Resolution has been found. We decided to pay him in full. His email exchanges to us have been frankly shocking and rude, he is clearly very angry at having his work criticised. My feeling is that in a creative position constructive criticism is part of the process and really should be viewed as way to improve / develop and shift with the times. I work as a designer and a photographer, criticism in the design world is part of the job, it is an essential part of project development. It seems more polarised in the photographic world, photographers on the whole seem to take offence to criticism more easily than designers, perhaps it’s part of being your own boss.
I gave him zero choice on handing RAW files over, he was OK with it. The files show me someone who is shooting in a rather unstructured way. Every shot is heavily bracketed (6-7 exposures). Typically 3-4 of these have no value to the final image as they are so dark that the extreme highlight info is in the left third of the histogram, there is usually one shot that you can judge to be close to the right exposure, then another couple massively over exposed for shadows. He is making a lot of work for himself in RAW processing. Dark / low light images are another matter, all massively underexposed and grainy as hell. All images exposed at ISO 50, he needed to crank up to 200 for the darker shots, perhaps even 400 with optimum exposure on the Aptus 75. He needs a service to the camera too, huge numbers of hot pixels in exposures beyond about 10 seconds at a guess (full metadata not embedded in raw’s).
A nasty situation to be sure, I am sure all parties have learnt from it. I would have normally have shot the project myself but my design work commitments to the company didn’t allow the time on this occasion. TBH just glad the whole mess is over. In the meantime I have had some excellent images from another photographer looking for work in the same region. Next time he gets the job if I can’t do it.