Little help for a Tog

No 2 for me!

Hi Greenleaf,

What sold our TOG to us was the fact that we will be getting a full days photography with the end result being a disc with 800 high res edited photos where we can then pick and choose what we want. She also said she would throw in 20 6 x 4 prints of our choice free of charge.

All the other TOG's I spoke to I felt was pushing me into the book's which don't get me wrong are very lovely but at £200 - £400 a book it was somthing that was just not within our budget.

x

2 here as well.

With the cost of weddings, being able to save a couple of hundred quid on a fancy album beforehand, but then having the option after the wedding to buy your dream italian bound leather album (or the £20 one from Smiths) is better because many of us don't really know what we want and having to pay for an album before the event kinda commits you.

It may be that, say, your standard album package contains 40 pictures but we only really want 20 in the official album then we're paying up front for something in excess of what we want, having actually seen the proofs. There may of course be nothing wrong with the photos, and the various relatives will love the big group shots (which can of course be bought separately), but we aren't necessarily bothered about having them in our official album.

That's cheap for an album!

We have paid for a disc only package with a view to purchasing an album after the wedding, when we will hopefully have a bit more money! If we had to pay for an album upfront, we wouldn't have been able to afford our tog.

No2 option for me as well!

Option 2- in fact that is exaclty what we have with our tog

We have pretty much gone for opton 2, with the discussion including the option of getting the album for our 1st anniversary, as we're fairly sure we won't be able to afford it until then (unless a realtive surprises us with offering to pay for it as a present!).

For me (us) we'd always personally choose option 1.

I can't think of anything I'd hate more than seeing a TOGs fabulous album, only to realise I can't have one myself and if we couldn't afford the album up front, it would put me off and make me want to go elsewhere where I could afford both.

That said, is there any harm in offering both services? Say if you are willing to pay in advance for the album you could receive a x% discount, or a couple of free printed images (subject to profit margin impact etc) and also offering both services.

Our TOGs packages are mainly album only with the option to purchase the CD as the "extra" rather than the album being the extra, which indicates brides in my area aren't so keen in having the disc, so making them pay for a disc they potentially don't want.

I may have a biased view, as initally I was going to go for a CD only package which is what my father did for his wedding 5 years ago. He was so against the idea, telling me how much he regretted it that he put the extra cash up for us to have the CD and album.

I'd go for number 2 but with an awareness of how much an album would cost, mainly because with all the other expenses it is nice to have the option of another few months saving before having to pay for the album.

If we hadn't found a photographer whos work we liked who was also within our budget; we were planning on approaching other photographers whos work we liked to see if we could pay for the album after the wedding.

This is what I offer. The only thing is that handing over a leather bound or Graphi album is a lot more impressive way of displaying the photographic work that has gone in to your wedding compared to a silver disk.(Which can get damaged and have potential limited lifespan) Always back up and then back up the back up.

It is also the case that few people have properly lined up monitors,so the true quality of the image is rarely seen.

Peter

Option 2 for me! our tog has done this for us

Peter, I have hardly sold any albums this year (or any year tbh).

It seems to be this group desire to just have the images. Ok, so peoples monitors are a little blue, not calibrated etc...but many many couples won't know if an image looks too warm, too cold etc as they don't look for it.

A good example are portraits. I upload all the images for the client to choose their selection from and there will be a couple chosen where the focus was slightly off.

Albums are a big expense these days, I refuse to use anything other than Graphi now but at £400 for a small-mid sized album it's prohibitively expensive when a lot of couples like to upload their images to facebook. It's as if Facebook has become the album now.

I find your second service rather odd.

Surely most people who want the images, want them because they either want to print them themselves? or to make their own storybooks? or whatever? I very much doubt you'll have many people going back to you for the albums afterwards.

I've gone for an album, because it was absolutely beautiful and better than any storybook I could make. But I dd seriously consider a disc, but then I would have gone my own way. Not back to the photographer.

First of all how do you do that quote thing as im not 100% sure you can do it using firefox??

In responce to sgreen's post

In past posts have you not said that you received the disc of images free with your selection? and if so what this one of the deciding point on your photographer?

you need to click the reply icon at the top of the actual post that you want to quote. it will then take you to a reply page and the post will be shown at the top of your screen with a 'quote' button at the end of that post. click the quote button and it will quote the post at the begining of your reply

Hope that makes sense.........

I would never consider spending £400 on an album however good the photos or end result may be.

