[steelese]

Okay, so I take a much more pragmatic view of this. The first thing you need to know is that your pictures were not good work. You accept that and you learn from it, no excuses. Secondly, you need to communicate with your clients about reasonable expectations. If there were 15 pictures that they liked, and if the shoot was an hour long, then I call that good. If you spent more like two or three hours on location, then more is appropriate. Anyways, let you clients know that not every picture is going to be good. This leads us to the fact that you need to not show clients your bad pictures. They don't need to see it. It just isn't useful for them.

So you have to ask yourself, is it worth it. If you are in a larger metropolitan market and have plenty of people to do work for, I would forget about it. The fact that they haven't complained to you directly actually is a good thing. For the most part, when someone complains without complaining to you, it is going to be a small number. If you approach them, you might upset them more. Maybe right off some free prints. Prints are much cheaper than your time. If this kind of thing happens on a regular basis then you better have a good way of fixing it, but if this is a once a year kind of thing, your best to forget about it.

In our business, the whole 10 to 1 ratio is not all that useful. For the most part, the population you are exposed to is not likely to use your services anyway. The people she is going to talk to are not likely to use your services anyway so it may not cost you all that much. This is actually were a lot of people get fixing problems wrong. If you are a Nordstroms (notorious for their good customer service), likely more than half the population of the area you cover is going to go into your store at some time during the year. That means if 10 people hear about it, you likely lost 5 customers. However, if I am a photographer and I have one gig a day for senior pictures, this doesn't happen but lets say it does, my market saturation for the 5 highschools with 600 seniors would be something like 1%. So for those people who hear about it I might not get one customer. But it would take something like 10 bad shoots with complaining before I lost a customer. It doesn't seem logical, but it is.

What you don't want her to become is a vocal complainer. The one who blogs about it and complains about it at every turn for several years. So this is were your real business savvy comes in. You need to give them just enough to keep them from being that unhappy. If its free prints or a refund you are probably good. Don't shoot for free again. Chances are the pictures won't turn out well anyway because of unspoken tension.

So there is my two cents. The real key to this is to not have this problem to begin with. You are a photographer, it is you job to make the photos great, even with sub optimal conditions. Heck, try something new, you never know.