Rant: What would you do?

[photostarfox]

The thing about putting low-res or watermarked photos up is that there are so many great sites out there these days, Photo Enlargement Without Quality Loss - Reshade - comes to mind, these sites can refocus and resize the image and make it look as good as new. In today's digital age I guess the artist has to be more careful who they are dealing with! People get super-sleazy when trying to something for free. Illegitimi non carborundum!!

 

[c.cloudwalker]

The thing about putting low-res or watermarked photos up is that there are so many great sites out there these days, Photo Enlargement Without Quality Loss - Reshade - comes to mind, these sites can refocus and resize the image and make it look as good as new. In today's digital age I guess the artist has to be more careful who they are dealing with! People get super-sleazy when trying to something for free. Illegitimi non carborundum!!

People can get pretty sleazy trying to get something for free but I sure hope that a business would not help copy copyrighted work. Of course, I live in the dream world

Anyway, I would put a copyright-notice type watermark right in the middle of the image.

 

[DSPhotography]

I would put the galley back up and make sure everything is water marked and only put it up for 5 days.
Get them the 8X10, thank them for the business and move on.

Definitely low res and watermark the gallery online. They might be a little annoyed at you because you aren't giving them the stuff for free, though. That's just how some (a few) people are. They try to get something for nothing and get angry when they get called out on it.

Quoting for emphasis. If they're trying to get something for nothing (which it sounds like they are), they're probably the kind of people who will right-click>save and try to print out their own photos.. or burn them to a disc and go to wal-mart.

That to me is one of the huge downsides of providing anything in a digital format to customers.. even with copyright laws and what-not, people are still usually going to go somewhere like wal-mart or cvs to get prints made from your disc because it's "cheaper". I'm not a full on 'professional' photographer (in the "I own my own business" sense), but I'm working on it and have done a few shoots for people. I prefer to offer a contact sheet to the client so that they can pick how many enlargements they want and which ones that way. It's just as effective as a gallerie (without the time taken to watermark everything) and it does give them a copy of each shot without giving them a way to go get their own "cheaper" prints.

Just my $0.02

 

[Dwig]

...put the gallery back up or come to my house...

It somewhat depends on how the certificate was worded.

If the certificate didn't specifiy a viewing period or include a "choice must be made withing X-number of days" disclaimer I think you need to respost the gallery for a reasonable period of months. You need to also reprint the certificates to include such a disclaimer to ease such problems in the future.

 

[Reese's PB Luver]

You did make a sale, since the gift certificate was purchased by somebody. What you didn't make was an additional sale. Big difference - the former would mean you did the whole thing for free.

You might want to make your future gift certificates valid only for prints instead of also for the session fee. Or, instead of offering a free print (why are you giving your art away?!) with the use of a gift certificate, offer a percentage discount on their first X number of prints (or X discount if they purchase X number of prints - the former gives a discount whether they buy 1 print or X number while the latter gives a discount only if they buy X number). Or just don't offer anything additional with the gift certificate; while gift certificates can be great money-makers because they don't always get used, when some ppl have been given this "free money" by family/friends, they will use it regardless of whether or not they get something for free/discount with it, since "free money" is incentive enough.