What do you charge?

Randhir, while you're buggering off, mind not ever addressing me in an argumentative manner again unless you're going to do something other than resort to ad hominem crap?
 
nanonyous said:
Randhir, while you're buggering off, mind not ever addressing me in an argumentative manner again unless you're going to do something other than resort to ad hominem crap?
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Sorry Ansel :D I bow to your superior technique of shooting crap in camera then recovering in post! :p I apologise! I'm not worthy!

Whoooosh.
 
You might want to troll using a different photographer as reference, just by the way. Ansel Adams practically pioneered modern dodging & burning techniques, among other things.
Or are you going to elect to let that little fact 'whoosh' straight over your own head?

Ideally, if I have visualized the image and if I know my craft, I should always produce a negative that contains the required information and from which I should readily be able to make prints that fulfill the visualization, perhaps with moderate burning or dodging for local control. I can say that I achieve this in the majority of cases, but in honesty I must also admit that I can make doleful errors of judgment or calculation. The lens extension for close subjects can easily be overlooked, or we can expose for a different film than we are actually using; our shutters can fail inexplicably or our exposure meters go awry . A photographer is reminded that he is human, after all, and his equipment is not infallible. To assume otherwise is folly. It is fortunate that the printing process is as flexible as it is!

With negatives of good general quality the subtleties of the printing process may be applied to correct the occasional fault, and for creative purposes. Each photographer will inevitably develop his own variations of thought and procedure.
The point I wish to emphasize is the dual nature of printing: it is both a carrying-to-completion of the visualized image and a fresh creative activity in itself.
As with other creative processes, understanding craft and controlling the materials are vital to the quality of the final result.
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Source: Ansel Adams Photography Series 3 - The Print

Read: balance, and everyone will make mistakes and/or ultimately have circumstances that are beyond their control, and even Ansel Adams had to make up for such errors of judgement or problems with his equipment or the circumstances under which he wanted to take his photos.

In Salvador Dali and Phillipe Halsman's 'The Dali Atomicus', substantial editing of the image was required to get the end result they wanted. Sure, that editing was intentional, but it was also within a controlled studio environment and utilized to make up for factors that were beyond their control unless they elected to continually throw things in the air until they got exactly the shot they wanted, so they could 'get it right in camera' and 'not spend more than 5 minutes photoshopping'.


So in summary, there are many situations, whether in a controlled studio environment or not, where there can and will be factors about a proposed final image that are outside of your immediate control while still pressing the shutter button or that simply do not make sense to try and 'fix' before taking the photo versus after taking the photo, and all the pioneers that were doing all of this long before you were born were doing exactly the things you are effectively claiming makes one a 'crap' photographer - and you don't even seem to realise it despite trying to name-drop.

'Whoosh'.
 
Sigh how every thread gets derailed I stopped reading at page 2
 
R13... said:
Let's just say I may have to do a photo shoot. Family photo shoot and have no idea how to price it.
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Bad news words there. In my experience, family and friends expect you to do it for nothing...
 
BigAl-sa said:
Bad news words there. In my experience, family and friends expect you to do it for nothing...
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I might be wrong here, Maybe its A family and not his family :D
 
DTBA said:
Sigh how every thread gets derailed I stopped reading at page 2
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It's actually been on topic the whole time. If you go back to why I first addressed bwana's statement, before Randhir started with his idiotic crap, it ought to be fairly obvious that I was talking about elements that influence how much one should or could have to charge for a job.

You charge according to;

* Your time
* Your shoot's circumstances
* Your equipment's maintenance, taking into consideration that you need to be very aware of what is necessary for a given shoot beforehand and why, as well as making allowances for some 'just in case' equipment, props or the like
* Your assistant(s)' time (if any), makeup artist(s)' time (if any), wardrobe specialist(s)' time (if any)
* Taking into account clients and/or model(s)' willingness to work with you as opposed to against you, and being able to manage the business-end of justifying to a client how and why elements of a shoot that you were trying to keep controlled were left out of your control by their or their associates' behaviour, such as parents not managing their kids, causing a family shoot to take much longer or a wedding's bridge/groom wanting you to stay on for more time where one of the parents is actually paying for your time

And most importantly

* Understanding that obsessing about 'getting it right in camera' purely for the sake of not spending any time using photoshop at all can be downright idiotic, because there are some things that are simply not worth obsessing about these days because the tools exist with which to better handle a situation than may be feasible in the real world.

Got an absolutely amazing backdrop in a scene, but there happens to be a big fugly emergency fire hose box or hydrant stuck to a wall in a foyer to the venue you're trying to get a photo of? Do all the lines, the angle, the perspective, mean that no matter what you're trying to do, the photo you want to take is going to include it whether you like it or not?

Then take the fugging photo and edit it out. Stop obsessing about it if you know that you are skilled enough to deal with it in a reasonable amount of time with a predictable, high-quality result at the end of the day.

I have seen a multiple more examples of where people like Randhir and bwana are quite simply wrong in their essentially pretentious assumptions of 'getting it right in camera' in the modern photographic world, along with all sorts of other people.

Nobody, me included, ever said anything about getting your exposure settings right in camera - that's a given. Nobody, me included, ever said anything about getting your composition right in camera either, that's also a given. I was talking about making the best of issues that may crop up in a photo that could be out of our immediate control or are simply not worth trying to control for wasting time or money on you or your clients' part, even in controlled situations - because these are things that influence your final product, what work and time is required towards achieving that final product, and in so doing influences how much you should be charging.


