You can afford a 1D Mark III but not a photography lesson?

bace · Feb 8, 2009

So one of my recent clients asked me if I could save some pictures for them.

Basically they payed some woman quite a bit of money to shoot their wedding.

The pictures came back GARBAGE (i'm looking at them now as they gave me the DVD of all the shots). I look at the MetaData to see what setting and camera she's using.

First it's a 1D Mark III (frigging $10k camera)
She's shooting jpg resolution 3888 x 2592 (should be shooting raw with 5616 x 3744 resolution)
And she's shooting indoor pictures with no flash and seemingly no knowledge of what a friggin white balance setting is. Everything is yellow.

Now I'm sure that she could fix this is issue if she wanted, but it makes me sick to think that this woman charged my (new) clients money for ruining their wedding pictures, and they're so upset that they don't want to give her another cent for editing them herself. They'd rather give them to me, because they know I know what I'm doing, after shooting pictures of a reception they had just recently (with a 450D and 18-55mm the whole time).

If only I'd known them before. Could of had some decent pictures.

Who the hell owns 10k worth of camera and doesn't take a friggin photography lesson?

dxqcanada · Feb 8, 2009

bace said:
Who the hell owns 10k worth of camera and doesn't take a friggin photography lesson?

A professional professional.

Chris of Arabia · Feb 8, 2009

I suspect the answer to that last question is "Plenty" unfortunately. Perhaps you should point her at TPF, I'm sure we have a forum that would suit her needs

lostprophet · Feb 8, 2009

you are confusing the 1D mkIII with the 1DS mkIII
1D is 10mp
1DS is 21mp
give or take the odd pixel

but yeah should be in RAW and JPG

bace · Feb 8, 2009

lostprophet said:
you are confusing the 1D mkIII with the 1DS mkIII
1D is 10mp
1DS is 21mp
give or take the odd pixel

but yeah should be in RAW and JPG

You're right. My bad. Didn't know there was two kinds of 1D Mark III lol.

Still a hefty price tag for a camera.

mrodgers · Feb 8, 2009

Just because the client has a DVD with photos, it does not indicate what the images were shot as...

bace · Feb 8, 2009

mrodgers said:
Just because the client has a DVD with photos, it does not indicate what the images were shot as...

It still doesn't account for the fact that the images in general suck balls though does it?

JohnMF · Feb 8, 2009

similar thing happened to my friends at their wedding. Except they never got any photos back at all because they all got "lost". Not sure what that means exactly.

Jaszek · Feb 8, 2009

post the worst one here

if you still have it that is

Jaszek · Feb 8, 2009

danjchau said:
Her pics may look like crap, but they still are copyrighted.

yea true. Just post it and delete it right away

Joves · Feb 9, 2009

Or host a couple and link to them. If she did indeed shoot in Jpeg them maybe she went to Rockwell University on the Web.

bace · Feb 9, 2009

this is an example of a before and after...

http://www.bacemedia.com/before%26after.jpg

the best I could do (I'm certainly no photoshop expert).

if you have any other suggestions I'm all ears.

bace · Feb 9, 2009

She didn't use a flash the entire time during the ceremony and all white balance was that yellow. If they were shot raw it should have been easy to batch process all of them to "Tungsten" and at least shown her clients that they don't look that crappy.

ISO was set to 640, there's ****loads of noise on all of the pictures....I just feel really bad for this couple. They were really good to me at their reception. There should be some sort of licensing process for photographers. Or certificate or something (diploma is good for some people I guess but I didn't go to school for photography and I still know better than THAT).

Overread · Feb 9, 2009

I think you must mean 6400 - at 640 should not a 1DM3 camera be able to do very low noise to almost no noise?
As for not using flash it might not have been allowed (not making excuses, but it can be the case sometimes).

As for a licence I think there are "elitist" groups and societies that photographers can join, but its volentary - I think making an exam or qualification would be very hard to do since many people work with different workflows (heck full auto mode can work!). Though it could ensure a minimum level of competance with kit I think it would not be able to enforce or control a higher level of competance with kit easily because (at the end of the day) its art.

bace · Feb 9, 2009

Overread said:
I think you must mean 6400 - at 640 should not a 1DM3 camera be able to do very low noise to almost no noise?
As for not using flash it might not have been allowed (not making excuses, but it can be the case sometimes).

As for a licence I think there are "elitist" groups and societies that photographers can join, but its volentary - I think making an exam or qualification would be very hard to do since many people work with different workflows (heck full auto mode can work!). Though it could ensure a minimum level of competance with kit I think it would not be able to enforce or control a higher level of competance with kit easily because (at the end of the day) its art.

1D shoots 100-3200 in 1/3 stops. Which means 640 is an option (right?).

I've seen 640 as an option on Nikon so I'm just assuming.

And that's fine if you can't use a flash in a venue. But set the white balance to tungsten or if she was using raw. batch them all to tungsten before burning a DVD for your client. My guess is she used JPEG and had the WB set to AUTO or something. I mean that's just brutal white balance.

Even all the pictures later with a flash look terrible (mostly composition and unflattering shadows).