FAQs
- What should the customer know about your pricing (e.g., discounts, fees)?
WE ARE A FLAT-RATE PHOTOGRAPHY STUDIO. Once we agree on a price, you will get exactly what you expect with no surprise costs added. Period. There are no additional sales calls pushing you into a photography package, no purchase-decision meeting, which can easily turn a simple family shoot into a $2 000 expenditure on photography products. We are all about the photography! As a final work product you will always receive the edited, high-resolution and the low-resolution files, with no watermarks. You will own the rights to the photographs. The files will be sent to you via a file-sharing service. We understand that the process of choosing the right printing lab can be daunting, so we will direct you to the lab that we trust and can recommend to our clients. We offer a "forever storage" service that is included in your price. This means if you ever need the photo files again, you can always reach out and receive the photos again, at no additional cost.
- What education and/or training do you have that relates to your work?
I have also been told that potential clients might like to know something about me, Ivan Djikaev, the chief photographer at Mind On Photography, so here goes: One of the questions I get asked a lot, most often by my mom, is how a boy like me, born in the Soviet Union to a family of physicists, grew up to become a man who abandoned the family business –the study of physics, and became a photographer in the US. The answer is simple: it just happened. I did study physics (which I loved) and was looking forward to a future spent in a Moscow lab, writing papers that no one would likely ever read. But the Soviet Union fell apart right in front of my eyes and with its fall, a lot of doors opened for an educated kid with no family to feed. So my college buddies and I decided that we wanted to start our own business. We were physics geeks, and high-tech business seemed like fun, so we started a company called MDIS. Our most interesting project was the creation of a digital recording system that captured all the conversations between the MIR Space Station and earth. No one remembers MIR now, but for a while it was truly the best thing since sliced bread. I got to listen to some of those conversations and met some cosmonauts, too. That was amazing! But the world marches forward, and the old MIR station was deemed out of date, so it was brought earth and was buried in the Pacific Ocean. The Russian Government invested in the International Space Station and I started to move on as well. Right about the same time as the MIR station went into the ocean, my wife gave me the best present ever: she sent me to photography school. She was pregnant with our first child and most likely just wanted to get me out of the house. Photography school changed my life. A couple of years later, I sold MDIS to one of my partners and started working on my photography fulltime. The next decade included: a move to the US, the birth of our second son, and a new photography business called Mind On Photography!
- What questions should customers think through before talking to professionals about their project?
One of the questions that we are often asked what is the difference between retouching, editing and art photography editing. A picture is worth a 1000 words, so we decided to show you! We have created a blog post on our website, just for that purpose. You can find it at mindonphotography.com, blogs.