A professional approach to print quality

Someone I know who, would regard himself as a professional, actually used to get his “professional” prints by standing in line at the local supermarket. He argued over and over that there was nothing wrong with what he was doing and he wasn’t ashamed of it.

We can all take our snapshots to the supermarket and come away with good results. But it’s not what a client hiring a professional is paying for. Uncle Bob can take pictures at a wedding and take them to the chemist or supermarket or knock them out on an ink-jet.

When someone pays for a professional to shoot their wedding they’re expecting something more than what uncle Bob can offer. They want their money’s worth.

There has to be something that differentiates a “pro” from what everyone else can do. There some added value and an attitude towards the job and the client that justifies the term professional.

Getting back to the guy in the supermarket I mentioned earlier. He said that he wasn’t ashamed of what he was doing – but, what he didn’t mention was that he carefully placed his own sticker over the supermarket’s branding on the back of every print!

Starting with something good

I’ve had a number of conversations with photographers and designers recently which have often revolved around the cropping and use of images.

Maybe it’s because of the flexibility of the digital image that makes some photographers so lazy. We can all manipulate our images to an unprecedented degree but just because you can play with an image doesn’t mean that you should.

When you’re looking through the viewfinder, you’ve got a pretty good cropping tool. I’d rather walk away from a shoot confident there’s a reasonable probability that I have some shots that worked rather than waiting until I’m back at the studio looking through a bunch of poorly composed, substandard, images hoping I can salvage something from what I’ve shot.

When you’re framing an image and getting ready to release the shutter you’re making a judgement and committing yourself to that moment. Pointing the camera in the general direction of a subject and putting it right later doesn’t seem to be the right way to go about it. There must have been something in what you saw that made you fire the shutter. Maybe it was the expression, the emotion, the way the light fell – if there wasn’t, why take it?

“There’s not much in the budget for the photography….”

I’m sure the anger expressed by science fiction writer Harlan Ellison in this clip is something we all feel from time to time. The skill of a photographer seems to hold less and less value in the eyes of some clients – to the extent that some don’t want to actually pay anything for photography. I can’t help thinking that all clients should be made to see this before commissioning a shoot – especially the ones who say “There’s not much in the budget for photography but….”