Custom Photography Service

Experience and Facilities

If you make use of this service, our professional photographer will visit you to take the pictures that your require, using a high resolution digital camera and associated equipment. If you wish to see some of his work, then please visit our Aardstorm Images picture library site, which showcases his independent work and makes it available to the stock photography market. We do not have our own studio facilities, so if your project requires them, we will hire them at a mutually convenient location. Please enquire for details.

This service is primarily intended to complement our other website design and authoring services, to allow you to illustrate your site or document with unique or otherwise unobtainable photographs. These may be pictures of your business premises, your staff, or your products, for example. You are also welcome, however, to use our service stand-alone, to provide pictures for use by yourself or a third party.

The Photo Shoot

The highly specific nature of the subject(s) that you are likely to want us to shoot, will almost certainly require our photographer to visit a specific location. It would be possible, however for you to ship the item(s) to be photgraphed to us. You should give us prior notice of the delivery, and either provide us with the necessary return postage, or we will add the return costs to your next invoice.

The location of your shoot will most likely be your own premises, but coul be any location you specify. If this is not your own property, then permission may be required for its use as the location for a commercial photo shoot, which may result in additional fees. You could handle this negotiation yourself (we will need to see evidence that you have obtained adequate permission prior to the shoot), or we can handle it for you. In this case we will charge an additional location administration fee, as well as passing on any fees from the location owner.

Once a suitable location has been found, then a date and time for the shoot that is mutually convenient for all parties will be arranged. This may need to be outside normal business hours, for example to minimise inconvenience to, or interference from, your customers or other passers-by. If the subject of your picture(s) has to be photgraphed outside, then the arranged time will be conditional on the weather, and may have to be rearranged at short notice.

Our fees for the shoot itself are based on the time taken, rather than the number of pictures, in units of half a day together with the travelling costs of getting to and from the required location. The length and/or timing of the shoot may require one or more overnight stays, which will be charged at our standard rate.

Picture Selection and Delivery

Once your pictures have been taken, we will do some basic post processing work and select the best ones for you to make the final selection. We can supply you with these pre-approval images, optimised for on-screen viewing, on CD or DVD ROM within a few days of the shoot, or we can present them to you in person shortly after the end of the shoot while we are still on location. This could be later on the last day of the shoot, or on the following day. We will not charge extra for this presentation, except to cover any additional overnight stay.

Once you have selected the specific pictures that you require from those presented to you, and they are destined for use as part of our other services, then we will proceed to incorporate them into your website, document, or manipulated picture. If you require your pictures for other purposes, either internally within your own organisation or for supply to a third party, then full resolution versions, in the format you specify, will be supplied to you on CD or DVD ROM. We can also supply high quality prints of your pictures, up to A3 in size, from our own inkjet printer.

Copyright and Licensing

We normally retain the copyright in all our work, and our standard license only covers pictures that are either to be published (free of charge) on the internet, used or distributed internally within your organisation, or incorporated by ourselves into other documents that are to be distributed free of charge to your customers or clients; you will be able to make as many copies of our work as you like for these purposes, or we can supply additional copies for additional fees.

If you intend to sell the pictures we produce for you, either directly or as part a larger document, or distribute them to others other than as described above, then you will also require some form of production license from us. Please contact us with details of your requirements to negotiate the additional fees for this.

Communication

All communication between us and you, throughout any photography project, from request for quotation onwards, will normally be via e-mail or regular post. However, at your request, then we are happy to visit you for a face to face meeting, perhaps to dicuss your requirements in detail, or to present the results of our search, but an additional fee will apply to each meeting that is not part of a photo shoot visit, to cover our travelling costs.

Fees

The standard fees for our custom photography service are as follows:

 

Once we have provided you with a quotation for our work, the quoted fee will be firm and fixed ; if we take more or less time than expected to produce your picture(s), the price you pay will not change, unless you change your requirements.

Aardstorm is not currently registered for VAT, and therefore cannot charge VAT. Once we are registered, the fees above will be the VAT exclusive rates.