Making the effort

So you've sent the client your estimate, all of a sudden where there was a frantic requirement to move forward, now you have radio silence. This happens from tmie to time. You put your best work on display on your website, it hopefully attracts your target client, and they drop you a line with a request for and estimate on a commission. No matter how hard you try, potential clients sometimes don't understand the effort involved in getting from the photograph at the top to the photograph at the bottom in the sample below. Which is understandable, I do my best to make my work look as natural as possible but also give it the necessary pop to stand out and grab the attention of the intended audience, a difficult balance at times, it can be easy to over cook it.

This was part of a recent magazine shoot for Homes & Interiors Scotland featuring Pat Renson Interiors. The conditions were changing by the second on the day, and by the time they ripened slightly, the sun had moved round enough to stop hitting the front façade of the garden room. I had already started lighting specific parts of the scene, I simply had to add a few more lights to create the illusion of sun hitting the garden room. All in I think there were 6 or 7 powerful location strobes at work here, and a fair bit of savvy in the edit to bring at all parts together. The top 'straight from camera' exposure is simply unacceptable for publication. I can't have my name next to something like this. It was taken for evaluation of the scene though, to assess how I was going to work the problems out. As you can see to expose the foreground I had to blow the sky. The sky in the finished version  is the sky that was actaully there, this has not been added. I exposed for the highlights and used the location strobes to lift the rest of the scene up the required exposure. There were so many design details in the scene that had to be picked up in the photograph for the purpose of the magazine feature. Another point to note is the crop, this is the only crop we could use, as the foreground of the garden was still 'work in progress'. With a bit of hindsight, I could have shifted the lens down a few millimetres (the image was shot as ever with a tilt shift lens as 99% of my work is) and then shopped some grass into the foreground, which may have worked. Fact is we were up against it time wise, everyone is a genius with hindsight, you can take the knowledge to the next shoot though.

Even if you're working with no lights as in above, or the one big light we have 93 million miles away which is more accurate, you have to be able to get to the image below, there's no publication anywhere that are going to be interested in the top image. So the potential client has gone for the cheaper quote, and now they're stuck with the top image because the photographer either can't get to the image below in post, or they can't allocate the time because their quote was so cheap. Either way, it's not a good place to be, because the moment has passed and the location is miles away. It's no mystery how to edit images, it takes time and experience to do it properly though without the pixels coming apart at the seams. I can guarantee you that there is not one blown pixel on the final image on the bottom of the above sample, there was no HDR software used, it was put together manually, with manually built masks, and a ton of attention to detail, looking at the entire image sometimes way beyond pixel depth. The final image is how I saw the scene with my own eyes, it's as close to facsimile as I can get with the tools at my disposal. Backlit shots like this are tricky as cameras have such little capacity to capture such high contrast scenes, even the £50,000.00 medium format digital backs have no chance in this kind of light. Time, care, attention to detail, experience, post-production knowledge all rolled into that one moment when I was pressing the shutter. That's worth paying for surely, that's why the cheaper quote isn't always the best one, but it really depends on what you need from the photographer.

Of course I have to take into account my clients needs as well, this goes without saying, and using images like the one above, I try and gently steer them towards quality over quantity, to give them an understanding of why they like the work on my website/portfolio if they have already shown an interest, and what it takes to get to that point from my own side. I don't really have any interest in producing fifty images in one day, whacking them through lightroom and considering them edited. Some clients are happy to accept that, at times that all that some clients need, and there are plenty photographers out there that will work that way, or even offer the flexibility to work that way if it's a budget concern. Some might not see the value in how I work, and that's fine by me, I need to know on a personal level that I've done my best in the circumstances provided though, and have good photographs that I know will do the job not just for the client but also for me as a means of portfolio. The best possible scenario is winning a potential client over who might have been thinking about going with a quantity over quality arrangement, and with showing some samples like above to reveal the value in what I'm doing and how it can help their business grow. I'd rather produce ten knock out images in one day, photographs that clients will be able to use for years, that I have made the effort on and poured my best into. It's an ever evolving process, and hopefully one that never stops, always making the effort, always learning. Hard to put a value on that at times.