Photography
Why we charge the way do:
"We give you thumbnails of all of the unedited photos, so you can choose which photos you want. This saves us massive amounts of post-production time, and is what allows us to charge less than many other photographers."
At Orphonic LLC, we deliver photography to our clients in a very unorthodox way, relative to the industry standard. Depending on the client, it's either a perfect fit, or it isn't. We ultimately have your best interests in mind, and that's to save us time which saves you money.
It's extremely common for a photographer to NEVER let the client see the unedited photos. And for a very good reason: Not every photo looks good right out of the camera. Heck, most of the time it's MOST of the photos that don't look good. That's why we take hundreds and hundreds of photos at an event: because to get you the 50 great photos, we might take 500 bad ones as well. A lot of those photos might also seem repetitive, too. It's in a photographer's best reputed interest to never let most of these photos see the light of day. Typically what happens with most photographers is they go through their hundreds of shots, sort out what they think are bad photos, and then spend a lot of time cleaning up what they think are the good ones. This often includes shots that the client doesn't care as much about. For example, a photographer might get a great shot of your second-cousin's date, but has no idea that you don't know that person. You ultimately are paying the photographer for their time to edit a photo that you have no intentions of using for anything. That's why we do it differently. We give you thumbnails of all of the unedited photos, so you can choose which photos you want. This saves us massive amounts of post production time, and is what allows us to charge less than many other photographers. |
What you need to keep in mind:
"...we realize that we show you "the man behind the curtain" and kill a little bit of the magic... We do this at the possible expense of our artistic reputations... We're hoping that translates into a more professional reputation in your eyes."
It's important that we set the correct expectation for this. What raw/unedited photos are not is...
It should go without saying:
The unedited thumbnails should not be printed, uploaded to facebook, or shared in any way outside of anyone involved in choosing the photos you want edited. This is the reason the thumbnails are watermarked. |
We strongly encourage you to have an open mind when viewing unedited thumbnails. For starters, you have to try to imagine what it might look like AFTER all those adjustments are made. You have to keep in mind that most of the photos are intended to go right into the trash. The worst looking photos are not a reflection of the photographer's full abilities, the same way their best photos doesn't indicate what an entire collection looks like.
Photographers want to be judged by their best, not their worst. That is why almost no one wants to show you unedited photos. It's why many portfolios might only have one photo from each event. When we show you unedited thumbnails, we realize that we show you "the man behind the curtain" and kill a little bit of the magic that is seeing only a flawless collection of photos. We do this at the possible expense of our artistic reputations, to save you time and money. We're hoping that translates into a more professional reputation in your eyes. |
The Process:
- We take a boat-load of photos at your event. Many are repetitive. Some are out of focus or not exposed perfectly. More than enough are amazing.
- We back them all up and then import them into Adobe Photoshop Lightroom.
- We export them all as small versions with a watermark on them (thumbnails).
- We upload those thumbnails to either dropbox or google drive for you to download.
- You write down the file numbers of the thumbnails you want edited.
- You send that list to us and we edit those.
- If it's the minimum number of edits that you were already invoiced for, no additional charges occur. If it's more, we will either update your open invoice or send you a new invoice for the difference.
- We send you the edited photos to the same dropbox or google drive folder. You have permission to do almost anything you want with those photos.