If you are old enough you remember the days of film. You went through your studio at the end of the day collecting all the rolls of film from that day’s sessions. You put the film into an envelope and shipped them off to the lab. You went home, ate dinner, spent some time with your wife and children and fell asleep during the 10pm early news with never a thought of the images you had captured. Those were truly “The Days”.
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2 days later a large box came back from the lab full of all the rolls of processed film and the paper proofs for a folio/booklet or a 35mm transparency for projecting your proofs if you wanted to sell wall portraits. As you pulled out the proofs (or in my case the staff pulled out proofs, I never do what I can pay others to do for me!) there were the previews of whatever type to sort through and prepare for the client's viewing. Typically, you had a few more proofs than the session called for to cover any missed blinks or strange expressions, but you were always within 4 or 5 images for a session because the cost of the film, processing and the proofs were expensive. The person that paid the bills forced us photographers to have some control and not shoot duplicate images just because the person or the pose was perfect!
Then the digital age came and a new way of thinking about the true cost of things to a business came about. Photographers looked at their time spent on the computer that used to be spent with family as having no value or at least not enough value to figure out a better way. I liked the process we had when we shot film, I like my wife, I like my boys, I like our dogs, I even like watching TV now and then, so I really didn’t see a reason to change the workflow that had worked so well with film. So we set up our digital work flow to emulate the successful system we had always loved.
Now before you start emailing me all this “this is my art”, “this is my vision” crap, save it for your divorce attorney! If you can’t keep “your Art” or “your Vision” to eight hours a day, you need to find another Vision because you can’t sustain a happy home life without being a part of your home life and sitting in front of a computer is not being a part of your family’s life. You might disagree, but that would make me right and you wrong! And, if you think I am wrong about this, ask your spouse to read this article and see if the people that care about you think I am right!
Unlike most of the topics I write about this will not take an entire book to explain, for there are only two problems that photographers have with their work flow that are responsible for the amount of time they spend editing their images. Before I explain what they are, I want you to keep an open mind.
The first problem is that some (probably most) photographers today shoot way too many images. With film, we actually determined the best camera angle, pose and lighting ‘BEFORE’ we started shooting. Photographers today start shooting and improve everything while they are shooting. As professionals, shouldn’t we know this before we take the first picture?
Every studio explains each session as having a certain number of images for the client to select their package from. Whatever that number is, the average photographer doesn’t let that number guide their shooting. Digital Photographers think each shot is free, unlike the costs of film and processing back in the day. The deceptive aspect of digital photography is that is has no “hard costs”. Time is the only expense, but time is a more precious resource than money. I can write a check to the lab and camera store, but money won’t buy the things I miss out on at home or the opportunities I miss out in business while I am sorting though images.
Another sad fact is that the number of duplicate shots grows exponentially with the beauty of the subject. A larger, unattractive girl gets the basic session, with no extra images taken, while a beauty queen with slutty clothing has 500 shots to edit through. Not all photographers fall into this trap, there are some photographers that take 500 shots of each and every client to edit through. I don’t know who to applaud, the moral person that has absolutely no business sense, or the person that has business sense until lust fills his heart!
The only people that have a reason to have hundreds of images for a client are wedding photographers, but you wedding photographers don’t get off the hook. While portrait photographers went from shooting 50 images with film to 150 to 500 images with digital, wedding photographers have gone from shooting 150 images on film to shooting 300 to 1000 images of the average large wedding. If you shoot like this, you had better have an employee editing down your images for you or make sure to pay yourself at least $300 an hour for every hour of editing and enhancement you will do.
I know many of you photographers started laughing when I said $300 an hour for editing your work, but isn’t that what a photographer gets paid as a minimum? I think you might be on the brink of discovering the error in your ways. You are a photographer, not an image editor or Photoshop enhancement person. As a photographer, with a camera in your hand you can generate $300 to $1500 an hour in profit, as an image editor you have just reduced your worth to about $10 a hour. Do you start to see why this might be problematic for your business and/or personal life.
This is why so many photographers’ personal lives suck, actually many don’t have a personal life any more. Photographers looked at the digital process and it looked like fun. They knew that they could never get paid enough for the time they take editing and preparing all the images they over shot, so they took the work home as to not lose billable time at their studio.
I want you to use some common sense here, if you enjoy editing images and over shooting and you have found a way to get paid a photographer’s rate for all your time editing more power to you. But I have never actually seen this situation yet. During a class on senior photography, I added up the hours the photographer giving the class spent on the personal consultation, 3 hour session, all the time editing down the images he overshot, pre-touching, creating a slideshow (all of which he had to do because this was “his Art”) He then talked about having a $1800 average sale, everyone in the class was impressed, I wanted to laugh. This guy spent 6 hours of his own time to get a $1800 sale. This means that if an average photographer shot appropriately with an hour long session, viewing as we will talk about shortly and only had a $350 average sale, he would make $300 more in sales with the same six hours of his time than Mr. Fancy-Pants in his boutique studio!
