Sales workflow

Nimai

Could I get some examples or suggestions from people with Pro accounts and print sales? I'd like to get a good workflow set up first, rather than stumbling through different approaches and confusing people.

Example: Last weekend I took over 300 photos at a neighborhood swim meet. Many parents would like to by prints (or maybe but digital originals?). People also like to see the shots soon after the event.
What I've done (after looking at cheerdad's site, actually) is upload all of the shots that are at least in focus and not completely redundant. I disabled viewing of the originals, right-clicking, and print sales. I put a message in my description that encourages the parents to email me with any shots they might like to purchase so that I can at least crop and tweak before they order prints... but I'm not sure what to do next.

Do you usually expect the clients to do the croping and color/sharpening, etc. using smugmug?

Once I have received some requests from parents, do I edit and re-upload those shots to a separate gallery that has print sales enabled?

With regards to photographing teens/children at events like this, I've received nothing but praise and positive feedback, but when I ask if it's OK for me to host the pictures for everyone in "the Internet", some parents tense up and get worried. To this end, I have password protected the galleries. I had wanted to share them with some folks here, for example, and get some feedback on the photography and/or and future customizations. How have you handled parental concerns about "the big, bad Internet"?

Thanks for any/all information.

dogwood

my method
I shoot a lot of local fashion shows. My method is to sort through and select the best shots and try to narrow them down so most designers are represented. I use software called Photo Mechanics by Camera Bits for this and highly recommend them.

Then I go into PSCS, open each photo individually (I shoot RAW) covert, do a crop and curves adjustment if needed, save a tif, and then run an action that sizes, sharpens and copyrights the image for the web. Once I get done, I upload the photos to my smugmug page, and add the custom stuff (banner, keywords, designer names/links).

Then I run a batch action on all the tifs that sharpens, flattens, coverts to sRGB and jpeg and saves 'em. I upload these to a seperate, private gallery with watermarking and enable large viewing. I grab that link, and put a link on the first gallery (order prints here). Voila-- they're done.

It's a lot of work, but I find the seperate print and web viewing galleries look better (big files always look soft and pixelated when shrunk down for web viewing) and then I don't have to have the "proof" over the images most people look at.

I'm curious to see other people's methods too.

Mike Lane

About the color correction part, you could just let smugmug handle that. Their auto color correcrtion is (unlike photoshop) excellent. You could force that option and only concern yourself with cropping and rotating the pics. Just a thought.

Dna

I do a similar thing for Lifesaving Victoria. I shoot their carnivals and put the photos on a website to sell. I'm in the process of transitioning over to smugmug so my present site only has small photos on it. (600x400).

I shoot in jpeg with extra compression, so the file sizes are around 1.5 Mb for an 8Mp camera. I discard the out of focus ones, sort them in to clubs and upload. I haven't had anyone in two years ask for a photos to be cropped or changed. I did crop some at one stage and they were rejected as not being the same as the one on the site !

I'll shoot between 800 to 1200 photos per day and usually upload 80% of them. For the big carnivals I have 2 or 3 other photographers helping me and we'll end up with 4000-5000 photos for the weekend.

All my galleries that have youths or children are password protected, I am not required to do this but feel that I should. The parents seem to appreciate it too.

www.lsvphotos.com
http://lsv.smugmug.com

Dna