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Comment by bradly | Hacker News Reader

My wife and I recently had a professional photographer come out to take photos of our newborn and it was quite frustrating. Apparently it is common for photographers to not give you your digital copies after the shoot. We _can_ however purchase separately a digital copy for an individual photo at $25 a piece. Want an 8x10? $50. Want to post the entire session to Facebook for your family to see? n*$25. I asked what she normally earns from prints on average from a shoot and offered to just pay that for the digital copies, but she wasn't up for it. Also, how long does she have to keep my photos to allow me to order more prints? 3 months? 6 months? What if I want a print a year from now? What if she goes out of business next week?

So for me, charge what ever you want to charge for the session, but for goodness sakes, give people their photos. That is what they are paying you for.

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> So for me, charge what ever you want to charge for the session, but for goodness sakes, give people their photos. That is what they are paying you for.

Absolutely! This is a communication issue. There would be no confusion if every single photographer / studio spelled this out explicitly to you before hand. The reason they don't spell it out explicitly is that once they take the photos, you have no choice but to pay them for the photos. After you are burned by this, you realize it is always this bait and switch.

Every single person in the universe is hiring people to take pictures so they can have the pictures. They don't hire photographers, so the photographers can build up a library of prints to sell back to them.

That being said, I negotiated heavily with my wedding photographer for the rights to my photos. This was an incredibly hard process and I almost dumped my expensive photographer. It wasn't the money issue, but they could not grok giving up or sharing the copyright (sublicensing). Eventually, they gave me a full sub-license, with equivalent full rights after 5 years (i could do anything except sell them for a profit until 5 years later). As if i wanted to try and make professional quality prints to sell to all of my guests.

My argument was that those images are priceless to me -- even in 30 years, but they might move on in 30 years or lose the images. Without an ability to reprint them, I would be limited to decaying physical prints.

This is insanity to anyone but a photographer. I wonder how often it is that a photographer loses out on the proverbial jackpot when a customer resells their images.

I guess this is the problem that photographers (and Hollywood) has, thinking to much about what they "could" have had.

Just charge for your time and maybe a reasonable amount for digital copies and be done with it.

Nine times out of ten in my experience, it's not a worry about money, but representation.

If you give a customer digital copies and they "retouch" them or crop them and present it as YOUR work, that's a huge frustration.

It's easy to prevent attribution in the sub-license. But I've never heard of this as a fear for consumer level photography. Who wants to share photos of their kids with a big attribution to the photographer?

Err, not things like that.

Say you shoot portraits of a family and give them the originals. They do a lousy crop of the kids, chopping off the parents' heads and send that out to their friends/family saying that they got the pictures done at Smith & Sons and look at the kids!

Some people will look at that picture and say "Wow, Smith & Sons did an absolutely terrible job, why would they cut off the parents' heads?"

That kind of mis-representation.

When I got married I put an ad on Craigslist seeking a photographer willing to do "work for hire" so that I would have the copyright. This is how photographers hire other photographers (e.g. for multi photographer shoots). I got many more responses along the lines of "how dare you ask for work-for-hire" than actual offers.

I had to spell out explicitly to the photographer that I hired that only I would own the copyrights to the photos and they she could not use them on her website, etc.

This was a few years ago. I think it's more common today for people to include the digital copies in the price or sell them to you for an additional fee.

I'm tempted to post an ad for a non-existent wedding just to rile up some indignant photographers.

Edit: HA! Looks like I found one in this very thread! Use that downvote button, bitter dinosaur!

> I think it's more common today for people to include the digital copies in the price or sell them to you for an additional fee.

They'll give you the digital copies but not the rights. It might not be a problem until you hit a store that won't make prints for you.

I was frustrated by a similar studio who took my family's shots. They tease you with 50 great photos and your budget dictates that you need to entirely discard 40 of them.

It's not like they were doing individual editing of the shots. They had some pre-made filters set up which we could choose to apply to the photos of our liking.

As a photographer, I wasn't particularly impressed with the digital files I received. They didn't seem to be as high quality as the camera they were using should be producing. And the sharpening/NR wasn't custom to the pictures.

So whenever I do shoots for people, I sit them down mid-shoot to see what the shots look like, and maybe even attempt to fully edit their favorite shot on the spot to show them the expertise that I put into the post-processing. I let them rate all the photos themselves so that I know what they like, and then I give them exactly what they asked for.

No, it's not, if you RTFA you would see that you're paying for their time and talent. The photographer still holds the copyright to those photos because they took them. Some photographers will be happy to license or even sell the rights but that's going to be a significant extra charge. It's the difference between buying a print of the Mona Lisa and buying the Mona Lisa. That digital file is their negative and you could very easily take that into Photoshop, make it look like it was painted by a clown and then put it up on your website with the photographer credit. You can do that if you want but you're going to pay for the privilege.

If you hire a programmer to do some work for you, who owns copyright to result of the labor?

