My wife is on the committee of a local community education group that does education for parents to be and parents of infants, anti-natal, moving and munching etc...
Now they were approached, or they approached (not sure which) a local photographer than specialises in pre-schoolers, got some local awards and recognition, had a look at here portfolio, not too bad, some of the shots are pretty cliché (you know baby with fairy wings in a plant pot), however the parents usually like them.
Anyway they organised a fund raising event, where people could have a session for $20 (we are talking NZ $$$ here, so at current exchange rate of around 0.70, that is $14US), $5 went to the community group, and the parents got to pick a free 5x7 to keep in a couple of weeks, with the choice to pay for others as well.
As this photographer normally comes to you, she needed a studio for a couple of days, my wife pointed out we had a good room with heaps of natural light, and hey presto, the photographer was using our place. I thought this would be good, as I would have a chance to pick up some tips.
The day came, she pulled out her 300D with standard 18-55, single battery and 256MB card. I was a little surprised at the lack of gear for a days shooting (she did have to charge the battery at lunch though).
She proceeded to put up her back drop and lay out her props, I though cool, nice props, fairly well organised. I didn't really want to get in the way, so I watched for a while, and let her get on with her work. She shot in Program mode, not sure what ISO in single fire mode.
We booked our wee one in for a 15 minute session, what can I say, the whole time I was thing fire now, fire now, did you get that? What about rapid fire, you just missed some great shots!!!! The same happened when some of our friends had their turn and I came in to watch.
Well, she is a professional, she knows what she is doing, anyway, can’t use rapid fire too much; it would run down the single battery and full the 256MB card too quickly! The real proof will be in the excellent results I was expecting.
The day came when the proofs came, not what I expected, just printed from Windows on a HP inkjet on plain paper, oh well, some of the shots looked OK, I personally wouldn’t have put them all in, some of them were not good at all (blurry, head cut off etc). We picked a couple for ourselves to get printed, as did several of our friends. I have to say, I did have higher expectations, I had done better myself in the past, but didn’t have all the cool props and backdrops.
Yesterday, my wife got a call from her friend, she had spend over $200, and got her prints, she said some didn’t look right, in fact she commented that they weren’t all the same size, and the B&W ones looked like photocopies, that is coming from a non-photographer. As a point she is a solo mum, and $200 is a lot of money for her!
By the time she came around with them last night, ours had also arrived. What a shock. Some were printed on gloss paper from a Fuji Digital Frontier at, however they were all washed out, others were printed on HP Photopaper from an inkjet (I can only assume an HP), these ones semi gloss. It was defiantly not a photo printer as I could easily see the dots with the naked eye, what made it worse is in a sequence we got done, some were Frontier prints and some were inkjet, which had completely different colour balances, some had borders some did not. They all were printed however from either high compression, low resolution and over sharpened as the JPEGieness (that artificial look that makes something look like it was printed from a TV) was very obvious.
Disappointed I am. What to do? I don’t know. I am more worried about the solo mum, she could see they were not good prints, she got ripped off, as for a Professional photographer, um I don’t think so.
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