Why do some high-end wedding photographers just do the wedding work and then hire someone for postprocessing?
by leony on April 3, 2010
It’s hard enough for a wedding photographer to make a profit. It seems incredibly amazing that some have employees.
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{ 5 comments… read them below or add one }
Because they don’t know how?
I’ve seen a ton of “wedding photographers” who have no clue what they’re doing. They just picked up a camera, set it to “auto” and started snapping away. So it wouldn’t surprise me that they don’t know how to postprocess either.
It is because they are shooters, not post production wizards.
In the days when we used film, after the shoot the film was sent to the lab. Wedding photographers had 5×5 proofs made and the best were shown to the client.
Orders were taken and the negatives went back the lab. If any “retouching” was necessary, an airbrush retoucher did the work.
Those of us who have over 70% to 80% of our experience shooting film, never did any retouch work. It was a different art all together.
The idea of expecting a photographer to also be a post production expert is not too realistic. Both professions take years of experience and at least some education. Most good photographers are so, so retouchers. Most of the excellent post production professionals are not photographers and are well versed in both Photoshop and Illustrator.
There are many more excellent photographers who “think” they are good at digitally retouching than ones who really are.
It seems that ‘teams’ are the call of the day because, for a photographer to both shoot and do the graphic arts end of the assignment, much of the day would be spent either at the computer or in some other post production work such as the legwork of building proof books or posting images online for the client to browse.
It’s tedious work and I know in my case, the model gets impatient sometimes waiting for the images to come because they have no clue that for every pimple they have, you have to do a post edit repair on EVERY image that shows that blemish.
God I like those soft-focus blurs.
.
Because it leaves the snappers to do their jobs – take pictures.
If there is a lot of post production work then it makes sense to have someone else do it as it is extremely time consuming and specialist work when done properly.
A “high-end” wedding business will be factoring in all these costs into the price to the client – hence the reason the charges can be many thousands of pounds/dollars.
Fotoace has it well said over all.
I was never a great color printer but found labs over the years that had them on staff to use for my work. I was never great at sales of my work, ever, so my best years in the business were when I had sales staff to book the jobs and sell the finished product.
The best advice I heard from a wedding pro at a pp of a year end meeting was find the best ppl you can to do what you do not do well…
It served me well over the years when I remembered to do that.