By James Booth
You've hired a professional photographer to shoot your wedding, spending thousands to record the precious memories of your union. You get the proofs back, only to discover some of the images, important ones, are missing, corrupted, or otherwise unusable. What do you do? Are you entitled to compensation, or a partial refund? One reader came across our wedding photography for amateurs series (which I'll reference later) in researching this very same dilemma.
Keven Howe writes:
I recently got married and our digital photographer's photos of our first dance and dances with our parents were corrupt. As a consumer could I expect some compensation?
As a photographer, would you be willing to offer any compensation? Our contract was $3600 cash for time, proofs, high-resolution images on CD, a 10x10 wedding album, and two 5x5 albums.
Could I trouble you as a consumer to fairly advise me on how to approach our photographer?
I'm more than happy to offer my advice on your situation Keven, but I'm not sure you'll like what I have to say. Overall, I'm inclined to say that you probably won't get much compensation for the corrupt images. There are several variables that have to be taken into consideration.
One thing to take into consideration is how many images were shot, and how many you received, both in the album and on the CD. If less 100 shots were taken, then I would consider the corrupted images a critical percentage of the job, and compensation would be in order. A pro-rated refund based on the number of images shot would be called for.
But if the photographer shot upwards of 300 images, which would be typical for a professional, then the six or so that are missing isn't that large a portion of the overall job. It wouldn't amount to much compensation if a refund were given based on those images.
If you were to take the value of those images as a percentage of the job, you would have to deduct the cost of the album, developing if film was used, printing, etc. and you likely wouldn't come out with much. Unfortunately, from a legal standpoint, sentimental value isn't considered as compensable if the matter were to go to court.
Although the first dance of the couple, and their dances with the parents are "must have" shots, like with any medium, be it digital, film, or video, there is always a chance of corruption that is out of the photographer's control. In reality, it could have been worse.
If a photographer chose to use a rather large memory card, like the 1GB and 2GB, and it corrupted, an entire wedding could be lost. Count yourself lucky that only a few were lost. Were they actually lost, as in irretrievable? Or were they just not fit for printing?
I certainly feel for you. To lose those images, and the quality with which they would have been taken if they survived is simply heartbreaking, but I'm certain that other people at the reception took pictures. I would suggest combing through those images to find duplicates of the missing ones. That way you'll at least have photos of those dances, even though not from your photographer.
I would also suggest looking through your contract and all other paperwork regarding your agreement with the photographer. There's very likely something in there to address lost images.
If you can find acceptable images that were taken by your guests, take the negatives to your photographer and ask him if he could have them enlarged and printed at his cost to make up for the ones that were corrupted. If I were the photographer, I would gladly do this to keep a customer happy rather than risk negative word of mouth.
Try not to be confrontational about it; be understanding. Approach from the standpoint of, "I know things can happen sometimes, but let's try to make the best of it. Could you enlarge and print these other images to make up for the ones that were lost?"
He should be glad to do it in order to keep a customer happy. Wedding photographers rely on word of mouth advertising more than any other kind. If he doesn't care, or doesn't offer some kind of solution, then eventually he'll put himself out of business, I've seen it happen to photographers in my area.
I hope I've helped out a little. I know it's not a lot, and probably not what you wanted to hear, but it's an impartial opinion on how best to handle the situation.