Charge according to everyone's time, your skill and your ability to deliver. Do not charge more than someone less skilled than you that was a real alternative, because it can bite you in the ass later on. Do not charge as much as or more than someone more skilled than you that was a real alternative, because it can bite you in the ass later on.
 
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IMO if I ever had to do a shooot( coming from a noob) I would try to make everything as perfect as I can get it.So I would move all the **** and all the stuff before hand my lights and so on then take all my pictures.If for some reason there is a fly or **** in the way or anything I didn't see in the shoot(or could have controlled) I would Photoshop them out.
 
DTBA said:
IMO if I ever had to do a shooot( coming from a noob) I would try to make everything as perfect as I can get it.So I would move all the **** and all the stuff before hand my lights and so on then take all my pictures.If for some reason there is a fly or **** in the way or anything I didn't see in the shoot(or could have controlled) I would Photoshop them out.
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iow, good on you, you're doing it right.
 
nanonyous said:
I have seen a multiple more examples of where people like Randhir and bwana are quite simply wrong in their essentially pretentious assumptions of 'getting it right in camera' in the modern photographic world, along with all sorts of other people.
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Please stop misrepresenting my beliefs. Nowhere did I say that anything but straight out of the camera was taboo. What I did say from my first post is that if you're spending more than five minutes editing a photo you're wasting too much time - either you took a bad photo to begin with, you lack competency when it comes to editing, or a combination of the two.

I wont even begin to go into the genres where altering reality is taboo but if a photographer lacks the skill and foresight necessary and cannot survive without the clone tool or the healing brush then best they stay away from them and stick to the artsy-fartsy side of things. :)
 
Guys if u do shoot and somebody has a pimple that makeup did not cover, is it your job to fix it after the shoot?
 
bwana said:
Please stop misrepresenting my beliefs. Nowhere did I say that anything but straight out of the camera was taboo. What I did say from my first post is that if you're spending more than five minutes editing a photo you're wasting too much time - either you took a bad photo to begin with, you lack competency when it comes to editing, or a combination of the two.
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Guess I worded it a bit too harshly in your direction (though I meant it more in Randhir's) but...

bwana said:
I wont even begin to go into the genres where altering reality is taboo but if a photographer lacks the skill and foresight necessary and cannot survive without the clone tool or the healing brush then best they stay away from them and stick to the artsy-fartsy side of things. :)
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In the film days, photographers would sometimes go out of their way to preemptively set up covers of some sort or to find more attractive props to hide unsightly things within scenes, even for weddings. This could cost time and in a very real sense someone's money by having to potentially be overly aware of the overall scene 'design' in terms of layout of 'props'.

In other words, photographers before you were born were essentially doing the very same things that you might consider 'artsy-fartsy', because they were simply manipulating their scene's contents before taking the photo as opposed to afterward.


It's not unlike people raving about dodging and burning as evil in landscape photography - there is absolutely nothing stopping a film photographer from taking a polaroid shot of a scene and using that polaroid to make their own airbrushed ND mask to balance their exposure out with. That's a time-wasting, expensive way of going about doing the exact same thing these days by taking multiple exposures and then simply masking in and out the light you wanted, yet it achieves exactly the same result.


And DTBA, potentially, yes. During the wedding of my friends I shot, their teeth yellowed over in a matter of hours during the day from the food and beer consumed, and the groom developed a great big pimple during the same span of hours right on his forehead.

You can either fix it while editing or you can ask a makeup artist to 'quickly touch up the model' - if not asking the model to do so themselves.
 
DTBA said:
Guys if u do shoot and somebody has a pimple that makeup did not cover, is it your job to fix it after the shoot?
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If I'm shooting something like a family portrait session then sure, if when they look at the proofs and want it gone it's gone. If I'm shooting for a newspaper then no. You change one thing and people begin to wonder what else you might have changed.
 
DTBA said:
Guys if u do shoot and somebody has a pimple that makeup did not cover, is it your job to fix it after the shoot?
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Like this

I would have removed the fly from that bat

From a mag scanned it in
Capture.JPG
 
Looks like what amounts to a personal photo, and a fly is a fly - there's no stopping them from entering scenes at the worst possible times, and it doesn't directly influence what the photo is about other than being unsightly. It might be considered tabboo by some, but it lends nothing to the photo other than being distracting - I'd remove it also.

*edit* Unless of course the magazine article read

"Today marked the 200th test match of Graeme Smith as Captain. Here's a photo of a fly sitting on a cricket-themed cake." :p
 
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This thread is a good example of how people take things to ridiculous extremes. If a photographer cannot take the trouble, or does not have the ability, to follow simple rules in order to take photographs which do not exhibit basic beginner errors, then they need to rethink as to whether than can call themselves a photographer.

I do not think that ANY professional, photographer or some other field, thinks that a single idea is the only one which applies. What makes them professional is that they have good knowledge of very many facets of their trade and then proceed to choose those which are applicable to the situation which they are addressing and discard those which aren't.
 
bwana said:
Please stop misrepresenting my beliefs. Nowhere did I say that anything but straight out of the camera was taboo.
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Which is exactly what I said before nanymous started to rant for some unknown reason.
 
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