On Monday I wrote about camera rental company HireACamera.com not honouring quotes. Today I want to warn other photographers about Barcroft Media, the most prominent of the up-and-coming news agencies. I did several jobs for them last year, some with travel expense agreements, but it took action through the small claims court to finally get the expenses paid.

Barcroft didn’t have a regular freelancer in the Highlands, so in late-2009 they started asking me to do jobs for them. Some of the jobs were local so I did them on the usual 50/50 split — I make the effort to do the photos, Barcroft make the effort to sell them, and we split the winnings equally. But other jobs involved long journeys so I insisted on travel expenses. Barcroft weren’t at all happy about paying for travel but they needed the work done, and I wasn’t willing to do it for free, so they agreed to pay.

We ran up travel expenses of £160.08 before I billed them, and that was when the trouble started. It had been a while since I did any jobs for Barcroft, and I knew they had started working with another local photographer who often gives his pictures away for free and, I’m guessing, doesn’t charge expenses. So as much as I was disappointed, I wasn’t entirely surprised when I got a phone call from Barcroft telling me that they wouldn’t be paying the expenses they owed me. They didn’t need me anymore, so they had decided to burn me. Fine.

What really did surprise me was the reason they gave for not paying: The member of staff who commissioned the jobs hadn’t complied with their internal policies, and therefore — in Barcroft’s opinion — they weren’t obliged to pay the expenses that he had agreed to pay. Not really a good way to treat your contributors. As a group, we photographers do tip each other off about dodgy clients.

Phone calls and emails dragged on for a few weeks. Eventually I threatened to recover the money through the small claims court. Barcroft stopped talking to me at that point, so I went ahead with the claim. If you make a threat, you’ve got to see it through. The day that the claim was filed, Barcroft paid the expenses in full. Which should be the end of the story, but it isn’t…

See, it costs money to file a case with the small claims court. And as part of the procedure you are advised to claim interest on the money owed. The person or company who owes you the money is then obliged to pay the interest and the court fee. Barcroft didn’t want to do that. They left the £25 court fee and the £13.92 interest unpaid, and started calling again to say that it was very "unfair" of me to expect them to pay those amounts. I said I’d waive the interest, but they wanted me to waive the court fee too.

At that point I just stayed out of it. The case was in the hands of the court and would be resolved that way. A week or so later Barcroft paid the £38.92 that they owed. In other words, they ended up paying 24% more than if they’d just done the decent thing and paid the travel expenses in the first place. They also lost a reliable freelancer, who would whinge about them on his blog

There are two questions raised by this incident…

Firstly, how bad must business be for Barcroft if they’re willing to burn someone over a couple of hundred quid? It reeks of desperation, clawing at every penny.

Secondly, and more importantly: The news business runs on trust. Jobs are booked last-minute all the time, and you can’t start drawing up contracts for every booking. You need to know that agreements will be honoured, and they always are. I’ve never had any local or national newspaper go back on an agreement. Barcroft will renege on a deal. Do they really have any place in the news business?

I’m really a bit miffed about having to write this, but any blogger who gets ripped-off will naturally end up writing about it, even when it’s a moronically stupid case like this. I can’t believe that any respectable company would behave the way that HireACamera.com has done, but they absolutely stand by their policy so I need to warn other people to make sure they don’t get caught out too.

Last month I photographed a major industrial project, and the company that I was working for asked me to also rent a hi-def video camera to record some video of what was happening. I decided to get the camera and a suitable tripod from HireACamera.com, so I got a quote from them, cleared it with the company I was working for, and booked the equipment.

The video camera arrived like this:

It worked fine, but unfortunately the tripod didn’t. One of the legs repeatedly collapsed and we lost a day of filming. The managing director of HireACamera.com, Guy Thatcher, wasn’t too concerned, telling me to just "tighten it up" and explaining that tripod legs can "sometimes work loose in transit".

We haven’t even got to the rip-off part of the story yet, but I’ll mention that HireACamera.com claim to inspect all equipment before dispatch. If that’s true then I don’t know how that video camera managed to slip through their inspection process. As for the tripod leg becoming slack in transit… well, my own tripod has been bumped around in various backpacks, bags, cars and buses for eight years now, and no part of it has ever come loose. HireACamera.com say that "tripods are always sent out in padded bags with the professional ones also then encased in a hard resin case". If that had been true then maybe the tripod they sent me would have reached me in good working order.

And so we arrive at the rip-off part of the story…

HireACamera.com don’t honour quotes.

I find that gobsmackingly stupid, but it’s true, and they have no shame in admitting it. How the hell can any business-to-business company think it’s right to not honour quotes? The whole point of a quote is to allow you to price a job for a client. No professional would ever work with a company that might randomly charge more than they had quoted. It’s just unthinkable!

What exactly happened was that the person at HireACamera.com who put my quote together mistakenly put the start/end dates as the delivery/collection dates, resulting in a quote for 12 days of rental instead of 14 days. When the mistake was spotted, close to the end of the rental period, HireACamera.com informed us that they’d be charging us for the extra 2 days. And because the rental had been paid for by credit card, they were free to just take the money. They even had the cheek to charge for a third extra day because they couldn’t get a courier to collect the equipment that day.

I’ve been on the phone for hours with these people and they are shamelessly unrepentant. They firmly believe that if they make a mistake with a quote then it is the client’s responsibility to make up the difference. So do they expect me to go back to my client and tell them that I need more money? I guess so. More likely is that it’s me who ends up out of pocket.

Am I saying that people shouldn’t deal with HireACamera.com? No. This is one person having one bad experience. What I am saying is that you should be extra careful when dealing with them. Make sure you get everything in writing, and make sure you double-check everything. Because if they make a mistake then they expect you to pay for it. It might also be a good idea to pay by cheque so they can’t just freely take money from your credit card whenever they see fit.

Oh and if you go to the HireACamera.com web site you’ll see that they make a very big deal of all the positive customer feedback they receive. Turns out they don’t like negative feedback. I posted the following comment on the company’s Facebook page, and it was deleted within minutes:

They justify deleting the entire comment because, they claim, the credit card charge was not "unauthorised". That’s a matter of debate.

Last Wednesday a group of horse-riders, cyclists and ramblers planned to cause disruption on the A9 near Crubenmore, about 15 miles south of Aviemore, to protest about a centuries-old right-of-way being blocked by a new section of dual carriageway. The police stopped the march from going ahead, but there was still one good photo to be had, when a steam train went under the bridge at the planned start to the march. Organisers had arranged for the train to sound its horn as it went past, "indicating widespread public support for the protest".

Here’s an article that I intended to pitch for one of tomorrow’s papers, but I’ve been so busy with a photography project today that I didn’t have time. Rather than let it go to waste I thought I’d post it here. It was written for a mainstream audience so it may be a bit low on detail for my geek comrades, but see what you think…

Unbroken: The codes we cannot crack

All three couples from a ballroom dancing class in Forres will be trying for their bronze medals in Lossiemouth on 19 March 2011. Pictured from left are Betty & Denny Masson from Forres, Eileen & Jim Russell from Inverness, and Jan & Alan White from Forres.

This is their instructor, Caroline Coomber, who also teaches me and my partner Katie!