A place to politely discuss the tools, technique and culture of photography.
This is not a good place to simply share cool photos/videos or promote your own work and projects, but rather a place to discuss photography as an art and post things that would be of interest to other photographers.
I think they fucked it up and don't know how to tell you.
Give them an ultimatum that the images by this date or you'll "investigate legal options", and if they don't budge then take them to small claims court or whatever the equivalent is. It's business. Protect your investment and your own money.
It might take time indeed, specially if he's not experienced as you said.
How much did he charge you?
You paid upfront. That was your mistake
At this point he's probably costing you money because you wanted to use the images for a promotion, right? Let him know that. That's probably your best bet at this point, trying to make it clear that he is the road block in your business right now.
And next time make it clear why and when you want the photos (I need them by Nov 15th because I want to use them in Black Friday advertising, etc). And make sure to get a contract with a delivery date.
Paying up front is normal. That's a long time to wait for photos.
What does your contract say? You did sign a contract, yeah?
To me this sounds like he wiped his SD Cards and the photos are gone. He is hoping you leave this alone and he never has to deal with the problem. This isn't an issue of lead time or process. If you have a relationship he is probably scared to tell you.
I don't know why people normalize photography as something where fraud is acceptable or it's your fault as client if you didn't have a contract. If you made a purchase and he doesn't deliver anything in return, even based off your verbal discussions, that is fraudulent in any business setting.
Kindly ask for you money back if you can and go your separate ways.
on digital my turn around would be maximum one week usually between 3 or 5 day for small session like this ... i shoot on film now my turnover is 14 working days only because i have to send the film abroad for processing to an external lab but one month i would be worried ... when this kind of problem arise between client and photographer i always ask "what does your contract says or what are the rules and regulation of the shooting/photographer"
Faster pay, faster delivery. Slow pay, slow delivery. That's how I work. It's like expedited shipping. Should not be more than a weeks worth of edit and delivery. OP be patient and never work with this photogs ever again lol.
sounds like you've been more than patient. 6 weeks is a long time for just 50-80 photos. i'd consider looking for a different photographer.
I don't see any reason why they wouldn't be able to give you an estimated date of delivery or at least a couple of quick edits before completeing the rest.
That’s slow af. I used to tell people a week and then they were pumped when it was only a day or two.
Or I was too busy and it actually took a week. And they don’t care.
Ask when you will receive your files. He owes you that answer.
There's something definitely wrong on his end.
For context yesterday I delivered 665 edited photos to the customer two days after the shoot. And I had two other gigs over the weekend. Everyone's busy but he's in trouble somehow.
He could have incredibly bad time management, or uber procrastionation, or computer failure or something in his world has really gone wrong. Hopefully its not anything with your photos.
Give him a deadline and your money back if he doesnt deliver....today. Friends are friends, but six weeks is out of whack.
Yeah you're being played. Forget about the pics, I would start asking his friends about him and why. At this point you have the upper hand because bad reputation is really hard to overcome, especially among acquaintances. If you maturely communicate to others in your circle the situation they will likely always hesitate to recommend him. Forget about the money and your pics, you got played. Just make sure to leave a rep stinkbomb in his way so he can never do this again to others.
People bite off more than they can chew all the time when they don't know. They think it's easy. Has he done any professional photography ever at all?
How much did you pay? At this point you can treat it as wasted money, a cost for the lesson on how not to hire photographers. You can choose to not chase him.
Did you look at any of this guy’s work before hiring him? Did you look at full jobs and not the greatest hits? Does he have a studio? Did he bring lighting and take the time to set it up for a look that supports your project brief? Did he style the items on set to make him look their best? Did he provide a contract?
If you paid less than a couple hundred bucks, well you get what you pay for and are at the mercy of his timeline. If you paid a standard rate for commercial photography in your area, then no, a month is not acceptable at all.
I just delivered a commercial job later than normal - it took me 7 days, because the job itself required a full day out of town so there was lots of busy work to catch up on upon return, and then I had some familiar obligations due to a death in my family. Kept the client advised of the timeline and delivered a ton of work.
Payment upfront in full is not unheard of, but neither is taking a deposit and getting a final invoice when the final images are ready for delivery.
If this person has a real business entity you could leave reviews, but based on what you said about the shoot length, this person sounds like a rank amateur.
How much did you pay? It's important, so we understand the quality of your guy. Also, it's for certain that the photographer isn't satisfied with the quality of the shoot.
