I understand, fundamentally, why the school photo place was so mercenary about certain things- like getting it 100% right in the camera, making sure your camera doesn't show the floor or go off the background, lighting Must Be Exact Or Else, etc.
Because when you're processing upwards 2000 photos per job, it does get a little laborious to fix all the mistakes.
But now that I'm doing some studio work of my own and I see the mistakes that I made on my first run, I do NOT understand how EACH mistake (most of which can be amended with cropping) cost our location $2 in labor and why I was scolded so often for minor problems.
The franchise doesn't take professional photographers. It takes non-professionals who may have never touched a camera in their lives, and trains them. Chewing them out over mistakes familiar to amateurs is unnecessary.
And let's take the reality of it:
It doesn't matter how long you train- any person that has to get up at 3 in the morning to drive to location and then spend 8 hours in a hot gym, where they may not get a lunch break because we're on the school's schedule not the company's schedule... they're going to make amateur mistakes.
"You know better than to make these kinds of mistakes."
Yes. I do. But I'm also not a robot.