Our package has an album but it's a much cheaper one, and we're having the disc of photos that we can more or less do what we want with. That means we can produce our own thankyou cards with a picture, upload thumbnails to our website, stick a couple on Facebook, make a slideshow presentation, etc etc etc. It's what we want to do with them, so a certain amount of flexibility with not being sold things you don't really want was very important to us in our choice of photographer.

We went for option 2.

The albums that we like are expensive so this allows us to split the cost. I think the quality of the photobooks you can buy on the internet are fine if you're just going to give them to your folks or friends but as a full document of our day, no thank you! The print quality is nowhere near as good as the professional albums and I firmly believe you get what you pay for in this instance.

We shall be going back to our lovely togs to put together an album for us. We're waiting for the nights to draw in and will start choosing our images then.

Yes. I'm getting a copy the disc included with the album, which is a nice bonus.

But I wouldn't look at a photographer just based on freebies, thats a bad way to go in my opinion. Way too many cowboys out there.

The deciding point on booking was largely just the quality of his work. That has to be the primary reason what the point of booking a photographer who can't take a photo? It doesn't matter how many free discs and imags you get if they are not beautiful photographs I want to cherish.

Last week I saw some wedding photos from a friend of a friend, she showed me hers because she I heard I was getting married. She is very upset, as the photos are not good at all. The ones in the church are very, very grainy and the many of them either seem to have camera shake, and a lot of them very oddly they are not in focus of the people in the foreground, but the backgrounds are perfectly in focus. I don't know how that has happened?

Most of the ones outside are really, really blue and the journalistic styles ones are of the backs of peoples heads and stuff. Terrible. She is really upset.

She has almost 2000 photos! and she thinks she likes about 15!

I could see it was painful for her to show me, because she doesn't like looking at them, and she was married more than a year ago.

I feel you are in danger of retorting a sweeping statement with another

You are correct - the photography needs to be spot on, without the photographer doing the job right on the day, the rest of it is academic. However, some photographers can produce a set of 1000 decent images, and have a very low percentage of shots that need to go in the delete box. Others shoot five thousand and delete them down to 200. Quantity and quality are not indicators of each other

A couple simply needs to decide - what do I want, in terms of style, quantity, budget and products, and then attempt to find the best fit photographer

One photographers "freebie" can be another photographers "2 week investment in editing". If we look at what I offer - disk, website, slide-shows - all of these things repersent a massive investment in creativity and editing, and in essence, you are paying for my time. The fact the silver disk you get in your hand physically costs £0.50 to produce is pretty irrelevant

A recent wedding I shot:

4.5 days of editing

0.5 days of backing up, importing exporting

2 days to produce a slideshow

0.5 days to source the music for it

0.5 days to produce a website

Overnight upload to gallery

14 hours of shooting time

2 hour drive up the day before

2 hours to scout the venues, parking

2 hour drive the day after

(out of the office for 2.5 days)

1/2 day to prepare & check the kit, load the car

(and that's forgetting the time invested in booking the client in the first place)

This is the trouble with cheap equipment. The grainy blurry shots inside the church will be because of this. In order to get correct exposure the tog would of used too high an iso, probably on a crop sensor hence the noise....but this wouldn't of been enough, the tog would of also had to of slowed down the shutter to let more light in. Cheap equipment has difficulty focusing in low light too.

Theres a guy local to me who charges £200 more than I do who uses a £300 camera. Mine cost £4500. Generally in photography it's not so much about the camera but with Wedding Photography you need all the help you can.

My tog gave me a disc of low res images to look through & pick from.

I asked him for high res disc as well to get some printed off myself, but am also having an album - 40 pages as standard & at the moment im having 2 extra @ £30 each. Its a large album with an acrylic front. Its roughly gonna be in around £1000.00 all in.

I want a canvas & my parents want a large picture, as does OH mum. Im too scared to spend £ using high resolution images & do these myself as Im no expert in these matters and want it done right.

Im making an album up on photobox for my parents, using some professional pics & family / friends pics. They dont know about it & I think they'll be chuffed to bits with it - I might get myself a copy as well but it would be additional to my proper album as opposed to a replacement.

Like Chris said

- Using High ISO on a camera with poor high ISO performance = noise

- Not then reducing the noise in post production = excessive noise in the final images

- Being forced to the wide open lens (to get more light in) scenario gives a very limited depth of field

- Using the wrong focusing mode on the camera, or poor technique (he has probably set to focus in the centre of the frame - which often is "just between" the bride and groom AKA as the wall behind them... you can get round this by focussing on a person and re-composing the shot)

- Using "slow" lenses which don't let a lot of light into the camera

- The issue with camera shake would indicate that he was being forced to go for longer shutter speeds to compensate for the lack of light getting past the lenses and the poor ISO capabilities of the camera

In all fairness, it does have to be said that on a dull dark day outside, some churches are so dark inside, that if we fling in the mix the stipulations of some vicars that getting a good clean shot, even with most pro cameras, and a talented photographer is nearly impossible

^^This this this!

