Not an easy thing to deal with. Cheap people are just cheap! One route that I have gone is to quit trying to make money on the prints and just charge up front for the job/time. I get no quibbles about people valuing my time and skills.
One real problem of this digital age is that it has cheapened the value of a print. Because of viewing on monitors (no prints), scanning, photo-copying, etc., the client just does not put much stock into the prints themselves. In reality, they shouldn't be able to get lab services any cheaper than you can. Seems that the Kiosk style pages are still at least $5-10 page. I get lab prints between 1.65 and $6.50 worst case for 8X10's. So you hit 'em hard up front with your fees for doing the job and then help them with (cheap) prints after the fact. That way you still have some control of the output. I haven't really had any problems with this direction so far. -- Best regards, Bruce Wednesday, December 24, 2003, 12:20:55 PM, you wrote: mw> Hi, mw> Tom Reese wrote: >> >> I shot some B & G portraits a little while ago at cost as a favor to a >> photographer friend. I was very pleased with the pictures as were the B & G. >> I was going to give the B & G the professional lab enlargements at cost too. >> I hoped to get a few more portrait jobs out of the assignment through word >> of mouth. I shot the pictures with medium format (non Pentax) and they were >> tack sharp. The enlargements would have been beautiful. The numbskull >> (deleted much stronger verbiage) bride took the 5x5 proofs to some jiffy >> print outfit and scanned them then got enlargements made from the scans to >> save a few dollars. mw> The _only_ way to deal with this, if you really want to, is to issue mw> legal proceedings against the expletive deleted and the print company mw> for copyright violation. The more people that do this, the fewer times mw> it will happen. Put it in the hands of the legal bandits on a no-win, mw> no-fee basis and watch the fur fly. It could be your Christmas present mw> to yourself. mw> mike
