Adding Negatives to package:

How common is it for the negatives to be a part of the package sold? Our wedding negatives cost us $1500 alone. We felt it was worth the cost because I don't trust our photographer.

Well, that's not good that you didn't trust your photographer. That being said, I'm getting married in 10+ months, and I will not hire a photographer who won't give us the negs at the end of the day... I don't mind paying them for the negs, but I ultimately want them at the end of the day ($1500 for them is expensive, though!).

How much did you pay for the pictures to be taken? Or did you mean it cost you $1500 for the negs and for the photographer to be there that day. Usually negs go for $250 or so as a seperate deal and most photographers will sell them to you either at the end of the wedding or a year or 5 later. This way they dont have to keep them protected for ever.

Selling the negatives to the customer used to be a big no-no. But I am seeing where this is becoming a more common thing.

Most of my weddings, since I've been in west Texas, are small southern baptist weddings. Most of my customers are military.

So I shoot for $500 for the day (35mm). I process the negatives, get a picture CD then put together an electronic album. I give them the album (and usually give one for her folks and one for his), a separate CD with hi-res 4x6 @ 300 dpi, a 11x14 montage, contact sheet with cross reference to the CD and the negatives, and I give them the negatives.

The technology is available for them to use and abuse the product. So if they print an 8x10 of something at 72dpi (album res) it's going to look bad, and that is going to reflect on me. So by giving them the hi-res they go to Wal-Mart print out the 4x6s and all their friends say wow.

The business I have lost on reprints I got back two fold in new weddings. Unfortunately this year has been slow for all the photographers in town. Hopefully I've convinced a friend to go back into wedding photography and let me do all the photoshop work and the albums. I'll be his "pro lab".

Wow, $500 us is rather cheap for all the pictures, negatives and cd. You could prob charge twice that and still be competative.

From what ive seen, a normal wedding can be 250 pictures easily, say 240, which is 10X24 exposure rolls, the film and developing and picture cd's cost alone would cost me *$4.00 for film, $4.00 for developing, $4.00 for picture cd* $12 a roll, so thats $150 Canadian just for film and developing, and no prints.

I was just reading on another forum about this guy that wants to buy a hot foil stamp press machine to put his company logo on each of his pictures so people will know what was printed by him and whats a fake. Something like that might be a good idea for this *although rather small and unatrusive *spelling?* as possible since its thier wedding album. This way people that have an understanding of your work will know what was printed by you and what was printed by the customer. But that only works if you offer printing/album making. Plus the machine is apperantly $2250 or something like that, according to the guy.

I doubt I would use the foil stamp myself on a wedding album picture.

Also im not sure if I would offer prints or just hand over the digital negatives and refer them to an wedding album maker. I would like control over what the final album would look like but the amount you can charge for the album and how much it costs to print all the images and supplies for it im not sure if its much profit for the time, but then again may loose some customers that want a finished album as part of the package, less work for them, or just offer both, album by me, or refer them to someone else, or maybe even contract out to the other person to make the album for you and make some money off of them.

A while back there were a lot of customers who were "running off" with the proof books. They were scanning them and then doing their own printing or printing at the local kiosks. Well now that copyright has become such a hot issue the kiosk thing has sort of slowed down.

But the home printing has not. And lets face it if Schmukatelli scans the prints and is willing to go with an OK product it sure won't look as good as what I produce. But when asked he'll say "Lucian took the pictures" and the viewer may say "Lucian doesn't do too good".

So that's the primary reason I came up with this business strategy. I worked for about 2 years. But if we see 3 local weddings in the Sunday paper we see a lot. Most of the younguns are moving out of town. There's not much here anymnore and all the city councils want to do is raise taxes. They sure don't want any industry other than fast food and hotels.

So anyway my business stragey seemed to work well when folks were getting married locally, especially for for those folks whose budget was tight. Maybe it'll come back again and I can get Kevin to start doing wedding work. I've told him I'll supply the equipment until he can get his own and if wants I'll go with him as a director/helper for a few until he gets comfortable. I'm keeping my fingers crossed for him and me.

I much prefer to sit at home with the dogs, a cup of coffee and work photoshop as opposed to being out in 100 degrees trying to make people smile.

P.S. Only two seconds on the preview. Wow!

Haha @ your fast net.

Did you put a copyright on the proofs to prevent them from scanning them and printing them larger? At least with out half an hour or more of photoshop time per picture to clean it up?

The way I plan to do things at first is probably $850 cdn just to take the pictures. $250 or something for the negatives. I like the idea of 4X6's on cd for $150 or what ever is competative in the area im in. Might as well sell the negatives right away since most weddings dont last to long these days and people loose interst in it soon after so they may not want to buy the negatives later on.

Then extras will be travel time, if its farther than half an hour away charge so much per mile/km, and if they want me to stay late for some other stuff, so much for that.

Then the album, prob what it costs to get good prints, and a descent hourly wage, at least more than min wage to make it worth while. If this all costs to much, contract out.

Plus what ever else I can figure to offer at the time that the customer may want.

No, I don't put a copyright notice on the prints. As far as the marriages not lasting long, that is a definite possibility so selling the negatives right waya makes sense.

I noticed that folks don't make a lot of reorders. So I charge a bit more than I would have otherwise and include the negs. The customer has them for reprints when their financial situation improves,

But what I've noticed is that when they have extra money it goes to other things, car, stereo, house, entertainment, etc. It's about 10 years after the wedding they begin thinking of reprints. That's a long time to wait for reorders. And who knows where any of us will be 10 years down the pike.

P.S. This is still working fast! Having a difficult time handling this. Keep expecting Freddie or Jason to come through the door.

And that means you gotta keep the negatives 10 years, and if you shoot digital you get to worry if the cd will crash in 5-10 years and if you do enough weddings, that means you get alot of cd's to back up every 4 years or so to make sure they dont "crash". So selling right away does make sense yup.

What do you think of wedding photographers that shoot entirely in digital?

My openion is as long as thier using a dslr that isnt noisy and doesnt have hotspots that interfear with picture quality, why not? Alot of people probably cant tell the difference between digital and film prints anymore.

Ok, I live in Houston. There are TONS of photographers out here, but there's business for it. Also, the photographic market is a bit different down here than up north. I guess I should say it's easier to get business down here, but people, say from New York, know and expect more quality work. Down here, it's all images on a peice of paper.

We payed $1,500 for him to shoot the wedding and the reception. This included a bound album and no bridals. Studio bridals are another $500, which we didn't do because I can shoot those anyway. Since we wanted family shots done, he setup a nice muslin background and shot that before the wedding. The "digital negatives" were another $1,500.

Our original photographer backed out 2 weeks before the wedding, which was on Valentine's Day. So we were really pressed to get someone. We both liked his presentation, so we signed him up. (Believe it or not, his prices for the services were nearly as low as we could find, and we both liked the work he showed us.)

I can shoot what he did, the way he did it WITH bridals and all kinds of toys for $1,500 and sold the negatives for another $500 to a grand. IMO, his work was pretty sloppy, he was indecisive and he didn't know how to handle people. But, that's beside the point.

What I wanted to know was whether photographers are INCLUDING the negatives in their packages, or selling them separately.

From what I've seen, there's usually an option to have them including for an extra fee... or it's included in one of the more expensive packages/options...

Whats a studio bridal? Just taking pictures of the bride and bridesmaids in the studio instead of before the wedding or?