Thinking as a business person for a second, you only have so many billable hours of time in the average day, week, month or year and that’s it. Every hour you personally do something other than photography you rob your company of $300 to $1500 in sales for every hour you sit editing your images. Some photographers think, “I am not hurting my business I edit at home”. If you are sacrificing your marriage and you don’t mind your children growing up hating you anyways, stay at the studio and generate the $300 to $1500 per hour. You can offer late night appointments, weekends, whenever they want to take portraits you are available. You would make so much money, your wife and children could at least hate you in style! (At this point, I must say I am making fun here to make a point, I sure your wife/husband and children don’t hate you, at least not yet, whoops there I go again!) I know that photographers can truly have it all if they conduct their business as a business and stop running their studios like expensive hobbies.
Reality check, I am 47 years old, I have been a professional photographer since I was 22. I am for lack of a better word, semi-retired, because I only work 2 to 3 days a week at my primary profession. I only work this amount of time because Achievable Wealth at Amazon.com I have many other interests I must look after. I have rental real estate and other investments, I own Muze Intellect, LLC which is the company that owns all of my intellectual property including all my books, a board game I have designed and other products of my little old mind. My wife enjoys dogs, so we breed Pedigree White German Shepherds that she sells all over the world for $1500 each, they have their own warehouse complete with doggy showers and sleeping quarter for each dog. I have, actually I should say my company has a Dodge Viper and I live in a beautiful home.
I tell you this story not to impress you, not to make you envious, but to inspire you. I have only been a photographer my entire life. My parents and my in laws are both middle class people that didn’t have money to give to their kids. Everything in my life has grown from my photography business and I am where I am because it is a business not a hobby. I don’t work for fun, I work for profit and have fun doing it! In my books and the articles I write I don’t tell photographers what they want to hear, I tell them what they need to hear. Photographers don’t need to be encouraged to think like an artist, we all do that without encouragement. Photographers do however need to think like business people.
Profitable work flow require two things, first you have to overcome your impulse to overshoot. We shoot ten shots of each background/pose, no more for a single subject. Two people 15 shots and a family 20 shots and that’s it. A greater number of the same image isn’t going to make them better! The number of different backgrounds/scenes/poses is calculated to produce the same number of images from a single subject as a family. A senior has 8 different posing ideas, while a family would have 4 to produce the same number of images taken.
This nets us around 80 images from a session, the staff member that saves the images takes out any bad expression or blinks which reduces it down to 65 or so, a number that a client can view. It’s amazing how this whole impulse-control thing works! Back in the days of film, clients looked at un-retouched images and made very large orders realizing they would have negative retouching on them, why do we think that clients need to see a retouched image? Because photographers at seminars and classes said they needed to be pre-touched, right? Wrong, each and every client views un-retouched images everyday and they can comprehend they will have retouching done on the final images.
Showing un-retouched images work for us because I shoot so the images are 95% as good as they will be with retouching. I don’t rely on Photoshop to fix the lighting or make my client look 
thinner, that is done using corrective lighting and posing (read the book Corrective Lighting and Posing) I rely on Photoshop to soften the skin and wrinkles and remove acne. The images are refined, but they looked just like the original images I had created, just slightly better. If you can’t show your clients your original images out of the camera there is something wrong somewhere. I think the biggest problem is that photographers should create, compose and edit in the camera as much as they can and use Photoshop as little as possible, this is after all why they call us photographers, not graphic artists!
The next thing you need to do is to reduce handling time as much as possible. In the studio, we shoot jpegs. (I can already envision all the emails now!) We show a client their images right after their session is over, this works really well. Client’s excitement will never be as high as right after a session and during a Recession you need excitement for a client to open their wallets when they are worried about losing their job.
On these two points alone, I can imagine I have a few photographers upset. I have attended the seminars that the photographers have said “if you think you are good enough to shoot jpegs you are wrong!” Is that right, well back in the day I shot slide film for clients using only a light meter with a 35mm and slide film on medium format using only a light meter and a Polaroid back and the images were beautiful. And now someone is telling me that I can’t master jpeg capture with a camera that has a histogram, a large digital display that can be magnified, custom white balance and over-exposure indication, in the control environment of the studio! Are we so lazy at photography now, we can record an image properly? And please before you email, realize I said in the studio! I too shot Raw images on location or when I am working somewhere for the first time, because the security of raw capture outweighs the time it takes to handle the files.
These same photographers have also professed how pre-touching and a slide presentation are far superior to viewing after the session. There is more than one way to do anything and I don’t claim to have the best way, but it works very well for me! I spend on an average of 45 minutes with each senior “total” and my averages are as high as anyone I have ever heard speak. I have employees preparing each client up to the point of the session, employees helping me during the session with sets and professional sales people taking care of everything after the session, so my total time with each client is 45 minutes. I see 8 seniors in the course of the day, I leave the studio each day about 4pm and don’t have a care in the world about the images I have created. This is how I can work 2 to 3 days a week! I didn’t base my business on my art, I based my business system on other “successful” professionals, like a doctors.
My business plan isn’t for everyone. There are some photographer that insist they must over-shoot, they must edit-down, they must pre-touch, they must produce a slide-show for the client to watch and they must do it all themselves, because it is their art and only they can perform each task. It is a hard road to go down, but if that the life you want, good luck. Other photographers are struggling trying to balance the whole making money, dealing with the family, wanting to travel and retire someday, thing. For you I suggest developing a business system that is based on profit not on art. The saddest thing in the world is the photographer that makes his/her entire life about photography and then has to do something else because there isn’t enough profit to sustain a business or their family gets tired of being alone. You can truly have it all, just run your business like a business and not an expensive hobby!
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