Why does everything cost so much?

Usually around this time of year I get lots of orders from clients through-out the year wanting special products for holiday gifts or custom Christmas card designs. And every year I get the same questions. Why do your products, prints cost so much when I can go to walmart or target and get my prints for $.20 each and sometimes cheaper online.

It's really plain and simple. The steps taken towards your final product before it is even sent out to the lab and is delivered into your hands takes hours and is very detailed work so I charge for this service. This is why there is such a big price difference between taking the non-edited proof version to your local target and receive 4x6 prints for $.20 and purchasing one from me for $9.00. A fellow photographer Stacy Reeves explains it very well in one of her blogs dealing with this age old question of why photographer prints cost so much.

"At the one-hour photo place, you are paying for the low-quality paper it is printed on, the antiquated equipment that prints it, and the two seconds it takes them to run the image through some generic tweaking (which usually makes the image WORSE, not better). When you purchase from the photographer directly, you are getting an image printed by a professional photo lab on super high-quality photographic paper and whatever time it takes us to carefully tweak and retouch the image and then calibrate it to the specific printer that our lab will be using, as well as our unconditional guarantee that if something is wrong with the print you receive, we will replace it free of charge until you are satisfied. This requires expensive computer software and hardware, as well as lots and lots of time (roughly 15-30 minutes per image). For large prints, we also have a special process that allows us to enlarge the image to virtually any size without any loss of quality. This is something that you just can’t get at one-hour photo shops."

And then I also get questions on "How much of a difference the editing can do?" and "It can't take that long to work on an image?" It's really a hard questions to answer for each images is treated differently depending on the mood, character and story each images portrays. Editing could be as simple as contrast and color corrections or be as detailed as removing blemishes, slimming down un-attractive body parts, opening closed eyes, putting a smile on a face that's frowning, removing distracting objects in the background, adding special effects like vignette, textures or selective tone coloring such as sepia. For fully edited images it takes anywhere from 15-30 minutes for each image and each images is treated differently.

It’s much easier to answer this question visually. In the following examples, the “unedited” photo is the image straight out of the camera, the “proof” photo is the photo after the first round of editing (this is the image that you will see in your proofing galleries), and the “edited” photo is the image after extensive retouching work that we will use for prints, albums, canvases, etc.



Also remember if you would like to post your images on your networking sites such as myspace, friendster & facebook please let me know I will be more than happy to tag your page with watermarked photos of your choice at no charge. Please do not steal download or copy images from the proof gallery.