Digital images - A Photographer's Perspective
(it's a little wordy, but worth reading)

Now more than ever, digital images are in high demand. Everyone has a digital camera, a scanner, a home computer and a "photo printer". Discount stores offer cheap photo printing. Everyone wants to put their digital images on their Myspace web page.

Some Photographers charge one price that includes the session fee, and a CD with all of the images. Typically a much cheaper option for the customer, but you get what you pay for. This is typically something that people do when they're just getting started in photography. They don't have an actual photography business, and therefore cannot work with a Professional Photo Lab. So they would rather just give you the CD, send you on your way and make a few bucks in the process.

The big problem with selling the customer just a CD with digital images is quality control. As the Photographer, you are now at the mercy of the kid running the machine at the local drug store. Hopefully he or she will do a decent job, and the customer's photos won't look too bad. But what if they screw them up? What if they look terrible? Who will the customer blame? When their friends see the bad pictures, and ask about them, will the customer say "we hired this terrible Photographer, look at how awful the pictures turned out"!?

I ask you this one question: Whatever it is that you do for a living, whether you are a Doctor performing an operation, a Car Salesman who has just closed a sale, a Hair Stylist cutting someone's hair.....would you leave the final step of whatever it is that you do to someone running the photo machine at your corner drug store?

We prefer not to.

This is why we require that our customers purchase a significant number of photographs from us, before we will sell our digital images. That way, you'll see what fine quality, professional photographs should look like. Then if the nice people at the drug store do a terrible job of printing your photos, you'll know who to blame.

We prefer to work with people who are coming to us because they want beautiful photographs. If you're looking for cheap photos, why not just have them done at a cookie cutter chain store photo studio? If you would be ok with printing your own photos at home on a "photo printer", why not just take them yourself with a cheap digital camera?

We are in the business of providing high quality photographs, and take great pride in our work. We hope that this explanation will help our customers better understand our policy on digital images.

Shawn, Pamela & Gavin Richter
Caught on Film Photography