#FILTERFREE

First let me preface this post by indicating that I LOVE a good filter.  LOVE.  I use phone apps like Snapseed, Boomerang, or Piczoo or on a pretty regular basis.  I would venture to say that about 95% of my personal images go through some filtering app or another.  In a day and age where image is so relevant of course we want to put the best of ourselves out there, even if it is slightly tweaked.  So having said that I want to educate my clients and readers about why you shouldn’t filter your professional photos.

The average Joe probably doesn’t think twice about taking one of their lovely, professionally edited images from a recent photo session and slapping a $1 (or sometimes even free) filter over it and posting it to social media.  No harm no foul, right?  Wrong.  We as photographers take great pride in the work we produce.  It doesn’t begin and end during the session.  Not to bore you with a bunch of details you don’t care to read about, but the actual session itself is probably the easiest part of our entire process.  After we part ways with our clients we then go home or to our office and spend the next 2-4 hours (for the average family session) in front of our computer screens making sure every image is up to our standards.  We work hard to have a cohesive aesthetic with each image and because we are the ones behind the lens and whose name is on the business card you called it is our work.  Our art.  Not to compare myself to a legendary artist like Michaelangelo or DaVinci, but no one would fathom the idea of walking up to one of their works of art and slapping red paint across it to make it more beautiful.  But essentially when you filter one of our photos or crop it in a way that wasn’t intended that’s exactly what you’re doing.  You are taking our work of art and making it something we never intended it to be.  Once you filter it it’s no longer my work.

Thankfully I haven’t run into this issue too often, but with the new (and absolutely fun!) app Artisto popping up all over my different social media accounts I felt now was the time to address this issue.  Many photographers, myself included, have it written in our contracts that additional editing by someone other than the photographer is strictly prohibited.  So not only does it kind of hurt our feelings that you didn’t think the original photo was good enough so you had to add a filter to it to make it better, but it’s also in direct violation of your contract.  As I stated earlier, I know most people don’t look at it this way.  They’re just wanting to use a fun app to play around with.  But if you love your photographer please make sure to keep their images #filterfree.  We thank you in advance!