I just had to look into this for myself. If it's not spelled out in the contract, generally the contractor owns the IP.

The default case, yes. Here we are arguing of what the correct way of doing things should be. It is widely accepted in programming contracts to transfer the copyright to the client and in photography contracts it is otherwise.

bradly's case, like darkarmani pointed out is a communication issue. His wife assumed that since she is paying for the shoot she would own the resultant work. The photographer probably though otherwise and had a contract to back this up. For a contract to be considered legal there must be a "meeting of the minds" and clearly it didn't happen here. I blame the photographer here, because they usually have their own contract templates that they know well. They should correct any asymmetric of information that may result. Having the client hire a lawyer to examine the photo contract would be more expensive than hiring a photographer in the first place.

TL;DR If photographers don't want lawyers fees cutting into their service fees, they should be upfront about what they are peddling.

>The default case, yes.

Which I believe is what the parent was asking about.

Or people could read the contracts they sign.

My employer pays for my time and talent. Freelancing programmers are paid for their time and talent. I, however, assign copyright over my works to my employer, because that's part of the terms of my employment. If photographers want to extort $25 for a .jpg, that's fine, but let's not pretend it's anything more.

I'd rather buy my own camera and learn to take photos properly than pay $25 per digital copy, it would be more fun.

Contract, for-hire photographers aren't employees. Freelance programmers give up their copyright willingly. Just because you negotiated badly doesn't mean photographers have to as well.

Go buy your own camera and learn to take photos properly! I would encourage everyone to do that. The exact moment that you grasp mastery of photography will be the day that you understand why photographers don't give up their copyright or hand over digital files to you.

> Freelance programmers give up their copyright willingly.

No, they give them up because that's _the entire point of hiring a freelancer_. It sounds absurd to pay someone to create something but not actually get that thing for yourself. That's what the money is in exchange for.

> No, they give them up because that's _the entire point of hiring a freelancer_.

Not really. My clients are paying for results, and part of those results include a license to use the code I write forever.

But I never give up the copyright. I frequently re-use techniques, libraries, modules, etc across clients, and in fact would be stupid not to.

Good luck with that. Got a few years?

>> I'd rather buy my own camera and learn to take photos properly than pay $25 per digital copy, it would be more fun.

Taking photos for yourself is always fun.

Taking photos for other people for money is not nearly as fun as you think it is, especially if your customers don't respect what you do and think that they could do your job by buying a camera.

I'm not a pro photographer, but I've definitely had my share of customers who'd constantly complain about how much we were charging them because they thought that by reading a manual, they could do what we do.

Why is it ok for the photog. to keep copyright on a work for hire?

Because it's not a work for hire when an independent contractor makes the work, unless there's a written agreement that it will be a work for hire.

Why is it OK? Because most people agree to it when they sign the contract.

You can have a contract where they pass the copyright over to you, but most photographers wouldn't sign that contract without raising the price significantly.

aleyan, If you hire a programmer to do some work for you, that programmer will own the copyright to what he/she wrote. That is why it is a good idea to stipulate in a contract that the work will be done as "work for hire" so you own the copyright. The default is the writer owns the copyright.

you could very easily take that into Photoshop, make it look like it was painted by a clown and then put it up on your website with the photographer credit

I don't see how this matters. If you wanted to lie and discredit the photographer, you could just take your own photo, do the same exact thing, and claim the photographer took it.

I do understand the economic incentive for the photographer to keep the digital copies, of course.

I didn't mean that it would be a malicious act. People have varying degrees of taste about photography. I might think a picture looks great the way I photoshopped it because it's my nephew and my monitor is calibrated incorrectly. Someone else might see it and think that there are dodge halos everywhere and all detail in the skin is lost because they tried to remove blemishes but instead removed all detail.

They might think they've done a nice thing but they haven't. I've also seen wedding pictures show up in newspaper ads because it was the best picture that the person had of themselves.

Hoomans don't understand or respect copyright, in general. When it's a big corporation it's one thing. When it's a guy/gal carrying forty pounds of gear around in their 15 year old car trying to make your memories last forever when they've got 1/500th of a second to get it right for ~$40/hr the copyright belongs to them. People should understand it.

Edited for gender neutrality.

The photographer still holds the copyright to those photos because they took them.

That's only by custom. Legally the photographer holds the copyright as soon as they take the photo, but they could just as easily assign full copyright to the person hiring them as a matter of course.

Most photos of people at weddings, family portraits, etc have little commercial value, except to the people who are in the photos. So you can see how this feels like double/triple/n-times charging, as it has suddenly become a monopoly backed by federal copyright law.

It's even more confusing. The photographer does indeed hold the copyright, unless assigned to someone else. However, the subject has the right to say how their likeness is used. For any commercial usage the photographer must assign rights and the model must sign a model release.

