On Mar 7, 2011, at 12:50 AM, Boris Liberman wrote: > On 3/7/2011 2:35 AM, Larry Colen wrote: >> > > Aren't you just describing what sets apart a professional and an amateur - > the right and cost of making a mistake?
In a large part that is true. > I am not sure I'd like to be one your customers if I had to rate photos and > so on. It is very much similar to Pentax making us fine tune AF of our > cameras instead of making it work from the factory. I am not saying that you > shouldn't be doing this or that Pentax is wrong. It is just my own (humble) > perspective. What I try to offer to my customers is the best quality photographs for the lowest cost. My biggest cost is my time. If I were paying myself minimum wage for the photography work, the company would be running way in the red. To get great photographs, there are certain things that most customers need from me: 1) equipment. It's possible to get great photos with crappy, or makeshift equipment, but not any time, or any place, or in a reasonable amount of time. 2) Skill with the equipment. 3) Teaching them to be good models, giving them direction. On the other hand, for the most part, they can pick out the photos that they like as well, or better than I can. If I need to charge $50 per hour for my time, and it takes me two hours to sort through photos, then I need to charge an extra $100. Not everyone, when given the opportunity, would basically pay themselves $50 an hour, for something that they could have someone else do. > It also depends on the relationship between you and your customers. If they > are not totally strange people to you, then it might work. But eventually, I > think, you would have to optimize your workflow and be able to work > completely on your own giving your customers completely finalized product. I could do a photo shoot, and afterwards pick my five favorite pictures and give them the prints. Most people seem to want to pick the pictures they get themselves. In a similar vein, I used to go to a restaurant where, as a joke, the owner put "Dave's whatever" on the menu. It was whatever the cook felt like making, you didn't have a choice, and he'd tell you what it cost when you got the bill. To his surprise, it was actually a very popular item. It seems that a lot of people do indeed like "home cooking" in the sense that you eat what Mom puts on the table, and you don't have to think about it, or get to choose. On the other hand, most of the people who went to Tara's didn't order the whatever, they actually selected something off the menu. So, while you might be happy to have someone do a photoshoot of you, and select and print the photos for you, I think that most people want more say than that in what they get. -- Larry Colen [email protected] sent from i4est -- PDML Pentax-Discuss Mail List [email protected] http://pdml.net/mailman/listinfo/pdml_pdml.net to UNSUBSCRIBE from the PDML, please visit the link directly above and follow the directions.
