Evolution: FayFoto’s Transition to Digital Services

April 10, 2018 by Steve Nelson

Office Archeology

We have been working at clearing out old and unnecessary stuff recently. After more than 25 years in our current office, you might well imagine there’s quite a lot of that. Recently Wayne unearthed the very first digital camera FayFoto purchased. That got me curious, so I started sifting through old assignment log books for the first evidence of actually capturing assignments digitally.

They started showing up in the Fall of 1999. Given that we’re into the second quarter of 2018 as I write this, that feels like quite a long time.

We weren’t the earliest of adopters, but our market moved us into providing digital services before a lot of other photographers made the leap (or else said “to heck with this” and moved into some other endeavor). Pro-level digital cameras at that time were beyond our means. We eased into the inevitable by scanning negatives and transparencies for years before investing in digital capture equipment. Our first cautious investment in a digital camera was at the upper end of what was then the consumer level. (It was a Kodak DC265, purchased in the Fall of 1999 at the CompUSA around the corner from our office. You can still read the camera’s review in DPReview’s archive!)

Head shot portrait retouching

April 13, 2018January 29, 2018 by Steve Nelson

Head shot portrait retouching

What’s in a word?

I’ll begin this article with a few words about the word retouching. We understand that this is the word everyone uses and understands, so we use it, too.

Reluctantly.

Frankly, most of the connotations about that word are negative. At best it implies fakery. At worst it suggests repair work on a flawed subject. We don’t want our work to suggest either of those! We are much more comfortable using the term polishing, which suggests making something good even better. So we’ll continue to honor the term which is used by most of the world but, between you and us, polishing comes closer to what we do.

These days, just about every head shot portrait image we release to our clients has been looked at carefully by an experienced digital technician. ¹

You don’t have to specify or explicitly request the basics of retouching – you can count on that being done as part of our service. It’s built into our pricing.

Our Policy on Archiving Your Images

November 8, 2017 by Steve Nelson

detail of hard drive data storage devices

Archiving: Our Policy

First, a quick caveat:

This is our Policy, not a Guarantee

With that out of the way, with a mutual understanding that bad things can happen to good data, you can be assured that to the best of our ability we archive all the work we produce.

In the days of film we saved negatives. When we made the transition to digital we saw no reason (or justification) for discarding images.

In the specific case of portraits, we also archive the additional images in addition to the selected images.

The images we produce for you are still yours – we don’t release them to outside parties or stock agencies.

However, it does now and then happen that months or years after a picture is taken, a need arises for a different size or crop. It does occasionally happen that a subject wants to review his or her options later, after the portrait sitting. It does sometimes happen that a client will accidentally delete, misplace, or overwrite a file.

For those reasons and others, we do our best to maintain copies of the images we produce for you.

We don’t charge extra for this service. We feel it’s a professional courtesy. We don’t have to reach into our archive every day, or even every week. But when we do it’s usually in response to a distress call, and the party on the other end of the phone or email is grateful and relieved when we can produce the missing or damaged resource.

This is one important advantage to having and maintaining a long term relationship with a vendor such as FayFoto Boston. We want the best for you and your marketing/communication efforts.

Headshot Business Portraits: How it Works

April 13, 2018September 18, 2017 by Steve Nelson

How it Works: Portraits

You may have worked with other commercial photographers in the past. Or, you may not have and you have no idea what to expect. Either way, this article will outline what to expect if you hire FayFoto Boston for a business portrait, or “headshot” assignment.

(Note: While we certainly work directly with individuals in need of a head shot or business portrait, the bulk of our interactions are with marketing or practice development staff, or with executive AAs. The tone of this article reflects that orientation.)

The first half of this article deals specifically with sessions conducted in your office. The second half applies equally to location assignments and sessions in our Brighton studio. The former is more convenient for your personnel. The latter is more economical. If you have any doubts as to whether to send your people to us or ask us to come to you, please get in touch. Outline your needs, and ask us for a quote.