Rangefinder Magazine
August 2002

Bought a Digital Camera… Now What? by Jeff Smith
Here’s How One Top Senior Photographer Has Coped With the Transition

You’ve been looking for a digital camera or back, or maybe you have already purchased one. If so, that’s great! According to all the digital equipment companies and the speakers giving informercials for them, you have just jumped onto the technology train, so you won’t be left at the station. What do you do now? You have your camera and you have Photoshop 6 or 7, so you’re in business, right?

When you think about your studio as a business, the least important thing about your business is your camera. Whether you shoot a Hasselblad or Bronica really doesn’t matter. It produces an image on film. The film is the important part, because that film has an entire business system in place to take it from the moment after it is captured right up to the client picking up the order at the studio.

Using film, most of the actual work in that “business-system” is performed by an outside lab. You finish a day’s worth of sessions; you drop the film in the bag, send it off to the lab and wait until the proofs come in. Then, the order is placed; you cut a few negatives and send back to the lab. Once the final order is returned to you, if you don’t like anything about the way the portraits look, you just mark them to remake and send them back. It sounds so simple and there isn’t much work involved for you, so you can focus on what makes the most money, which is photographing.

With film it was easy, but now you have the power of digital in your hands. You are now in control of your images. That’s right, you have control, which means you have to safeguard your images so they aren’t lost; then store, retrieve, retouch, color balance, add lithos, package and refile those files for safe keeping. Since you are in control of your own work, (from beginning to end), you can forget about sending back printing for remakes—after all you were in control of it.

In a way, it almost seems like a step backward, in that we have to invest all this time in doing what used to be the lab’s work, but we do have the “savings on film” to help offset the additional cost of payroll, right? Well unless you are using 8x10 sheet film, your savings on film won’t come close to covering the costs you will incur with digital. Digital is more expensive to shoot than film, that is a fact. The cost of time involved in dealing with digital files will far exceed the cost of paying for these services at the lab for film.

And speaking of labs, before digital came along, labs were hungry. There were more and more labs competing for your processing work, driving the price downward and the amount of services at competitive prices up. With digital, it’s new, it’s exciting, and most labs are charging top dollar for any and all services provided. My lab was so kind, they offered to print my digital files for me at the same price as units from negatives. They would even do color corrections while I was getting started, but I would need to take over all final color corrections to keep that price.

With digital, we need to color correct each image, add any lithos, package each digital file, as well as provide the lab a detailed inventory list of everything on the CD, along with the typical invoice information—more work for us and a great deal less work for the lab. In addition, the lab never has to remake anything again and if you are lucky enough, you can have them charge you the same price as your units from film. What this means to you is that your cost is going to be much higher! You are taking over most of the lab’s work, at the same time you pay for any mistakes caused by human error, (missed retouching, bad skin tones, wrong packaging, etc.).

Before I entered into digital, I kept hearing about the larger sales that photographers were having, but I didn’t hear anything about the additional costs involved with digital. I have only talked so far about the work (time spent) on the digital files, which translates into additional payroll for your business. In addition to these costs are the computers (which, of course, have to be “beefed up” to handle the volume of large files), the regular upgrading of those computers, (because with digital “time is money”) and the software. Then there is all the time you invest in research and learning about new products and software that are constantly coming out. Basically, sales have to increase, not to be worse off with digital than film.

If you haven’t yet converted to digital, I have probably depressed you. If you are already using digital, you have already lived through everything I have talked about. There are ways to make digital work, profitably. This is obvious, since so many studios are successfully using digital today, but it isn’t as easy as most photographers think it will be. And truthfully, I think that many photography studios aren’t considering the total cost of all the additional time the owners/photographers have to spend working with this new medium in ways other than shooting it. After the excitement fades, most photographers admit they are working longer hours and have less free time with digital than they had with film.

To make digital profitable, you first have to replace your old business system with one that will work. You have to realize that the average studio generates way too much work for the photographer who shoots the session to work on the computer after his/her sessions are over. This means you need to train employees to work with your digital files.

Finding and/or training people who are computer literate enough to work with Photoshop and able to produce good skin tones consistently isn’t always as easy I have heard some infomercials say. You can’t just go down to the local high school’s computer lab. Working with digital files is time-intensive production work. If you put a young, immature person at the computer (even at minimum wage), more often than not they will waste more time than work. To keep employees from wasting time, we have assigned a maximum time allowance for each package. We assign the work for the day and expect the work to be completed by the end of their shift.

The trend over the last 40–50 years was to get the processors out of the studio, using an outside company to deal with most of the production work and letting photographers be photographers. I have a feeling that the trend is going to change. With digital, we are doing a majority of the lab’s work for them, which means more employees, larger facilities and all the responsibility. Since we are doing most of the work anyway, the next logical step is to take over all the work. Let’s be honest, with the way most studios have to prepare orders for the lab, how hard is it to find space for a photographic printer and hit the print button.

While many labs are assuming we can’t figure this out, many manufactures of processors/printers are betting we can. There are many printer/processors on the market for the medium to larger studio and there will be more coming out to fill this niche soon. One of the photographic processors that looks promising is the Net Printer processor from Gretag. It is a $60,000 machine that prints on any photographic paper, uses most popular chemistry and is capable of running 200 8x10s an hour. This processor prints up to a 12x18 size, and has a cost of about 35 cents per 8x10 unit. You do the math! If your studio lab bill is between $60,000-$80,000, the machine would pay for itself in a reasonable amount of time.

To make digital work profitably, you also have to look at the way you sell your images. For years we have heard that to increase sales do away with paper proofs. Well now is your chance. Mall photographers and national studios have used instant previewing as a way to increase sales for a long time now. Let’s be honest, with the photographs some of these companies produce, immediate excitement and impulse buying are all they have on their side!

Showing images immediately after the session will increase sales, no doubt. You have the client go from the session to a private sales room with a qualified sales person and your sales averages will put a smile on your face. Your costs have gone up, so your sales have to go up as well and that isn’t going to happen selling from paper proofs, as you have with film.

One comforting fact is that with digital everyone is struggling to come up with a working business system that will be as efficient as the system that was developed for film. Everyone, including the labs, are trying to work the bugs out of this new technology. An older photographer put this into perspective for me recently. He remembered back to when the change in technology was changing from black-and- white film to color. He said some photographers thought this new technology would be their salvation, some photographers saw opportunity, while other photographers were scared to death. The technology has changed but the reaction to change hasn’t.

All of us will sooner or later have to come to grips with digital. Some have and profited handsomely, while others have spent a bundle of money only to end up in worse shape than they were using film. A photography business should make the change from film to digital when it makes financial sense to do so. You must look at making money first and let the “gadget freak,” who is in all of us take a back seat in our decision.

The senior images and composites seen throughout this article are typical of the senior images being produced by Jeff Smith in his studio, Photoique in Fresno, California. To see more of his images and to take a look at his senior packaging and marketing, visit his website: www.jeffsmithphoto.com.

Jeff Smith owns and operates Jeff Smith’s Photoique in Fresno, California. The studio now has its own web site, which features articles by Smith and other information: www.jeffsmithphoto.com.