Thought I’d give a motivational sermon today.
I did a ‘half day’ job for a client recently, portraits to publicise a documentary they’d made for the BBC. They’d asked my rates, I told them, they decided it was a half-day job, I booked it in. It subsequently changed date numerous times. So many, in fact, that I honestly can’t remember how many emails and calls I took where I was asked for the umpteenth time what my availability on this day or that week was as the people we were going to photograph weren’t available, or the producer of the project wasn’t available. Didn’t really matter – I just kept answering the question and re-booking the job in whenever they needed to change the date.
Eventually the day arrived and I had a lovely 2 hour drive to the location with the producer, and we got on famously. Did the job and had a lovely time and was cheerful and practical and helpful throughout, as much for my own benefit for anything else. Nobody wants their portraits shot by a moody negative arse, right? And there’s nothing worse than shooting portraits of someone who doesn’t like you and doesn’t want to be shot.
I’d booked and quoted for a half day rate, and by the time we got back to London it was a good couple of hours over, at least. Didn’t ever mention this on the day, it wasn’t important.
Downloaded my cards, did a rough photo-kill on the duffers, had a few beers, went to bed. Next day I went to work at my ‘other’ job (*cough* The Wright Stuff *cough*) and while there got a call from the client asking how soon they could get the images or at least some of them, as their client (the Beeb’s picture publicity department) needed some ASAP to start publicising the project.
Got home after the show, about noon-ish, and started working on them, did a final approval on the keepers, had to swap a couple of heads in from other shots to hide the dreaded blinkers in a couple of group shots (you know, it’s a great group portrait, but someone had to blink at that precise 1/100th of a second!) and threw together a gallery to upload to a private client area. Hint: buy Photo Mechanic and use the built-in Export feature to export in any one of a range of Flash or HTML galleries. I use Simpleviewer, and I tweak the HTML it produces to fit my website style. A couple of clicks and a miniscule bit of copy/paste in Coda and it’s ready to go.
Emailed gallery link to client. Client bloody well loved them (yay) and sent me the numbers of the ones they need ASAP to send to Auntie Beeb, and can I get them to them on a disc by the end of the week for them to send off? I offer to upload a ZIP archive of the selected photos to my site for them to download and send directly to the Beeb that very day. Oh no, they say, don’t go to any effort, so long as I can get a disc to them by the end of the week that should be okay.
Hah! I dig out the high res copies of those photos, around 70MB worth (and therefore not really email-able), compress them to an archive, upload the archive to my site (took 15 minutes to upload), send them the download link. 20 minutes later I get an email.
“What’s your day rate? We love the photos and are happy to pay your full rate for the day.”
Always go the extra mile! 🙂
