Vanity press

[tbob]

Warning: Rant to Follow : The local animal shelter prevailed upon me to create a book of my photos for auction at their annual charity ball. They hit me in my weakest spots, pride and vanity. Next time I will give them money. It is nice to be recognized, but the companies that produce the books charge quite high; $104 for 40 page book using photo quality paper. Not the sort of service you would use if selling your work commercially; I cannot see anyone buying a book of strictly local interest stuff at that price plus markup. Wholly a vanity item.

And to add insult to injury to my parsimonious soul, the first book I made had a number of typo errors. My fault for not proofreading, after letting them choose the images and adding some text. I felt I couldn't put the book out there as an example of my work with spelling errors. Would make me look slightly foolish. So I had to bite the bullet and order another book at the same price. And I could not back out or make them pay, so it was up to me to cough up the dough.

Isn't vanity one of the seven deadly sins? End of Rant

[Bobobird]

That's the thing Trevor.

Read it 5 times, put it away for one night, then read it 5 more times. Why the next day? You may not like what you wrote originally.

Of course if you change things around, that will be more rounds of 5.

I had a similar experience. A couple of friends wanted prints, about 15 in total. They asked for the files which they would get printed in some shop near their work place. I said no, let me get my friendly printer to do it so that the prints do not get messed up. A couple of $$ each and 15 comes to a bit of $$$. All were 12x8 or larger.

They took them gladly and went about looking for frames etc. Not one offered to reimburse the costs. Dang it not even a coffee....

Pride and vanity are bad for the wallet.

[RustBeltRaw]

These issues are part of the reason I do my own prints. I'm not a genius at it, certainly, but it keeps printing costs down enough to do a pro-bono project without killing myself.

I've never had a project snowball as badly as when I volunteered to shoot and produce a series of labels for my friend's micro-brew beer. His girlfriend found a model who could pull off a hilariously hokey redneck goddess - the perfect match for the beer's name, Backyard Betty. The idea (mine) was to create labels with six different pictures so a six-pack of beer had all unique pictures. I put about eighty hours into negotiating which six photos we'd use, printing, and producing the labels. There were 132 bottles of beer, each with photo-quality front and back stickers cut out by hand.

I don't think vanity's a deadly sin - pride in our work is, within reason, a critical force in driving us to improve. But it does sometimes force us to contribute way more time, effort, and capital than anyone realizes.