Mall photographer charges $99 per digital file!

I was checking out a shopping mall portrait studio, and I was very
surprised to hear that they use Olympus and that they charge $99
per RAW/jpeg file (they 'renounce the copyright' for the files
they sell).

A hundred dollars for a lousy digital photo?! And no professional cameras?
Are these guys for real?

 

Are people paying it? If so, why didn't you get the idea first?

 

Charles wrote:

I doubt that many people ask for the RAW files. And I'm not a professional
photographer.

 

Depends on the photo.

 

Which Olympus camera? The E-1 is a pro camera.

 

What is your definition of a Professional photographer?

What is your defintion of a professional camera??

 

Hi.

So that is their price, if you want the goods, pay the price.

That is still fairly modest. There is a photographer who has a Studio in a
near-by shopping centre (Mall). His price for a Framed 15 x 12 Colour Print
is £500 ($750 ?).

There seem to be enough people willing to pay that, to keep him in the
lifestyle to which he has become acustomed.

Roy G

 

Sounds like GlamourShots. My daughter worked for them for about 2 days.
They used an Oly E-10, at least they did a year and a half ago...

 

The $99 price is probably 99% for getting the copyrights to the image, the
rest is for the image itself. The fact that for that small amount of money
they are willing to turn over the RAW file as well as the copyrights to it
indicates it is a steal.

Look at stock photo companies, you can pay a lot more for an image and still
not get the RAW file or own the copyrights to it.

 

Agree, more power to him, ...and more $$$ money $$$ too!
He wouldn't be in business unless people were paying hi price.

Cheer$, Anabella M.

--
Anabella M.

.....it's better to have loved and lost
than to have never seen "Lost in Space"!
--Kelly Bundy

 

HornBlower top posts:

Yeah, but no stock house will hold "mall photographer" images in their
databases -- they want to rent their stuff out, don'tchaknow, not hold
on to worthless imagery -- so what is your point?

 

"His price for a Framed 15 x 12 Colour Print
is £500 ($750 ?). "

unheard of!
I've heard $750 for an entire wedding, but for a single photos!?

 

What's the value of the copyright for a photo only a family member
would ever be interested in? It surely isnt 99 dollars!

 

That's right! Very good!

 

Well to YOU it could easily be worth $99. My son just got pictures
taken at his school, normal school pictures, and they turned out very
good...I asked the photographer if I could get a digital copy of the
file, so I could get my own enlargements, make a mug for the
grand-parents, etc...his response was that it was $350 for the digital
file (I'm sure it wasn't a raw file, just a full-size (6.3MP, as he was
shooting a *ist Pentax camera) jpg image).

His prices weren't high for the actual pictures, but I guess to let the
digital file go, they wanted a chunk of change...I would have expected
it if he charged alot for the prints, but a full package of like 24
wallets, 2 5x7's, 2 8x10's, etc...was about $20, so he certainly wasn't
ripping anyone off there...

Basically the photographer has to weigh any possible sales to you for
reprints, versus him giving you the 'negative' and then no more sales
to you at all...$99 honestly sounds pretty cheap and if it was a good
picture of my family I'd pay it in a heart-beat...it beats scanning a
print and trying to replicate them that way...been there done
that...and it sucks.

 

Nor is the guy in the mall, he is just a scammer.

 

That's why she quit. A) she couldn't stomach being a part of such a rip
off, B) she had access to better equipment at home, but they wouldn't let
her use any of it and C) they cared nothing for the client, only in keeping
to a formula, including outfit changes, whether the client wanted them or
not. Those, and they paid the photographer a ridiculously low wage. She
walked halfway through her second day, the first being her training day...

 

Only $99. How can this guy make a living?

Since when do we need to use professional gears that cost 10k or more to
make great pictures? Since when is it too much asked to charge money for
one's work? Since when is it written that a photographer needs to give away
his negatives for less than a double-digit amount? - No way, this guy needs
to either increase his price or his quality of work isn't much worth.

Gregor

 

I don't quite understand why people are saying this guy is a rip off artist.
If he has a product that people are willing to buy at his advertised price,
what is the big deal? I thought that was the basic concept behind free
enterprise in the civilized world. Seeing what people pay for wedding
photos, graduation photos, etc., this sounds cheap. It's amazing to me how
people will criticize his equipment, and his pricing. It really sounds to me
like there is a lot of envy green going around.

Chris

 

Why not raw with Pentax? My *istD shoots raw, as well as TIFF and JPEG.