> So for me, charge what ever you want to charge for the session, but for goodness sakes, give people their photos. That is what they are paying you for. Absol

> So for me, charge what ever you want to charge for the session, but for goodness sakes, give people their photos. That is what they are paying you for. Absolutely! This is a communication issue. There would be no confusion if every single photographer / studio spelled this out explicitly to you before hand. The reason they don't spell it out explicitly is that once they take the photos, you have no choice but to pay them for the photos. After you are burned by this, you realize it is always this bait and switch. Every single person in the universe is hiring people to take pictures so they can have the pictures. They don't hire photographers, so the photographers can build up a library of prints to sell back to them. That being said, I negotiated heavily with my wedding photographer for the rights to my photos. This was an incredibly hard process and I almost dumped my expensive photographer. It wasn't the money issue, but they could not grok giving up or sharing the copyright (sublicensing). Eventually, they gave me a full sub-license, with equivalent full rights after 5 years (i could do anything except sell them for a profit until 5 years later). As if i wanted to try and make professional quality prints to sell to all of my guests. My argument was that those images are priceless to me -- even in 30 years, but they might move on in 30 years or lose the images. Without an ability to reprint them, I would be limited to decaying physical prints.