True professionals may not know what they don’t know but at least they know that they don’t know.
You may have heard of the Dunning-Kruger effect which affects almost everyone. It’s a cognitive bias where those with a low ability at a certain task are more likely to overestimate their ability at that task. But people with a high ability at a task know that they don’t know everything about that task and may underestimate their ability.
A Cautionary Tale
In June this year, a Toronto-area company hired a photographer to shoot some office photos. The photos, along with some text, graphics and company logos, were to be used in six retractable banners.
After the photography was done, the company asked the photographer if he could also design the banners. The photographer said yes even though he had no experience whatsoever. But how hard could it be? He already uses Adobe Lightroom so using Adobe InDesign should be easy. And graphic design is more or less the same as photography, right?
The photographer spent two weeks struggling to learn InDesign by trial-and-error. He missed the company’s end-of-June deadline. In early July, he sent the banner files to the customer and the banners were sent to a printer. The banner company did not print the banners because, fortunately, they noticed low resolution images and graphics in the files and notified the customer.
The company is refusing to pay the photographer and has demanded that he redo the banners. The job was to pay $1,600 for the photography and $900 for the banners.
In the third week of July, the photographer emailed me and asked for advice. After looking over the photos and banner files, there were several problems:
• The photos used in the banners were only low resolution. The full-size images were not embedded in the files. The photographer had ignored the warning messages about missing images because he didn’t know what it meant. He said everything looked okay on his laptop.
• The company-supplied graphics and logos were low resolution. This was the company’s fault but he never said anything to the customer because everything looked okay on his laptop.
• Many elements in each banner were crooked or not aligned. The photographer never used guidelines or grids but only eyeballed everything. He never viewed anything at 100% because it was too big on his laptop screen.
• Elements that were supposed to bleed didn’t. Other elements were too close to the document edges and risked being cut off.
Yes, you can blame the customer for not properly examining the files before going to print. But the photographer never sent full-size proofs of the banners but only very small proofs because they were easy to email. A full-size proof would have been 9,900 pixels wide X 24,300 pixels tall.
In addition to the design mistakes, the photos used in the banners also had problems:
• Most of the photos were either too dark, too contrasty, had bad colour, and/or had camera shake. The EXIF data showed shutter speeds down to 1/15 second.
• The people photos were shot with an on-camera flash or no flash at all. Many of the portraits looked bad: too dark, too light, eyeglass reflections, no catchlights, poor skin colour.
• The photographer shot only in jpeg format which makes it more difficult to fix the photos.
The photographer thought the photos looked okay on his laptop and the customer approved the pictures.
As a photographer, you should remember that customers don’t usually view proofs critically. They rarely view images at 100%. Cellphone photos have become the norm and as long as your photos look as good as a cellphone snap, the customer will be happy. This might not be much of an issue if photos are going to be used small on a web page. But if photos are going to be printed then critical proofing is very important.
Professionals Know, Amateurs Learn
Photographers, if you don’t have the experience to properly complete a job then turn it down! Know and accept that you don’t know.
Never learn on the customer’s dime. Never trial-and-error at the customer’s expense. Business customers not only have financial constraints but they also have time constraints. If you mess up and fail to deliver, you could get into serious and costly trouble.
By all means, learn new software, learn new skills and gain new abilities. It’s fun and it will give you more marketable value. But do it on your own time so that it doesn’t create risk for the customer or for you.
This photographer made the mistake of overestimating his design skills. He may be a professional photographer but he’s an amateur designer struggling to complete a job for which he has no experience. And it’s the customer who’s suffering the consequences.
Juggling Risk
Juggling is just throwing and catching. Easy, right? But it takes months and years of practice to do it properly and professionally. This photographer thought he could juggle with fire and he got burnt.
The photographer took a needless risk and failed. He missed the customer deadline, he has spent an enormous amount of time on a project for which he won’t make a profit, and it’s unlikely the customer will hire him again.
After several more days of struggle, the photographer offered me $1,000 to retouch all the photos and help with the the banners. I retouched 27 photos and created three banner templates that he could use. (In the early 1990s when I worked at a newspaper, I learned QuarkXpress. A decade later, I switched to InDesign and have used it to design trifold brochures, business cards, multi-page booklets and a few small books. But I haven’t used it in a few years.)
Self-confidence is great. Overconfidence isn’t.
Confidence is not competence.
Know when you don’t know.
The photographer knows that I’m writing this without mentioning his name. He’s almost happy to be the bad example ;-)
