Thursday, 10 August 2017

First paid job, client unhappy. What would you do?


So last thursday, I got a text from a friend, asking me if I wanted to photograph the restaurant she's working at. They just had e restyle and needed some shots for their website.Now I'm not a complete amateur: I regularly shoot for my 9 to 5 and people are always very happy with my work. These photos are used internally and externally for campaigns. Still, I don't feel I can call myself a professional photographer just yet. So I asked a modest price for the gig: € 100,- for shooting and editing.The shoot had to happen the next day, so there wasn't much room for preparing. I went to the restaurant straight out of work with my 18-55 (crop) and tripod, spoke to the owner who seemed nice enough and tried my best to get a good idea of what she wanted.Shooting took me about an hour and a half and during the weekend I edited the picture. Sent them to her and later she texted me back that this wasn't what she expected. The colors were to light and if I could perhaps crop out some disturbing elements? Fair enough: it's a matter of taste and this can changed easily enough. I re-edited a handful of photos and askes if this what she was looking for.But she answered that it didn't feel like her restaurant and maybe I could take a look at her old website to see the angles she wanted. So I took a look at that and saw that I apparantly chose mainly the same angles as the previous photographer. She also said I took some of the 'realness' out of the restaurant because of the techniques I may have used. She asked if I could do a reshoot.What would you do in this case? I really don't feel like doing a re-shoot: I've already spent way more time on this than the € 200,- was worth. But I don't want to make someone unnecessarily unhappy either.Stuff like this really puts a dent in my self confidence as a photographer. Did I really do that bad a job? Or does the restaurant owner simply have expectations I cannot meet?I thought I'd managed her expectations as good as I could: I told her it was a really short notice and that ussually I'd like some more time to get clear what she would want. But apparantly, that wasn't enough.Here's an album with the (somewhat darker) re-edits of some of the images: http://ift.tt/2vp7Jgt via /r/photography http://ift.tt/2wwbGjF

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