School Concert photographers and outdated thinking patterns

School Concert

I do not understand the school photographer's business case for digital images at all.

See when one is attending a concert in the school - we cannot take snaps / videos since it will disturb the children. So obviously we as parents refrain from doing so. Hence the photographer gets to choose the amount he charges for a snap and normally IMO it tends to be exorbitant for no reason.

Still most parents wanting the memories do shell out the required amount. And these are for the hard copies mostly 6 x 8 prints.

Last year it happened the same way - we paid for the prints and yet the photographer did not want to part with the digital snaps. Why ?? This is the reasoning I do not understand. He said he would charge something like 100 Rs per digital copy. Seriously ????  I mean what do the parents want the snaps for ? To share - most likely on fb / flickr and for memories. It is not like these are National Geographic snaps that one has to worry about digital rights to them .. correct ?

So the parents obviously - just scan the damn snaps and share it. And whose loss is that ? The photographer's of course. I would think for a nominal amount he could get a good extra chunk of money for the same thing. But seems the reasoning is archaic - if we do get the digital copies , we can make umpteen copies and put him out of business. Really ???? Doesn't that sound silly ?? For one thing if I get a good scan - I can make any number of copies. Yes they may not be the same as the original but they will be good enough. Most concert snaps one can rarely enlarge after all so the RAW image quality is not required.

And who these days makes that many prints anywayz ? Not many I would think. Finally whoever gets back to that photographer for concert snaps ? Nobody ... !!!! So after a period of time [ if at that ] he would delete the whole lot and it is such a waste.

In the the previous nursery school - the photographer only put those snaps that we had paid money for (prints) and charged for the CD.  I wish this year this person did that - instead he is stuck in the same medieval thoughts.

I did speak to the school office about it and they are also steeped in age old ideas of rights and ability to make multiple copies off the scanned images. These cannot be viewed in the same light as -ves. We have moved way beyond that in the internet age. Although going by their behavior we are still stuck about 30 years back.

In these days of mobile snaps and their prevalence who would upload a 5.8 MB file on fb ?? Looks outdated thinking is not restricted to politics alone !