problem in our workflow as well.

So now I'm thinking I should just keep offering what I already do and just raise my price enough to where I feel the extra time is worth it. Oh well, more to think about.........

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If your afraid of the Client scanning not the studio. We have been shooting 100% digital since the Canon 1D first came out. There are some basics that I'm sure you know but I will put it here for anyone who is interested.

First and most important, time sync ALL camera on a weekly basis. Chris Breeze has a program called Downloader Pro that can do this with most cameras. (10 minutes)

Second, after the shoot take all the images into one folder and open them up in BreezeBrowser and sort by shooting date and time. Batch rename all images in that order by time. Burn a DVD or 2. (30 minutes total)

Third, do your edit in what ever program you like and then I rename them again in time order and burn more DVD's. The end result is the bride get a cronilogical sequence of her day in order with no numbers skipped (raises too many questions). (2 hours total)

Forth, I upload all images to my lab(www.bayphoto.com) and they print them in reverse order so print 1 is on top. Then all proofs are put into several Black proof boxes when they return from the lab. (10 minutes)

This does not include the time to convert Raw to JPeg as we walk away from the computer or work on the next one while one runs in the backround. Also does not include upload time as again we walk away.

We shoot 800-2000 per wedding and only edit 10% so I think the times to do all this are reasonable.

Hope that helps.

[SteveEllis]

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If your afraid of the Client scanning not the studio.

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Yeah, OK. I see what you meant now. Sorry, my brain was in the wrong gear.

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There are some basics that I'm sure you know but I will put it here for anyone who is interested.

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Your workflow is very much like ours except with different software and lab.

We have had trouble with your first rule on a couple of weddings recently. We use Nikon Capture to time sync the cameras, but one of our shooters has managed to do something wrong on the last two weddings (we really don't know what) and he has been 4 hours off from the rest of us. We of course did not catch this until AFTER the wedding, so it really was a pain to sort his back into the collective (sounds like a Borg for all of you other Trekkies).

Anyway, we have decided that he does not get to do it next time. I will do it for him and we will verify it BEFORE we start to shoot.

[David_A_Smith]

Hey Steve,

For my online proofs I create them in BreezeBrowser with the EOS template. There is a function there to auto levels images which I use for exposure corrections. I’m not sure what other people do that they seem to spend so much time correcting but my self ( and without trying to sound arrogant or smart) I can shoot clean enough for any corrections to be really touch ups rather than something the images vitally need. When I am going to print an image, I will look at it for any corrections and make them when I am compiling the order for the lab. To me it makes no sense working on pictures that may not even be purchased. If a Shot needs so much fixing that it will not appeal to a client enough to buy in its unedited state, then chances are the amount of editing to make it appealing is probably too much anyhow. There is no way I will waste time playing with images ( especially hundreds of them) until they are sold. I realise that may go against a lot of people ideas but that’s the way I work :0)
What I sell is my album page layouts and any work the images need is done in what I show the clients and it is the customers ability to pay that limits the size of my albums, not my lack of image quality or because I haven’t retouched every proof image I show.

I have been shooting RAW and Jpgs so I simply extract the Jpgs from the raw files, edit out any obvious “ Blooper “ Pics, run the EOS shopping cart template and upload it all. Excluding RAW and EOS processing time, I probably only spend an hour or less sorting and editing. Upload can take a while but I usually either do that in the background, at night when I’m asleep or lately just do it on another slave computer.

So far I have sold a couple of CD’s of full res images to clients. This has been after the album has been completed and I believe they genuinely wanted to have the images as “ negatives” for safe keeping for the future. In both cases I sold the CD’s for $1000 which was a very nice boost to the bottom line of the job. Wether the clients did use them for reprints, I don’t know or care for that matter. If I can get this much for the full res images without having the trouble and fuss of doing reprint orders then I think I am on a very good deal. As the clients have the prints in the album, should any reprints come out substandard I am happy that the fault will be easily recognised as the reprint and not as my work as a photographer.

One thing I like about not having any traditional proofs is the clients know they have to buy what they want. As I work on the album planning system where my cream is in the couple adding pages over their base coverage, I would never include ( unless priced in ) the full res images on CD for the same reason as I would never give proofs…It gives the clients an “out” of spending money in their album.

I am presently offering the full res Images on a sliding scale in accordance to what the couple spend on their album. Should they get the base coverage the cd would be for example $1200. if they spend $1000 extra the cd would be say $800. If they spent $3000 extra the cd would be $200 say. As the CD is a virtual no cost item, Whatever I can get for it is all 100% profit along with anything extra I can get in additional album page sales.

I have now also done several small, low key weddings where the deal was that they would get all the original images on disk and no album or anything else. These work great for weddings were the photo budget is low either because of a lack of money or a lack of value on photography itself. The irony is I am able to make an hourly rate 2-5 times what I would make on a full wedding service and just spend whatever time on the job and an hour or 2 editing and burning the disks.
Some of these people have come back to me and paid me to do album pages and some I have referred to reputable labs to get the images printed themselves. As I have charged and been well paid at the outset for my time and effort, I do not have a problem doing this.

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