My wife and I are expecting our first child. My in-laws got us a maternity photo shoot which costed $1800 for 2 hours. It included make up for my wife and access to a wardrobe. Everything was great the pictures were beautiful when shown. But now she sent us a proofing of about 300 photos to choose 15 for further editing and touch up. All photos she sent have watermarks and are blurry and don’t have the sharpness like when she was taking them and showing us. We asked about this she stated it’s common. Because people try to steal extra pictures by screenshot. We asked about adding a few extra. She wants $100 per 1 photo $300 for 5 and $800 for 20 I was so confused. And asked what happens to the photos we don’t get she said they will be deleted. To which I said but why couldn’t we have the unedited photos if you’re going to delete them, there’s a lot of really good pictures we like. She paused and said that just how things are done and this is standard. Idk it’s really making me want to never deal with a professional photographer again. Cause it seems like a money grab to me. Am I wrong?
Are these baked goods of which you speak made specially for you? Would you call it a cash grab if they said no we aren’t giving them to you for free?
I mean I think you’ve hit on why this analogy doesn’t work - the photographer’s products are specific to the client, the bakers are not (and have lost value by the end of the day). No baker would bake a bunch of extra cakes for an order just in case the person happened to buy one.
I think if I went to a baker and they made a bunch of cakes for me and then said here are the cakes in your package and I’ll just throw these other ones away if you don’t pay an extra fee for them I would find that a bit weird? And would probably go on r/baking and be like ‘is this normal?’
Let’s adjust : in the process of baking your special custom cakes I made a bunch of other cakes you did not order. You can buy them if you want otherwise I’ll throw them out. Got it now?
Yes, that would still be weird tbh. Can you imagine a bakery or indeed pretty much any other business actually saying this to a customer? A baker would not present the other cakes to you as an option.
It happens in photography sometimes for justifiable reasons (particularly if there is extensive retouching required) but it’s not a familiar business model to most people so it’s unsurprising that people aren’t familiar with it and find it a bit gross.
It’s weird that people even need metaphors to understand the very basic business model of photography. 🤦🏼♀️