Most of you may already know what "TFCD" means - you as a photographer "hire" a model, make up artist, hair stylist, wardrobe stylist (here my imagination stops, but you probably can think of more roles in there), and instead of money, you pay them with photos you take or other credit they might be looking for.
That is done in order to create what YOU want to create for your portfolio. Even as a pro, you want to show not only what you HAVE created, but what you WANT to have created, and more of who you are. That's where you start looking for creative professionals, who are just like you, looking to define themselves and get onto another level.
You get together and you have a blast shooting something for 4 hours or 8 hours or however long it takes you to exhaust that creative flow and then... you end up with 16 GB (that's no standard, just the number off the top of my head) of photos that everyone involved is so eager to see in their portfolios.
As a person, who is trying to grow or achieve something in the field you have so thoughtfully selected, you are not going to release images that are not up to your current standard - technically, artistically or whatever other way. You do want to please people who showed up and did such a nice job preparing everything for your imagination to run wild, and you want to give them the best of the best, so that they feel special and think good things about you.
And that's when you run into a wall.
Let's say you took about 600 photographs. First thing you do is go through them and filter out complete waste - pics where something didn't work out quite right - whether it's your hands, or an eye, or (God Forbid!) equipment, or model made a face :). You need to filter those out, and leave only those that you do want to get to the eyes of the involved. Those come out as proofs. It takes you quite a while to do just this one step.
And then imagine having 1 hairstylist, 2 make up artists, 1 wardrobe stylist, and 4 models. That's 8 people not including you - wanting your images in their portfolios. And then take into account that some people are greedy - they'll want as much as they can get out of you.
As a person who's taking full responsibility for their decisions and promises you may end up spending long productive hours just touching up and adjusting the results in PS or whatever you're using. You may also get creative and decide that you want all 10 photos of that model in that light to be tone-adjusted, and that's a very thinly drawn manual operation, that requires attention and detachment that take time. I can go on, but hopefully you get it by now - you're in a world of post-production work!
Work that some may not notice or appreciate. Or, on the other end, - totally LOVE it and pay you the deserved respect.
The answer to this issue comes with time - the balance. Complete plan of the shoot, and perfect the notion of what you offer and what you ask for it.
I've seen photographers offering as much as ONE (1!!!) retouched photo to a model. And I've given as much as ALL I could give or was inspired to give from the shoot.
Now I'm at the point of offering only 2 photos per look, unless they are so good that I'll send my picks to go with theirs. And I have to remember to say it out loud to everyone before the shoot - what my conditions are, and find out from each one of them - what are their sincere expectations from this shoot. So far - nobody wanted to "just shoot". Well... except me *lol*. And I was just afraid of getting rusty.
If I don't speak, I may find it hard to refuse giving them more than I expected later on.
Next post will be breezier :)
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