Just the Digitals, please!

 

I am a big fan of printed pictures. When my customers choose to have family portraits taken, I want them to display the results on their walls and desks, to look at every day. There are so many ways to enjoy your printed photos; if you don't have wall space for a canvas or framed print (and open plan homes are a popular trend) then how about a press printed book or a folio box? The thing about printed pictures is, they are easy to share-no charging or batteries required!  So it makes my soul die a little when a customer says to me, "I just want the digitals!" Let me tell you a story. 

Back when I was still a "shoot and burn" photographer, I was asked to photograph a milestone wedding anniversary. After spending the weekend at a local resort with the family, I delivered the images on a DVD and moved on. Around 10 years later, the time came for the couple to celebrate their next milestone and they hired me again to photograph it. By then, I had "seen the light" and I was selling professionally printed images. I thought it would be nice to have some of the pictures from the earlier celebration for guests to look at. That's when I found out that the original images were still on the DVD and had never been printed! What's more, the DVD had been in a drawer and had deteriorated to unreadability. Fortunately, I still had the digitals on my computer and I printed a bunch of them for the party. That's when the penny dropped. Not everyone understands what to do with digital images and not everyone, even today, has a computer. Since then, I have heard many similar stories: 

"My wedding pictures are still on the flash drive and we don't know where it is." 

"My photographer is giving me all the digitals from the wedding." "Oh, what will you do with them?" "Um..."

"It's been about ten years since we had family photos taken. I have the thumb drive somewhere..."

The average non-photographer takes their pictures with their cell phone and doesn't think much about storage. Many have cloud back up through free or subscription services like Google, I-Cloud, or Microsoft. That's their decision, of course, but I want to know that the pictures you pay me to take will be around for the long term. So when I started working on digital packages for my portrait clients, I needed a secure and permanent storage solution. The packages I created are priced the same as my print packages, since the work is the same. Instead of matted prints in a sturdy and attractive folio box, clients can now choose to have the full sized digitals in a permanent Forever account, along with a box of proof prints. Even if they never print them, I know that they are safe and easily shareable!

Is this caving to the inevitable? No, I don't think so!  I still want to sell my clients prints and wall art and I'm happy to create books for them, or let them do it themselves through Forever. They receive a box of un-watermarked proofs to show off to friends and private storage with no data mining. Seems like a win-win solution to the cry of "Just the digitals!"