If you thought your home office was small or ugly, here is someone’s “vintage” 42-square-foot home office before it gets renovated. It has no functioning lights or heat. But it does have lots of nails in a wall, a very sloping floor and a sewage pipe in the corner. I didn’t ask about the dark red stains on the floor.
A small financial consulting company last week sent me four business portraits they wanted fixed. Another photographer shot these portraits three months ago and I don’t know why he or she didn’t fix the photos.
Based on the embedded EXIF data and by looking at the pictures, these business headshots were done with a Nikon D810 at 1/125 sec., f5.6, ISO 3200, auto white balance and the pictures used available office light. The creation time of the pictures indicated that all four portraits were shot within six minutes. They were edited using 12-year-old Photoshop CS3. Except for the camera model, all of this says “amateur.”
Two of the four headshots were noticeably out of focus and another was sightly blurry. All four people had dark shadows under their eyes because only the office ceiling lights were used. The eye whites were medium grey and three of the four people had only a dull catchlight in one eye. The two brown-eyed people had their eyes appear completely black. Each person’s skin tone was magenta which is common for some Nikon cameras in auto white balance under tungsten lights.
Despite all this, what the company wanted fixed was its logo on the wall behind each person. Due to the way the pictures were shot, the logo appeared crooked.
Listen to the customer
I straightened the logo in each photo. Then I lightened the facial shadows, brightened the eyes, corrected the skin tone, darkened shiny foreheads caused by the overhead lights and sharpened the pictures. I also fixed a loose, crooked tie, a lumpy jacket shoulder, a missing shirt button and an open pocket flap.
After sending the retouched pictures back to the customer, they immediately complained. There was something wrong with the photos! The brightness and skin colour had changed and each person looked different.
I explained what I had done but they still complained. Just fix the crooked logo!
On my second attempt, I straightened the logo on the wall and left everything else alone – the dark circles under the eyes, the grey eyeballs, the dull catchlights, the magenta skin tone, the shiny foreheads, the blurry faces, the crooked tie, the open pocket flap . . .
The customer loved the results.
My mistake was that I fixed what the customer didn’t think was broken. The customer only noticed the crooked logo on the wall and that’s all they wanted fixed.
The customer was right in what they thought. Just because I didn’t approve of the low quality images, that didn’t mean the customer was wrong. The customer is happy with their photos and that’s all that matters.
How to fix what’s not broken
What do you do when a customer wants something that you know from experience won’t fulfill their goals? What if a customer decides on photography that is below professional standards?
Don’t tell the customer they’re wrong. Instead offer them an alternative, for example:
“Here’s the picture you asked for. I’ve also included another version that you might want to look at because it has a brighter face and nicer skin tones.”
Once you’ve offered an alternative solution, your work is done. If the customer doesn’t choose the higher quality image, there’s not much more you can do.
This is gold stuff! I love it.
They get what they deserve.