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Professional photographer throws away important event photos

Posted on 10. Dec, 2008 by p syrek in Client Appreciation, Programs, Tradeshow tips and tiffs

You hire a photographer to take pictures for your event.  At the end of the event you get all the pictures….RIGHT? Well not exactly.  This is a really good learning lesson for using professional photographers. 

What happens, especially in the digital age, is the photographer takes a ton of pictures.  He/she is just snapping away.  Now they take pride in their work, so when they go back and view their pictures, sometimes they delete the pictures they feel did not come out so well.  Here’s the problem.  Sometimes those pictures are valuable and needed.  For example:  I was doing a customer appreciation event at the US Tennis Open.  A Senior VP and his client had a picture with tennis star Boris Becker… who was speaking at our private tent.  Now they had several pictures with Boris, but there was one in particular that they had to have.

Of course, this picture happened to be one of the photos that the photographer felt was not up to par and so he deleted it.  This was a major disappointment and caused me a lot of grief.  Well I repeated this mistake again at a Detroit Lions game a few months later.

The solution:  You have to realize, some photographers are like artists.  As stated before, they really take pride in their work and they don’t want you to see any crummy pictures.  Well we put the pride aside and we ensured that every picture would be given to us… no matter how bad.  We gave the photographer a chance to give their feedback on pictures they felt were not adequate, took that into consideration and chose what we needed.

The lesson to take from this post is that you don’t realize pictures are missing until someone requests it…and it is not there.  Next time you book a photographer make sure you go out of your way to ensure you get everything

Tags: bad, events, photographers, photos, tips