What's the difference between Helium and other portrait studios?

At Helium, we don't just take photos - we make photos.

To compare Helium to other studios is a little like comparing home-cooked meals to fast food. Various studio business models are refined and tailored to the markets of vanity, sentiment, gifts and other niches which pidgeon-hole their clients into predefined target groups and serve up packages accordingly.

In contrast, we consider the needs and desires of our clients on a case-by-case basis. Every person is different. Every person wants to see different things. Every person responds to visual styles in different ways. We have developed our line of products and services to cater for this exact concept; therefore every client receives unique, individually-tailored work.

How do you charge?

Our pricing structure is based heavily on our mission statement - in particular, to structure our fees in a manner accurately reflecting our costs and efforts, and not exploiting our clients' unfamiliarity with the industry.

We refer, of course, to the all-too-popular notion that something is worth what you can get for it. We disagree.

Our prices are designed to reflect the labour and consumables directly connected to producing your photos - no more, no less. We oppose the practice of charging next to nothing for photo shoots, and making a killing on print markups - a practice which has sadly become all too common amongst our competitors.

We charge for studio time, any retouching or compositing labour, and sell prints at very reasonable rates. We are also one of the only studios in Australia willing to supply the original digital masters to our clients at no extra cost.

Those photos are amazing - how do you do it?

The wonderful world of computers!

We have essentially adapted many of the techniques used by film and television visual effects companies (blue screens, rotoscoping, 3d modelling etc) to be used in still photography. For more information, check out our article on bluescreen compositing.