Quickie Question

Chaoslillith

I searched print charge and came up with a ton of threads but this is a little unique.

I have a prospective Christmas party job where I will be providing over 1000 5x7 prints. What would you charge per print? This will be posed shots as the people walk into the party.

Thanks!

Kat

Photog4Christ

Are you being paid anything to be at the party?

Chaoslillith

I am charging $400 it's two parties two different days about 500 couples at each party and most of them get the shots done

Angelo

so you're making a decent fee for two nights.

you're not selling 1000 prints, you're selling one print each to 1000 people. decide what you think a memory of the evenings' festivities might be worth to each person and price accordingly.

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Chaoslillith

Angelo,

Well the company is paying for the prints not the people individually I was thinking at $3.50 per 5x7, a pro I know was saying to try to get closer to $5.00 but that seems a bit high for so many pics.

Thanks!

Angelo

consider this.

how much time will you spend on:

downloading, processing, editing, uploading - per picture? 10 minutes per? and the cost of printing? heck $3.50 only amounts to $21 per hour.

I think 5x7 is not impressive. an 8 x 10 is more so and the cost difference to you is minimal

.

angevin1

Chaoslillith wrote: »

I searched print charge and came up with a ton of threads but this is a little unique.

I have a prospective Christmas party job where I will be providing over 1000 5x7 prints. What would you charge per print? This will be posed shots as the people walk into the party.

Thanks!

Kat

Kat, you need to provide more info.
1. Are you printing on-site?
2. If so, is it your printer, ink and paper?
3. Editing of images done On-site?

Chaoslillith

Ordering through smugmug, editing the images off site. Basically take the pics, go home , upload, edit , send to smugmug to ship to the client and I am charging $400.00 for my time separate from the prints.

Sam

OK,

My take on this is it looks like you have one job, but split between two nights. If you use 3 hours on site each night that equates to $66.00 per hour. Less than most professional photographers charge for event photography. (In CA)

A 5X7 can cost somewhere between $1.40 and $1.75 through Smugmug. An 8X10 from between $2.00 and $3.25. Depending on choice of printers and options.

Lets say a print costs $1.75 and you sell it for $3.50. Smugmug will charge you a 15% handling fee on the $1.75 profit ($0.26) this leaves you $1.49 per image processed, uploaded and sold. I could make more collecting bottles.

Is the event ordering one of each couple to be delivered in bulk to them, or are the sales to the individual attendees?

This would have a bearing pricing in my opinion. If the event organizers are going to commit to buying one for each couple (1000 est) then I would have them printed on my own through Bay (my choice) or any other printer you like. I would look at the pricing and think that from $5.00 to $6.00 for a 5X7 could be doable. I would offer them an option of an 8X10 for say $8.00 to $10.00. The 8X10 would, I think, be perceived as a better value.
As an example if you used MPIX you could buy the 5X7 for $0.89 ea, and the 8X10 for $1.69 ea.

If on the other hand the sales would be made to the individual attendees, I would absolutely use SmugMug. I would not charge less than $10.00 for the smallest print in the world!

To make this work I believe you will need a small studio set up with lighting and distance, seating, etc. all set and ready to go. Shot RAW and jpg. If you can get the lighting etc set up right and the in camera jpg setting right you could be looking at very little to no post processing. This is the way you can actually make money.

Also note you probably will need to identify the couples in the file name. That will require assistance at the event.

Do your own math........

Sam

Chaoslillith

Sam,

Thanks for the feedback. I told the company I would just ship all the shots to them and they can distribute the pics out to the the people. I am still going to look around for printers and I told them $4.00 a print. I told them they could either pay me for 1000 up front or wait until the event is over and then when we know how many people actually took pics I would charge them for the prints.

This will be my first big event so it should be fun and challenging! If I get the job anyway.

Art Scott

It really should be closer to $10 but I am too late to the game.......last time I worked for large corp (over 20yrs ago)
they had a x-mas party and did the same....and were charging $20/ 8x10 in a cheap TAP folder, over 3.5K people
attended and were shot....but we had to fill out a form with name and empl # so the company could get us the pic......
You must have a way to identify each shot and so that they can get it out to the employees with out any trouble.

Good Luck.

chrisjohnson

It should be an easy sell to corporate marketing that every couple or single gets a remembrance photo "free". You can raise your event fee accordingly. Make sure your url is printed somewhere in a corner together with the corporate message. You probably get some good add-on sales via your website - big prints with no messaging, candids, future events! With a decent printer on-site the punters can even take their entry picture with them at the end of the party. Just an idea. When you have the lighting set optimally where the people enter and a clean "set", you can shoot jpeg+raw and eliminate your processing time for the freebies.

If they go for this then my ostensible "pricing" per print would be my cost +10%. I would raise my service fee to compensate - do you really think anyone in the marketing department is looking forward to distributing these photos themselves? (When your cost per print "looks" low then the organisers can easily defend their decision to do things this way, next year too). You get the opportunity to give a personalized business card to 1000 corporate employees - better make sure you get the first shot right first time and look forward to the calls about upcoming weddings.

Seems like you got yourself into this gig by being incredibly cheap. Now you need to upsell like crazy. Final thought, your customer is budget constrained. The budget for Christmas 2011 is likely being set NOW. When you want a bigger slice of the pie next year you need to start convincing people today.