poor quality photos for a Photographer’s website

[snillor]

I just landed a small website design job for a local photographer. Although I haven’t yet clarified the scope enough to provide a firm estimate, that’ll happen soon. But I’m beginning to get concerned about a couple of things:

1) She’s sent me a number of photos, and, to be honest, a lot of them are technically flawed – mostly out of focus, some poorly exposed, and others poorly composed/cropped. A few suffer from all these problems. Since the main goal she gave for her website is to sell photo prints, I think she’ll be disappointed in the sales, and probably blame my design for failing to meet her main objective, rather than realize that some of her photos aren’t good enough to sell. I’ve thought about bringing this up, just haven’t come up with the right words. I don’t want to insult her abilities and make both of us feel bad. And if I do mention this and she resents it, I’ll probably lose the web design gig.

2) As for cropping, I made the mistake of mentioning (tactfully, I believe) that different crops might be worth looking at. It’s looking like she might expect me to crop, sharpen, and otherwise adjust her photos. This is something I can do pretty well, but I’m not sure it’s a good practice to mix web design with editing her photos. Maybe I need to keep any photo enhancements she requests completely separate, and certainly bill them separately (which I would probably do at a higher hourly rate).

Any thoughts on this? I could use opinions and suggestions on how to handle it.

Thanks

[yashar]

Hello,
As a web designer, and photographer i do both web design and photography.
Regarding billing you can have one bill for web design and have a separate section for photography and photo editing, and uploading, or you can have two separate bills for each one, that’s up to you.
As for the images you can edit them or crop them as you know best, or you can request the original images, you can also see if the photographer is willing to give you different photos or capturing different photos in order to be edited and used for the site.
Hope that helps.

[mpd4128]

I second the idea of simply explaining you need website specific photos. If anything show her the site with the current pics and, if she doesn’t see the flaws, tell her that you did a focus group and they indicated that some of the pictures seemed flawed in “x” ways.

[Author]

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