Pricing question

Marlowe · May 23, 2009

I'm an event photographer specializing in bike racing and recently have been approached by the owner of a local team to start a gallery on my website exclusively for that team, for this season. He wants the medium sized photos available to his team for download (right click & save) and keep the print purchase option in the album for potential buyers.

In my experience once someone has a jpeg for their own use they are not likely to buy a print from me, that's why my downloads are priced at $15 for personal use. If it was cheaper than my 5x7's they'd just get the download and run off their own prints.

Anyway there's no way of knowing how many event shots I'll get of his team and my questions are, if anyone has encountered anything like this, first should I minimize the number of images I offer (per rider/per race?) over the season, and second, how should I price such a service?:scratch

Just to put a number on the photos, I may get 4 or 5 shots on average of each rider per event, and maybe 10-15 events for the year. I have no idea how many riders on the team yet.

Thanks,
Jon

termina3 · May 24, 2009

I'm the business manager for a high school sports photography (think traditional, ball-based sports) company.

We post tons of photos of lots of kids. What we've found is that parents will go through and buy EVERY photo of their child, so we post 10 photos where we'd normally only put up 2 (note: the quality is consistently good, but lots of times you'll get three different photos of the same play). So that should answer one of your questions.

Downloads are a bad idea. I would suggest

a) Get exclusivity. If you're going to be the official photographer for this team, you're going to be the only photographer. I don't know if that's plausible for bike racing… but in HS sports, if we're the home team, our company is the only company shooting.

b) Provide low-res JPEGs to the coach via CD/DVD, no charge. If you trust the coach to not redistribute (I wouldn't in this case), you should give him the originals. Only give him the photos you're posting on the website; there's no need to inundate him with the 1000s of rejects.

c) No downloads. If team members want a digital copy for Facebook, Myspace, etc, they may email you. You'll give them a web-sized JPEG.

If he really, really wants downloads, then he should be paying you to show up for the event. Because otherwise there's no way you're going to make a profit.

Marlowe · May 25, 2009

Thanks for the input! Exclusivity won't work as they will accept photos from anyone who happens to be at an event with a camera, including family of the riders. He approached me because I tend to get photos of everyone through the day. His initial suggestion of an album on my Smugmug site showing the medium sized images (unprotected, unwatermarked) was for an up front cash agreement, not per race price.

I have no issue doing this, but I do know that most riders will copy ALL the photos for themselves and I'll probably never see any future sales, be it downloads or prints from that album. A flat fee to cover everything is what I'm trying to determine.

After mulling it over, I now lean towards offering one or two images per rider in this free album, with many others yet available to them in the original right-click-protected, watermarked album. This leaves the possibility that they may want to purchase an image NOT on their free album. I don't feel I should give them all my photos.

He just wants a link to provide the team a gallery from the season. I would just insert my links to all photos for each specific race. I'm still undecided on a fair price for this service though.

Thanks,
Jon

termina3 · May 25, 2009

I'd charge at least $800 for all the photos.

Here's my thinking:

If you shoot 10 events, and each event is 4 hours, that's 40 hours. 40*$20=$800. And I suspect those numbers are conservative.

If there are 20 riders on the team, that's $40 per rider for as many prints as they want… really a pretty good deal.

Marlowe · May 25, 2009

Good point, I like your math, but I know they'd never go for that price. Maybe an alternative is providing a gallery in Smugmug small style with my watermark at the bottom edge intsead of all over the image as it is now. These could be copied and used for facebook but not much else.
Jon

termina3 · May 25, 2009

Would they go for $400? That's $10/hr.

If you're shooting for less than $10/hr, there's little/no potential to develop from that point, and you're doing this to make money (vs. as a hobby that pays), you should find something else to shoot. Because for every four hours you shoot, there's probably an hour of post-production/web administration… which brings your $10/hr for 4 hours to an actual $8/hr for 5 hours. We're getting pretty close to minimum wage, which is absurd considering the skills and equipment you're bringing to the table.

If you go to these events for fun, then sell the photos for whatever he'll buy them for. Or just give away the web-sized downloads (like you were suggesting), and try to sell prints. You'll get a few orders. But you have to figure out (read: make an educated guess) at what point you'll make more by trying to sell prints than selling the digital negatives.

Ideally, in the future, you'll target a more tractable audience. Or you'll charge this guy an up-front fee and only go to one event.

Target groups who don't have many photographers come to their events, take their events seriously/value what they're doing, and have a reasonable disposable income. There's no reason to try and sell photos a) in an ultra-competitive market, b) to people who won't buy them b/c they don't want to remember what they're doing, c) to people don't have the money to pay a reasonable price for your services.

Marlowe · May 26, 2009

When I do go to an event I try to shoot as many competitors that time allows. I'm not shooting one team in particular, so its out of these photos the team needs their gallery. I will eventually sell others from this race too. No one wants to hire a photographer for one event around here, so this is their way of avoiding that.

I think in this case I may have to compromise and go for a smaller fee (providing a fraction of the images taken for the album) and hope it leads to future downloads & print purchases.

I feel that I should be tough but if I say no to this I may risk alienating more people. There are some out there who resent my watermarking but still use screen capture tools to get all their photos. I've had people email me asking if I could remove the print on the photo so they can decide if they like it or not :crazy !

In my opinion there are too many weekend photographers out there willing to work for praise alone which makes it difficult to do business.

Jon

Pricing question

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