Gestures Photography: June 2008

This is a question I get a lot from family and friends: Why should I pay for professional portraits when I can get perfectly good photos from my own camera and the One-Hour Photo down the street for a fraction of the cost?

This is a question I asked myself when I opened my own studio - would it really be worth it to me and my clients to use professional equipment and a professional lab rather than the point and shoot camera one-hour photo down the street? After all, millions of people use that stuff all the time, and their pictures come out perfectly fine, right?

So - being the type-A, ex-engineer that I am, I decided to do a little research and run experiments of my own. I asked the various labs why I should use their lab vs. their competitor. At several of them, I got the answer I expected - because we're way cheaper. At the more expensive labs, I got answers like "trained technicians", "color-managed and density corrected output", "validated quality control standards", etc.... I wasn't sure this really answered my questions, because after all, that would be what they say, right? I mean, that's their job.

Ultimately I decided to do a little experiment. I sent the same set of seven prints to about a dozen different labs. When I got them back, I marked on the back which lab they came from, then mixed them all up and laid them out on my table. I then looked at them from a purely subjective perspective - which looked the best to me? Remember - these are exactly the same photo, from several different labs. I arranged them in order of my preference. After that was done, I turned them over and compared them based on price per print. The results were exactly what the more expensive labs said they'd be - theirs looked so much better it was almost unbelievable. So - I went down the list eliminating the "poor" prints, and set to further analyze the "best" ones. In the end, I chose a higher-end, but not top of the line lab.

The rest of the expense of the "professional" comes in paying for my time to process the final portraits. I personally process each and every one of the photographs that come out of my studio. This includes everything from croppping to make a more interesting composition to adjusting the very yellow color that comes from shooting under indoor light, to removing wrinkles, blemishes, telephone poles, power lines, and pretty much anything else that you don't want in your professional portraits. I've had a lot of training and experience that helps me translate what I see through the camera onto the paper that you see on your walls.

In the end - I guess my "short answer" to the question is - if you want "perfectly fine" photos - your sister-in-law could probably do that for you. If you want contemporary, professional, creative portraits, that's when you find a professional.