Completely unprofessional. But how much did you pay? Does this person at least have a professional website? When it comes to photoshoots, you usually get what you pay for. I just went to a quinceneira and was watching the photographer, he was pretty bad, I even noticed the white balance was off on his lcd, his shots were all blue :/, looked to be in the " i know a guy" $100 range. For only 50 shots, I would have given you the images same day or next. Maybe he is ashamed of how poor the images came out and is avoiding you out of embarrassment or he accidentally deleted them. Other than just being unprofessional, thats really the only thing I can think of.
for more context,
i know im getting cooked for not getting a contract or a specific deadline written down. its definitely dumb on my part. I usually do for most of my jobs, specially since i hire a lot of freelancers for my work, but in this case we’re a bit more friendly than ur stranger freelancer just from being in the same spaces a lot and him working with a lot of my close friends, so i just sent him the idea and photo references i had for the shoot, he told me he was into it and gave me his price ($100/h w edits included) we agreed on a date and i paid him in full. didn’t think much of it cause its not a crazy amount of money and i liked his work + he’s a chill dude.
we didnt agree on a deadline, however we were part of the same event about 2 weeks after the shoot, where he came up to me and told me that everything is looking good and to give him about another week since his schedule is super busy. i told him i understood and to just send them when they’re ready. this was over a month ago
I’m worried he lost your photos and just delaying the inevitable refund.
Always remember one thing. Never ever pay up front and secondly if you want to judge a person meet them after you've paid them.
$100? You pay peanuts, you get monkeys.
Your photographer is probably only guilty of not having a professional sense of urgency in delivering edited images, in part, because he's already been paid. At this point, he could have edited two images a day and had them to you by now. Tell him you are coming up on a deadline where you need the photos and have to give an answer to your printer for when they can expect them.
I'd say it depends on whether you're paying him standard rates for the type of shoot it is, and how experienced he is.
Yes, at a professional level, that is too long. A week to two week turnarounds are normal, depending on the shoot. However, if he isn't experienced it might take him longer to edit them.
Alternatively, if he's charging you less than he usually charges or he's giving a "friend" rate, he might not be prioritising it. Which can be understandable. Unless you're paying him to work full time on it, he might be getting to it in his spare time.
Yeah 2 months is crazy to not have anything. I'm new to photography and have only done a couple shoots so far but I try my best to be transparent and get a finished product to my clients in a reasonable amount of time. Even if I don't have everything done you should be able to get something from them. They should have something done at this point.
Crazy ex? You're a business, he's (purportedly) a business. You wouldn't be bothering him, he's bothering you by not fulfilling his promise. Do give the benefit of the doubt to a point, shit happens, people go through stuff. Communicate on a human level as much as on a business level.
Reshooting if you have time is definitely an option, sometimes you have to cut bait and move on, I've been hired a few times to reshoot work done by a photographer who ghosted the client—once, it was for school photos!
A photographer that charges $100/hr including edits is not covering the cost of doing business. He shot an hour and you’re in it for $100.
Consider it a life lesson and move on to a real photographer.
Every wedding photographer I know stipulates full payment before day of wedding so the comments decrying op’s decision on that front hold no water, only mistake op made in my opinion was not getting a schedule of deliverables in writing.
Paid jobs, I show the client the gallery of images 1-3 days after the shoot. I also send samples from the shoot same or next day.
Once they choose the photos they want from the gallery I offer a 3 day turnaround. Sometimes I do it quicker and have it done the next day.
50-80 photos is a tiny amount in 40mins.
Maybe 5-10 decent photos from that, if lucky To edit them they should only take a couple of hours at max.
If he's that busy, he shouldn't have accepted if it means 1 month wait for you. Also he's spent the 100 and now there is not much incentive for him to complete the job.
I would suspect he's just being a flakey, inexperienced photographer. Or something happened the photos.
A month and a half is beyond unacceptable. 2 weeks would have been too long. At this point, I’d had him for the RAWs then find someone on fivver to do the post editing. Sorry for your situation OP
Next time you ask, ask him what the expected delivery date is? I’m a photographer who does a lot of sessions for friends of friends since I’m just starting out and I’m getting around by word of mouth. At most editing my own photos takes at most a week and a half. I usually end up with 300 and have to cull, crop, edit, cull some more, then put in gallery. I also work another job outside of that so it seems like this photographer you’re dealing with is either VERY busy or he’s just a procrastinator. Longest I took on a gallery was a few weeks because the original photos were bad quality and I didn’t ever feel like working on the photos bc I was discouraged.