As someone who had a wedding photography business, my standard contract had a "client agrees to allow photographer to use client's likeness for promotion of photographer's business."* clause.

I'd go over the contract term-by-term with a client before they signed, and I never had anyone request to cross it out.

* paraphrasing, of course.

> That digital file is their negative and you could very easily take that into Photoshop, make it look like it was painted by a clown and then put it up on your website with the photographer credit. You can do that if you want but you're going to pay for the privilege.

This is inane. What photographer would give you the priviledge of publicly showing "defaced" work as theirs? Can't you do this anyway be mis-attributing?

When I got married and we hired a photographer to document the event, we had to stipulate ahead of time, when we were interviewing prospective photographers, that we wanted the digital copies included. Several balked, one offered to provide a DVD with the images for 3x the price and one offered the DVD as an included service. Guess which one we picked? In the end the photos were great and we got over several hundred digital copies of all photographs taken.

It's interesting to see a bunch of people defending broken defaults in this subthread. I see this as no different than an app that uploads or spams your entire address book with a tiny opt-out checkbox. Why should every single person have to get burned and learn their lesson to negotiate better next time?

This sounds like an old school photographer. That's the how the model used to work, especially wedding photographers.

Being a professional glamour photographer (www.topmodelphotography.com) I can say that is not how all photographers work. I always give all the RAW photos immediately after the shoot.

Some photographers want to pick out the good ones, retouch them, and only give those out. This ensures that there is nothing out there that would reflect badly upon them. Personally, I'm not as concerned with this and I'd rather have less friction with clients.

Thats the "old-school" way. to keep the "negatives" and charge for prints. They keep them on file forever. (I used to assist a wedding photographer). Negotiate for digital copies of the images ahead of time, and for rights to the photos. That way the images are yours. Some photographers aren't going to like it but its the way the market is going.

Some labs wouldn't print photos that look "pro" but this is less of a problem now.

I worked for a professional photographer. Customers don't pay professional photographers to take photos, they pay them to take good photos. The end photos which go to customers are edited to look as good as possible, which is why the customer is charged per shot. Even a professional does not take perfect pictures every shot. Giving a customer a CD with all the outtakes simply doesn't reflect well on the photographer's talent, since he is not paid enough to ensure they are all high quality.

For those of us paying for photos of babies, kids, or annual family pictures, we frequently are less interested in getting One Awesome Photo, (or three), but rather in documenting a shared time together. Yes, I'd like to have the good copies: spend your time on those. But I'd also like the outtakes where my son is picking his nose, or my daughter is trying to peel my eyelids off. I don't want to have them hanging on my wall, but which do you think I and my grandkids will want to see in sixty years?

I care about the talent of the photographer, because I'd like one or two good photos, but we recommend her to our friends due to her behavior, accomodation of two unruly and not-always-cooperative kids, as well as her ability to find the good shots.

We don't expect perfect pictures. Our facebook friends will not know who the photographer is, and live across the country anyway, so there's no risk of them ever being a customer of hers even if they did know. We don't plan to sell them, etc.

The answer, of course, is to find a photographer who is willing to negotiate a good price on the service of taking excellent pictures as well as on access to the data.

Those are not outtakes. Outtakes are bad exposure, hand obscuring the lens, ghosting, etc. Objectively bad work. It's more like why you wouldn't want to give up all the functions you ended up throwing out when doing a development gig.

I do think that not giving the majority of the acceptable files is silly though. Most photographers often seem to greatly overvalue their work. Not that good ones don't exist, but craigslist is overwhelmed with talentless photogs who overspent on gear and put obnoxious watermarks on everything.

The takeaway from that story - argue before that about this being work for hire with all IP transferred to you with some kind of non commercial licence for the photographer.

> We _can_ however purchase separately a digital copy for an individual photo at $25 a piece

I'd be willing to bet that just about every professional photographer retouches each photograph in some way before printing or otherwise delivering them to the client.

Retouching takes time. If they gave away digital copies before retouching that work wouldn't be up to their standards and their reputation—and ability to gain new clients—could be harmed.

EDIT: Changed my mind. What I wrote below is not the argument the OP was making and your criticism stands...

Though, if the photographer holds copyright they can still charge per digital copy (per use?) of the same photo.

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You're missing the point. Unless they retouch the photo before every subsequent digital "reprint", there's no reason to charge per digital copy of the same photo.

The OP is saying "charge what you're going to charge, but don't keep charging for each subsequent copy".

Apparently it is common for photographers to not give you your digital copies after the shoot.

It's common, but not the only option. There are plenty of skilled photographers who will just charge you for the time spent on the shoot and hand over the digital copies. You just need to search them out and realize that you may or may not get the same caliber of artist as one who can dictate their own terms.

You're paying for whatever was agreed upon. This is an industry standard but if the pricing structure wasn't clear beforehand then that was the photographer's fault.

my experience was that you pay for the shooting of one pose but they take many more and offer them to you afterwards

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