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Hi everyone:
I recently did a one year birthday photo shoot. My client is delighted with the images and she just emailed me wanting to know if she can buy the rest of the pics from the shoot even if they are unedited since this is their first child's birthday. Do you guys even do that? I mean sell the CD with more unedited images? I am afraid to sell her another CD and have her edit them herself plus if unedited I don't know if I want my work being posted or printed not being my best if ykwim.
Should I edit and sell her some more images for an additional fee? If so what is the going rate for additional images?
Thanks for any help you can give me.
You are ONLY selling digital copies if I understand you correct?
I sell mostly edited, printed pictures (digital mainly from old studio sessions, for charity causes or if I know the people) and am myself kind of struggling with how to price (unedited) digital copies.
When my studio does sell digital, it's understood that the client will never come back to me to have them printed again, and since that is how I mainly make money, the digital copies are pretty pricey (around 250 for 40 pictures. Not that much for what it could be worth, but this is Alaska afterall).
I don't know how "big" your business is, but I'm a small business owner and I do a lot of "compromissing" with my clients. Maybe you could talk to your client and tell her that you are somewhat against the idea of selling unedited copies of your work, and that you'd feel better if you could agree on them buying a few more edited pictures instead? Most of the time people understand - it is YOUR work afterall - and if they don't, try to come up with some other way of meeting in the middle.
I'm afraid that's the best advice I can give you without knowing more about how you work. I do my own printing, so I do pricing according to what I could make off the prints (and when I do sell digital copies, they are almost always down sized to fit mainly Facebook profiles, etc.).
Do you have a way to print your pictures for your clients (or do they do that on their own through a third party?) and how much did you charge for the first set of photos?
Thanks for the quick reply. I am going to sell her an additional 20 images for $50. I don't want to sell her any unedited ones. I also have an online gallery where they can buy prints.
But since I am fairly new at this and want to keep her happy I thought that the 20 images are a great deal!
Thanks again.
My normal procedure is to give my clients a CD with their full-quality edited images on it. But under no circumstances would I give them unedited images. It hasn't even been requested. (Short of one commercial client which insisted that in order to do business I'd have to sign a contract giving them the "negative files" and allow them to examine our complete database after the work was concluded to ensure we didn't retain any photos. Needless to say, I sent them packing.)
My company's standard copyright release for personal photos on the CD states that the photos are copyrighted by us and available for personal printing and personal web use only, and that the images are expressly not to have any edits made aside from cropping. I've never had anyone complain about that statement, which is also in our standard modeling contract.
This leaves some recourse for myself and those I work with so if we spot a horribly mangled image of ours, we can ask for it to be removed. It has yet to be a problem though.
These days the vast majority of photographers sell the digital rights (aka a cd of pics) to the client for an additional fee depending on the event. Engagment disks with all edited images are usually ~$200 in my area. I would assume a birthday would be in that range or a little less. And of course you should be editing them but I wouldn't be heavily photoshoping them. I'd just make sure white balance, exposure and lens corrections are done. Probably batch for the most part. Now if they order prints from you then you go in an touch up everything.
Thanks everyone! After I sent her the email for the $50 for 20 additional images, I gave her 4 more images of her baby playing with specific toys and balloons. That's all they wanted and I didn't include them in the first CD because I had already included 22 other images (my rate includes 15 edited images).
But under no circumstances would I give them unedited images.
Question already answered and action taken but. I agree. I just never give out unedited images, nor do I give out all images.
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