Professional Photography: A Clients Tutorial on Digital Production Fees.

You've instructed the photographer, visited the shoot, seen the results on their notebook and are now looking forward to acquiring your disk full of amazing new imagery. The compact disk arrives and as imagined the pictures are stunning, more than you could have asked for, however there seems to be a mistake with the sales invoice, what's this digital production fee all about?

Customers often seem uneager to pay for digital production costs. They either don't fully comprehend the costs to the commercial photographer in capturing and presenting digital imagery or simply believe that the 'virtual' nature of digital image files somehow deems them free or of less value than a file that has been shot on film, printed and then scanned.

In the past working out the price of a shoot basically involved adding up the price of the film shot, photo lab developing plus printing costs and then adding on a modest supplement to cover the managing of the whole process. Scanning and retouching was normally done and reimbursed by the customer but if I was asked to do it myself then this time would be billed for separately. With the arrival of digital capture, things have changed significantly.

Well I haven't even seen a roll or sheet of film, breathed the foul odor of darkroom chemistry or spent hours laboriously removing flecks of dust from a transparency before scanning for more than 3 years now. To be honest I rarely miss it. Digital photography has many distinct benefits over the traditional film capture process, most noticeably in the new level of creative command the professional photographer and client has and also the time saved in finishing the whole process. But there are now many less observable and unseen costs involved in getting to this final image file:

Digital Camera Equipment. Just to be able to capture digital files the photographer must now frequently invest in extremely expensive digital cameras, far more expensive than their film counterparts. Film cameras are fairly simple mechanical devices that would last a careful photographer for many years whereas digital cameras are full of technology that soon becomes defunct so therefore need frequent upgrading. Digital cameras also appear to break more often, let alone the regular sensor cleaning needed!

RAW file processing and retouching. Professional digital capture often produces a RAW image file, a kind of negative that unlike jpeg files will need fine tuning to get the right level of exposure, colour correction and sharpening. These RAW files can best be compared to a traditional film based negative that demands to be lab processed, printed, scanned and finally retouched to the clients expectations. But rather than dodging or burning with an enlarger the photographer will now do this key retouching work in image manipulation software like Adobe Photoshop. Last these fully edited and retouched files will either be printed by a calibrated desktop printer, transferred to the client via some sort of digital media or sent via email/ftp. High end computer equipment doesn't come cheap, or the image manipulation software that commercial photographers must learn to efficiently use. Such high-priced items also have the unpleasant habit of devaluing very rapidly too, plus considerable training is often needed to enable the photographer to use expertly.

Time. All of these new and often unrealized skills require time, although the client may get the finished imagery much quicker than with traditional prints, transparencies and scans, the work load and set of skills of the photographer has actually increased. Remember the scanning and retouching costs you used to have to pay the reproduction house? Well now the photographer saves you lots of these costs by doing it themselves, but this process still necessitates time which must be paid for by the client.

Overall, Professional photographers digital processing fees simply reflect the ongoing financial investments in appropriate professional equipment, skills needed to pursue such tasks and the labour time incurred in delivering the customer with finished digitally captured, edited and presented image files.
This article has been supplied courtesy of Andy Nickerson. Andy is a Commercial Photographer Northampton with over 14 years experience in working for design and advertising professionals. Andy also creates bespoke art in Northampton.