Requesting Advice on Structuring Event Photographs

tdinardotdinardo Registered Users Posts: 98 Big grins
edited March 2, 2008 in SmugMug Pro Sales Support
I'm new to smugmug and am just finishing up the setup of my site and getting ready to start marketing photos from an event I shot.

Not sure that my title makes sense. I'm not really looking for pricing advice, but rather what photos I should actually post for sale and how to structure the price based on that decision. I'm trying to figure out what's going to yeild the best sales outcome.

I recently shot the North American Longtrack Speedskating Championships. This is the first major event I've shot on speculation. This is also the first event that I'm going to market through smugmug. I had a lot of positive comments and feedback at the event from the participants and spectators who wanted to look at some of the shots while I was offloading from the cards to the laptop. I'm getting ready to release the photos and I'm having a problem deciding on the best strategy to take. The lighting at the venue was very bad (in an 8 shot sequence, almost every shot would have different lighting due to spacing of the lights and the type of lights in use - no flash was allowed in the facility so fill-flash was out), so post processing of the job took a lot of time to get things clean enough to upload. I shot about 10K frames over four days on two bodies (D2H and D2X). Because of the poor lighting, and the general desire to have an attractive motion blur, my money shot rate was pretty low (lucky if I hit 10% tack sharp and 20-30% soft but good enough for 4x6/5x7 prints. My final count of usable shots is around 2,000 (shots where the participant's body position made for an attractive shot).

I'm trying to decide what makes the most sense from a business perspective when pricing and presenting these shots to customers. Am I better off only putting up the money shots and going for a premium price with a lower number of sales, or should I put the soft shots up too (and set the pricing for the soft shots so you can't order larger than 5x7) and then charge a premium only for the larger sizes on the money shots?

Here's a representative gallery showing an assortment of decent sharp and soft shots: http://www.bellafaccie.com/gallery/4424066_SBUAq/1#259941291

Any feedback or suggestions would be greatly appreciated.

Feedback on photos themselves and the watermark I've chosen would also be appreciated (I want to make sure the watermark isn't really annoying).

Hopefully my rambling request makes some sort of sense. :dunno

Thanks in advance.

Tom.
Sign In or Register to comment.