Gene51 Loc: Yonkers, NY, now in LSD (LowerSlowerDelaware)

It's covered as T&M (time and materials) in a business plan and detailed in the contract. When working for corporations, the practice is to shoot product, then hand over files for editing and setting color. The corp may have it's own graphics department with permanent staff, or it may sub that work out to retouchers.

Personally, I never work to get it right out of the camera. I work to capture as much detail and tonal value as raw files, fully expecting to do post processing - which happens on 99% of the images I sell. I stopped expecting my cameras to produce perfect results in 2006 when I got frustrated with the limited dynamic range, noise and overall lack of quality of the early DSLRs and started shooting raw on a D70s and a little later a D200.

Gene51 Loc: Yonkers, NY, now in LSD (LowerSlowerDelaware)

It is expected that someone taking on a job like this has lighting and how to use the camera down pat. Whites are not at all tricky if you either use an in camera meter or a separate flash meter. Using mono lights or studio strobes (both of which have modeling lights, remotely triggered with a radio trigger, and light modifiers selected to best suit the subjects, and a thorough understanding of lighting ratios and how to interpret the results from light meters.It's a good idea to place some yellow tape on the floor to mark subject and lighting positions on the floor for repeatable results.

Photographers are not stylists, so generally someone else will be responsible for setting up the dresses to look their very best. Background choices are usually a collaborative result between the stylist, creative director and the photographer. Details like Fstops and shutter speeds are elementary and a photographer should have mastered that before charging for work. Sometimes shallow DoF is needed, other times full front to back DoF is in order. And often the venue needs to be darkened for complete control over lighting.

Lastly, a ColorChecker Passport needs to be deployed to establish consistent, neutral color. And if the lighting used changes color with power levels (not usually an issue with Paul C. Buff monolights), then that also has to be taken into consideration.

There is a lot to consider when getting things right.

Opsafari Loc: Roodepoort South Africa

Sorry to learn that the shoot was cancelled, could have been an interesting project! It reminded me about a request I had to photograph a dressmaker/ballet tutu designer’s work years ago. She wanted me to photograph 6 tutus in various colours dressed on a mannequin for her internet portfolio. I said my fee is per 4 hrs as it is my free time (I’m not a pro photographer but did many weddings, never really made money either as I was to “cheap”!) She agreed that it might take longer to shoot as she does not want to rush it. It took a full day.

I had some homemade quartz lights on home dimmer switches on stands and three wide and high neutral background cloth as the shoot was in her living room. On arrival I noticed that the mannequin had some serious marks on it and ask her to clean it but without success. She said that she could spray paint it with a water based skin colour paint and it will dry quickly. It did as I used the four lights full blast onto the mannequin!

First I thought that I only have to take one image of every tutu but those tutus are fantastic, the work is just phenomenal and did about six to eight shots per tutu all under constant and same positioned light. Post production took fairly long time and only charge her for a full day. I did everything on a Saturday and Sunday including nights because it was important for me as well to deliver a good product.

The following Monday I had prints made of all the tutus, only frontal shots on 5x7 gloss and that afternoon gave her those as a gift and all the edited digital files in high resolution but prepared for internet size (a few years back it was rather small compared to today!)

She was extremely happy with the end results. We never discussed any form of copyright as I thought she asked me to photograph her work but I did say that I keep the original files as they are my work and if she wanted more copies or whatever she will have to pay me to do it for her. That never materialized as she had the edited digital files! Year or two later she asked me to do another shoot of tutus and she paid me more or less the same fee. At that stage she was a single mother of two girls and her basic income was from making and designing ballet costumes and somehow I felt that I helped her to generate an income. Did asked to give credit to the photographer which she did but never got any referral to do work for someone else.

My preparation for the shoot I did not consult the internet but paged through several magazines, did it helped me, not really as all dresses where shot with a lovely ladies in them! All I knew was to keep a clean and natural background with consistent lighting, I did not had any fancy strobes and reflecting umbrellas only my first digital camera with a kit lens; Pentax K10!

After reading all the comments I visited the Etsy site, just to get an idea of photos and yes, there are some grand shoots with models and there are some done with mannequins and some mannequin shoots were very good. Why? The photographer paid attention to all the detail especially to the background, I mean, do you really want a wall lighting switch in the background, or unfinished skirting at floor level? On average there were about five shots per dress. Tom Kitoko said that he had to shoot 70 dresses that would have been about 350 shots in total! My 6 tutus turned out to be about 36 photos in total which took a full day to capture.

At the end of the day I enjoyed the shoot and learnt something new.

anotherview Loc: California

By law, you own the copyright off all your photographs. You may sell your copyright or give it away. Or in this case, you could sell a one-time use of it or some other use. Whichever way you go, Put the copyright understanding in writing.

autofocus Loc: North Central Connecticut

"It is expected that someone taking on a job like this has lighting and how to use the camera down pat." Sorry to disagree with you here Gene, but in this day and age of digital shooters you just cannot assume that. I can't tell you how many times I've heard of people taking on jobs, like weddings, with virtually zero experience, and many of them are clueless about light, flash, and certainly balancing light and flash ratios. Now, I'm not implying that about the op here, but we really know little of his experience, with, or without the use of lights.