News: job: Jesaja Sport

Just over a week ago I shot a series of tshirts for a company called Jesaja Sport. It was an improvised product shoot since I don’t have access to a studio now, but the images turned out pretty much like I wanted them. The only thing that was a bit off was that one of the flashes gave up during the shoot and I had to rely on ambient lighting. I used the flash to lit up the background which was important that it was perfectly white for the client…

However I measured the white-balance and did everything I could at the shoot to get it as perfect as possible, and when I got home I spent about half an hour per image to get it as good as I could. With all the images it’s over 10 hours of work but for the sake of arguement I say 10 hours. The images was suppose to be used at Jesaja Sports webshop so they were commercial images. The client wanted all rights to the images, fine by me. The only problem is that the one running Jesaja Sport is an old classmate of mine. When I did the shooting and when I sent the samples the images was very good according to Andreas Lindh, the founder of Jesaja Sport, but when I had to state some price I got a bit of trouble. I checked what the images should be worth in a pricelist for professional photographers, then I asked for a 10% of that price and he thought that was a bit much, I know this guy and went down to 5% of the recommended price, which is a stretch I would normally never do. Then he started finding faults on the images, they were too bright on one side, they was blue and the light should be softer and so on and on… He called back a few days later and said that he could not pay 5% of the recommended price because I wasn’t good enough, basically…

So I thought about it for some hours and then I drew back everything, what bothers me the most is that asking a fraction of the price made the guy think I was ripping him off, and that there seems to be people that are doing this kind of job for a so small amount of money they can’t possible live on it… In a web-shop, like Jesaja Sport, the image is the only thing that are selling, it wouldn’t matter if you wrote a long essay about how good the product is the image is what attracts the customer… I told him this and he later used it against me, this images will apparently scare away the customers… I recommended him to go look for some studio that are specialized in product photography and not a landscape photographer next time, I’m still pissed off at Andreas Lindh and Jesaja Sport, it’s been a week, I was expecting an apologie or at least an angry email, but nothing, I though greed was one of the seven deadly sins… =)

These are the horrible images that are not good enough to sell for 5% of the recommended price… If you get some kind of eye infection from looking at them please let me know…

I will never have any more business with Jesaja Sport, at least I hope not…