What do you actually sell?

Dick on Aruba

If you sell pictures on-line with SmugMug of any other similar site, what do you sell?

Do you sell the “negatives” (Tiff, Jpeg, NEF, RAW)? Do you sell a printed version? Both?

How you handle it if people want to pay with credit card? Paypall?

Please enlighten me.

Dick.

marlinspike

I have a smugmug pro account and only sell prints (if anybody ever asks for a file I will offer it to them, but only at an inflated price).

Since I have a smugmug pro account, smugmug handles all of the credit card stuff and I've never had anybody want to pay any other way (well once, but he ended up never buying anything anyways).
Richard

JimM

I just take credit cards through Smugmug. I have sold one digital image, but that was locally and I took a check (pre agreed before shoot price).

Dick on Aruba

Thanks Richard & Jim.

kkart

Well I have sold quite a few large prints through my deviantart account....most have been retro subjects (hotrods) with the occasional landscape and sunset thrown in the mix. If someone was to want a TIFF file I would gladly supply it with a rights contract.

gus

I go to a race..take a huge amount of jpegs...& post the link to their forums.

They pick out their own shots..PM me the number of the image/address to post to & banking deposit details & i do several diff copies (size/crop/B&W etc) burn them to DVD or CD & send the disc to them.

I couldnt make enough to buy a dead possum with the shots i like doing but these amature racers always love to buy their own photos & im actually starting to really like doing it. The same people race generally & they now know me now & if they see me standing near a jump they will put a bit of a show on to get themselves a decent shot.

I always make a donation to the site each time i get to a certain $ value to keep the mods happy & because its a small local struggling forum..it is bringing in the guys from the other more popular forums whom dont have a pet photogrpher. Its sort of a win win situation for everyone.

johng

I recommend selling prints only...
I sell via my pro account at Smugmug.
I recommend selling only prints for a very simple reason: you can control the quality of the final product. EZPRINTS does a fantastic job on prints, but say you sell an image to someone and they print it on their old color (but not photo) printer on regular paper or worse - on a photo printer with wrong settings so it screws up the colors. Now, someone they know sees the printed image and asks about it. Your work is now associated with that poor quality print.

There are, of course other reasons relating to copyright and trust - but even if you have a trusted person I don't recommend. Heck, I have to have photos printed and mailed to my father from family events. Otherwise he just prints them out on regular printer paper (he has a photo printer but doesn't want to pay for photo paper -go figure). So when he prints them out they look terrible. He also won't order on-line so my only alternative is to order them myself and have them sent to him. This way the end result is a quality print. There is absolutely no way I would trust the common person to get a quality print made from one of my image files. And a third party looking at those prints isn't going to know it was just poor printing that poor product reflects on the photographer. Just something to think about.

mercphoto

johng wrote:

I sell via my pro account at Smugmug.
I recommend selling only prints for a very simple reason: you can control the quality of the final product.

It is true that even though computers are very powerful it is still extremely easy, even for seasoned pros, to goof up printing. I'm still amazed and a bit embarassed that my industry (semiconductor, in particular PC microprocessors) can't get this easier for people to do. One would think that all the user needs to do is select the proper paper type and our powerful systems would take care of the rest.

Well, we do have computers powerful enough to do this, but it hasn't happened. But I digress.

It does, however, confirm John's fear, that you send a client a file, they print it, the colors are wrong, and they blame the file (i.e. you, the photographer who created the file). I know of only one way around this problem and that is, if you send a client a CD-ROM with his race photos on it, put with it one 4x6 print that is properly done. The customer has a known good copy of one of your images. If they complain, simply ask for them to print that identical image and see if the results are the same.

I understand people's fears about selling digital files because of the control aspect as well. I might be unique in that I used to be an amateur racer. I would ONLY buy images on CD-ROM. I never bought a print. I was the customer that many photographer's feared. Now I am the photographer and I offer CD-ROMs partly because there is a market for that, partly because I'd want to offer a product that even I would have bought. Right or wrong that is my reason for doing so.

Dick on Aruba

Thanks guys for this valuable information.

Dick.

gtc

selling
i send 16bit tiffs to the stock agency and framed prints from the walls of cafes,bookshops and foyers.

no direct over the web sales for me-sold another framed 13X19 print the other day and went out and bought bellows ,ink and paper and had enough left over for a very nice bottle of red wine.

Dick on Aruba

gtc wrote:

i send 16bit tiffs to the stock agency and framed prints from the walls of cafes,bookshops and foyers...

Thanks!