Huh, what?

Sorry, I'll explain that last post.

It's been a very frustrating last couple weeks in dealing with a last-minute commercial client. I've never done commercial work before (but the images turned out pretty sweet), and he had never used a professional photographer before.

Like I said, it was last minute. The model, which I had met at a wedding I was second-shooting at the Saturday before, called me at 3 in the afternoon on Monday for the shoot at 6pm that night. Their photographer's camera broke, apparently. I'm guessing that was his excuse to get off the hook for that job.

I thought things were fine and great. We met up a week (one week! that's a short time frame) after the shoot, and I gave him the disc.. 26 images, fully retouched and edited to perfection. He was expecting every single image from the shoot, edited and retouched, which was over 90.

Obviously, there were some massive errors and omissions in what was expected from both parties, mostly what he expected from me.

Long story short, he emailed me then, pressuring me to give him all the images, saying he'd invested a chunk of change into this venture (I was only paid 1/5 of that amount, so I'm assuming the other 4/5 went to the model...? Dumb.). So I carefully explained to him that for the number of hours I worked on his project, including shooting time, resulted in me getting paid $5.20/hour with no compensation at all for the images... the going rate for professional commercial images is $50-75.

Despite the fact it was my first official commercial job, I still expect to get paid to expand my portfolio, especially since the images were extremely well done.

I think he folded (HAH! His business deals with poker) since he was apologizing up and down. But I'm not really giving him an option.


Not just anyone gets to boss me around, and no one takes advantage of me unless I let them.


However, this isn't the first email war I've won. :)

(This was one of the images from the session.)