I did a commercial shoot for a startup fashion brand. Shoot was 2 hours, I had about 1000+ raw photos to cull. We ended up with about 400 photos that I edited and delivered within a week (4 days if I recall correctly). So yeah, you’re well within your rights to badger him.
This is why we draw up contracts. Chalk it up as a learning experience and don’t work with this photographer in the future. How much did they charge you? Edit: $100/hr is super low, my eyebrows would have left my head if id been quoted that. Well, you get what you pay for I suppose. Are you sure he had an SD card in the camera during the shoot?
The delay is totally unacceptable, I never take longer than a week to wrap a job. I recently shot 5k images for a beauty campaign and had to provide an edit of 250 (RAW) to client in 96 hours and I did it! Granted I was being paid a hell of lot more than $100 however he took the job at that rate and he needs to honor the terms. There’s no reason on earth for it to take so long: even the highest end of retouching for all 80 wouldn’t take more than a few weeks and I am sure that’s not the case anyway. Thankfully you are out a very small of money and you are learning an important lesson: you get what you pay for and (written) communication is key!
$100? You hired a hobbyist. They may have botched the shoot and are avoiding telling you. 50-80 photo in 40 minutes? 2 photos per minute? That’s a run and gun method, not likely to result in anything meaningful. I would have had maximum 20 images to edit from that. I shot a family Christmas session 4 days ago, edited and delivered 20 images today. That’s fast but I don’t do a lot of portraits. My primary work is real estate with delivery the next morning but I outsource the editing. You realistically shouldn’t expect more than 2 edited images for that price.
Those photos should of been done in 2 weeks Max.
Send a message every Friday for a month and then the last Friday you say if you don't receive what you have paid for you will start the process of small claims.
There is a $100 lesson in there somewhere. Be glad it was relatively cheap at least.
It’s probably not too late to get something in writing for a due date
Or even if you have written conversations about the expectation you had of when you wanted to use the photos may be sufficient if you want to sue for your finished product
Paying upfront wasn’t the issue. Most photographers I know require payment in full before edits begin. But as you’ve already learned getting a solidified due date was the problem
Story time. We didn’t have a big to-do when my younger son was born for reasons, then at six months we held a big celebration for him. I was fishing around for photographers (I have many pro photpgrapher friends and many more who are extremely talented; you know where this is going), and a friend offered to take the photos. He’s really good, especially at portraits. I paid him upfront, because of course I knew he’d come through and I didn’t want to deal with money. And it wasn’t that much in the grand scheme.
Half the photos he takes with his iPhone indoors, circa 2018 models. They are ok, but I keep thinking I’m missing out on something. The iPhone photos are good. Well, then I waited for the DSLR images. He was working on them. Needed another weekend. Eventually I flat out said just send me anything, these are his baby photos.
They finally arrived, completely unprocessed, a few months before he turned two. I’m still pissed off.
Was this digital or film? Should of explained you have a deadline but I will say editing photos (if you paid him to do that too) that also takes time I’ve been there before,
Does he do photography as a side job?
I think with any friend terms should be clearly layed out, even oraly.
Now if it were me and I am swampted and haven't charged the full amount, I would allow some delay if things are coming along. But I would eventually get down to it. I guess the delay can't be too long either.
Don't hesitate to ask him to put his word down for a delivery date. Letting him know that it is frustrating for you to be in the blue (that's to let him know), if he takes your business for granted, remind him that customer experience is indid important as well as reputation, and that for the moment the experience is a frustrating one.
If it takes that long to deliver I wonder if the results will be worthwhile. I would ask for a sample of the results.
Kindly ask them for an estimated delivery date - you are the key stakeholder and it’s reasonable you need to know what’s going on
Put youf foot down...
A month and a half is the turn around time for a wedding photographer delivering 700-1400 images. Not normal for 40. He sounds inexperienced and kinda scammy (no contract) so maybe he screwed up and wants to make you wait until you can’t do a charge back with your bank. Take this as a lesson and hire a real professional next time. You get what you pay for with this stuff.
You've given him more than the week he asked for, and he's been paid up front. Stop being so nice to him and demand your product or your money back so you can hire someone who can deliver. As a photographer whose shot a few destination weddings now, I take half the money up front and half when the product is delivered. In one intimate wedding, from the about 700 pictures I shot, 86 were edited. It took me two weeks. And that, I felt, was pushing it. I gave them 10 edits after just a few days so they could get a taste of what's coming and so they would have something to share right away. A month and a half is a little ridiculous in my personal opinion, but I don't do magazine editing...