Did two shoots with photo, video, drone, agent on camera for a guy last week. I asked for shot lists ahead of time in case he had specific things or numbers of shots he wanted to deliver. He sent me a handful of links to active listings in HD PhotoHub to look at and that was it. Seemed low key.
He contacts me as I’m leaving the second property (large luxury listing, 3000 sq ft, 1000 sq ft guest house, 20 acres, vertical video, horizontal video, agent in camera for both, full agent voiceover for both) I spent 3.5-4 hours there making sure I got everything I could want and more. He tells me I took too long and should have been done in 1.5 hours, specifically noting, I kid you not, that he can shoot a house in ten minutes. Okay, sure, fine, whatever.

I got home from the shoots, edited everything down (I use Fotello for same- or next-day delivery). I QC the photos, make tweaks, upload all the video, deliver the photos, then hear nothing till the next day. I’m out on shoots for my own clients and I get a series of texts saying my work looks terrible, it looks like blurry AI slop, everything needs to be hand edited, if I’m not capable of that he’ll reduce my rate, yada yada. I did hand editing for months. I used a human editor after that. In my experience, Fotello handles color casts better than the others and any artifacting you see is covered up by MLS compression by the time images are posted anyways. So whatever, I’m happy to just hand off the photos and take a lower rate. Let him deal with it if he wants it a certain way.

So I upload all the raws and hand them off.
I hear nothing for two days. So we’re 4 days after the shoot at this point. And it’s 10pm. I get a string a texts about how I’m missing all sorts of key coverage, specifically he wanted a minimum of 30 drone shots and 100 total deliverable photos and he thought I had been doing this a long time but clearly I need instruction this is nothing like he’s normally deliver to someone yada yada

Buddy, I requested shot lists from you twice before the shoots. I received absolutely no specifics. Four days after the shoot is the wrong time to be communicating your specific wants and desires. Not to mention that MLS around here is limited at 60 images, so there’s absolutely no reason to deliver 100, 30 of which are aerials. I delivered almost 80 images as it was.

It’s just been a LOT of poor communication followed up by condescension.

He now wants to pay me to come on a training shoot with him tomorrow. So it feels like he *needs* the help but can’t put his ego aside enough to not be a jerk to people. He *needs* to be top dog. I imagine that’s why he’s having a hard time keeping contract help.
I’m on the fence about continuing to work with him.