I confess when we started "wedding shopping" I was sceptical on the whole album thing, as the prices were way above what I was expecting. However, having seen these albums in real life, the quality is clearly very different. Our tog showed us albums he has himself designed, along with the studio samples, and I can see the difference, I like the style of shots he picks and the way he lays them out. He knows his own work and the type of shots he takes that work well together. *That* is why we will go back to pay him to do our album.

My friend has a Photobox memory album that was given to her when she left a long-term job 6 years ago. The photos are already fading. There is no way I want my wedding fading after that length of time.

We have said we would rather have a proper album or not at all - we were not going to compromise and pick a photographer we didn't like just so we can afford an album in the immediate package. Both of us would rather have a slight wait and get the album in a year - after all, we plan to be married a long time, so what's the rush?

I only just about understand some of the very technical responses, and to be honest I don't need to.

But any photographer I book for any job certainly needs to. I don't want excuses about fast lenses and focusing modes. I want perfect, beautiful photos.

For fear of swearing and shouting it from the roof tops, in a nutshell, you have really explained the issue. Thanks

Also beware: that silver disk - has a very short lifespan... It would be a damn shame in six years to find out that the disk wont read and there is no backup

You are right about not needing to know the tech stuff, that's what you are paying for. To get what you want, you need a friendly, easy to get on with, competent, experienced, creative photographer behind some half decent kit

Would you prefer a photographer to show the difference between a "tescos/bobs books/ photobox" and the more expensive albums or would you all see this as a desperate attempt by the photographer?

Ill also add another question in to the mix - how many of you booked photographers who have a shop against working from home?

My photographer did show me the difference between and inkjet print and a chemical print, and the difference was very dramatic. He also showed me a print about 3 years old printed from an inkjet, using he explained 'hundreds of pounds worth of setup, specialist expensive inks and papers and a complete waste of time'

The inkjets look ok but compared to a chemical print they were nothing. The chemical prints just ooze quality.

and no, I'm not sure what difference haveing a shop makes? Lots of photographers surely don't need one surely? Wedding photography isn't done in a studio for a start.

Just out of interest you didnt use to be under the name soontobemrsssmith did you? as she had the same opintion.

Your photographer obviously didnt have the correct set up as having worked for a professional printers and using both chemical, thermal and ink based printing there is no difference in quality, just a different look. Chemical prints are just cheaper to produce and quicker, although having a shorter lifespan... his problem was obviously "the hundreds of pounds worth of setup as you require "thousands of pounds"

The question was refering to more the difference in the storybook albums that you can get and those done by the big multiples who produce 10's of thousands a year against a company like graffi or sims2000

Or you could have a real silver print done in a darkroom, by a specialist who selects from hundreds of different types of paper depending on the subject

(we offer those)

Wonders what they use for museum grade prints (rhetorical question)

Or Pigmented inks. Trouble is they lack in the colour department but last 100's of years.

A decent inkjet print, on genuine paper, with genuine ink kept in a frame or from the air will last for years.

I use my garage as a semi studio and I've had some prints on the walls, in the damp, the cold, the heat for a year without fading. Although when I used some third party inks (OCP inks as supplied by Cartridge World) and Ilford paper they faded in 6 months.

Or just use DScolourlabs and pay 65p for an A4 for fuji ink on fuji paper and blacks to die for.

To be honest, that is the issue with prints made from sources that are non pro. Few labs or photobook makers actually give long life prints. What seems a good deal (by doing it yourself) at the time is going to be in the long term not so good. Proper professional prints and professional photobooks should last as long as your wedding rings......thats why they cost a little more. This isn't intended as a "frightener" for those that choose this route, it is honestly the bare truth.

As I have mentioned dozens of times on this forum over the years, for those that choose the disk route, back up and back up and back up. Then, if you need to recreate your album a few years down the line, you should still have the files to achieve this.... In my corporate work with a broadcaster, they have trialed disks for various things for over 20 years and so far none have survived longer that 8 years without having to rely on a replacement back up. I would also suggest backing up to solid media like a memory stick or memory card. Your wedding images are too important to find that at some stage they won't read.

FWIW, when couples ask for a digital files wedding from me, I supply both disk and solid media to avoid issues.