John,
Thank you for taking the time to add your considered thoughts, which pretty much accord with my own, I think. I do have a couple of questions about the specificities of your approach:
1) Do you advertise the 'digital capture' fee as effectively a traditional setup charge, and is that sufficient to cover the necessary post-production work to arrive at your master print file? If not, how do you recoup that additional time?
2) Do your clients clearly understand that any file they purchase for printing elsewhere is simply an unedited, basic conversion of the original RAW file, or do they equate this with the finished product (the print-ready master file)? How do you explain the difference?
Unfortunately, all too many clients, at least those uneducated in the reproduction process, take the view that anything they pay in terms of a 'setup' charge entitles them to ownership of the finished file to do with as they wish. It doesn't help when other businesses, such as the husband and wife team that recently emailed one of my clients aggressively pushing their 'giclée print service' (and annoyed him considerably in so doing), and who are running this in tandem with another dozen or so only very loosely-related services, advertise ludicrously and unsustainably low 'digital mastering' charges and specifically include the master file at no additional cost.
I would also be grateful for any further thoughts you may have on the subject.
There is a further footnote to the original issue, in that last week I happened to be in the town where my former client lived, and out of curiosity popped into the local bookshop that used to sell her prints. Sure enough, the remaining original stock of my prints was still on sale, along with several new images that were recognisably hers but that I hadn't seen before. On the back of these was a CoA identifying a local print shop that had for years been trying unsuccessfully to take over my client's work, and whom I strongly suspected at the time were behind her daughter's demand for my master files. It appears that, when I refused to hand them over, she had given them some previously-unpublished originals to photograph and print instead. A couple of the new ones were superficially acceptable, though I didn't have chance to examine them in detail and I haven't seen the originals to know how accurate the reproduction might be, but the others were of very poor technical quality. It seems her daughter cares more about keeping me out of the loop than she does about diluting the brand, which is a real shame after all the effort I put into achieving absolutely the best possible reproduction. It does however wholly vindicate my determination to retain control of my master files, if any further reason were needed.
Coincidentally, I have just been independently recommended by two of my existing clients to an artist who has recently had some giclée prints done that she wasn't happy with. I was amused to discover that she had used the same printer that my deceased client's daughter is now using ... Thankfully, some artists at least are savvy enough to know the difference. The difficulty lies in educating those others who have never seen a really good print, or who simply don't care.
Kind regards,
Malcolm