The End of ‘Good Enough’: Are Clients Waking Up to the Value of High Quality Photography?

Photographer Joseph Cristina thinks the era of “good enough” is ending, and that’s great news for photographers. In a recent vlog, Cristina explains why he thinks professional photographers are going to benefit from a “return to quality” as more and more clients get burned by sub-par work.

It’s not often we hear a positive hot take about the photo industry these days, but in one of his most recent vlogs, event and commercial photographer Joseph Cristina explains why he believes things are looking up for pros. Where pro photographers, himself included, have been losing out on paying gigs during what he calls “the era of good enough,” he believes that that era is ending, and the industry is seeing a return to quality.

The video could definitely be classified as a bit of a “rant,” but it’s a mostly positive one, and it’s based on Cristina’s own experience. He explains how a client that had stopped hiring him for their smaller events over the past two years recently asked him to come back and start shooting those events once more. When he asked them why, they explained that they’d been using an all-in-one iPad photo booth setup and the results were just plain sub-par.

After two years, they realized that there was real value in making your event/gala look great, because, as Cristina puts it not-so-gently “if the images look like s**t, it looks like the gala was s**t.”

Based on this experience and others like it, Cristina posits that the “era of good enough” may finally be ending, as clients wake up to the value of a professional photographer who can take high-quality images, even if those images are never printed; even if they’re only posted on Instagram or a website.

“I think things are changing guys, I really do,” says Cristina. “I see it in my business […] Mediocrity is no longer acceptable.”

(via SLR Lounge)