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Event 100 Girl Scouts - Time and Sales?
lifeinfocus
Registered Users Posts: 1,461 Major grins
I have been asked to consider taking photos at a Girl Scout event in late February. I have done a lot of gratis work for local organizations.
The group wants still photos of each Girl Scout to be taken between 5:00pm to 6:30pm and have prints available for sale by 8:00pm.
I know it is not possible to take that many still photos, process and print by myself in that short a time period. Doing the math it would take many hours.
So, I was wondering:
1. What is a reasonable amount of time to take a few still photos of each subject? Five minutes, more, less? I have done photos like this for our church religious classes and at least three minutes seems about right. What do you think?
2. How much time to shoot that many in one time period with one photographer?
3. Would the attendees buy the photos if I had a viewing station with a big monitor and sold photo(s) stored on a CD with a link to my Smugmug website for the processed photo as a download and possibly prints. I could also do a large order of 8x10s for all those who bought a photo on a storage device and give them to the girl scout leader for distribution. Any thoughts on this is deeply appreciated.
I would have help in saving the photos to CDs. i thought about flash drives but they seem to be too expensive even 256mb drives. Thoughts on doing either storage device?
Thanks in advance,
Phil
The group wants still photos of each Girl Scout to be taken between 5:00pm to 6:30pm and have prints available for sale by 8:00pm.
I know it is not possible to take that many still photos, process and print by myself in that short a time period. Doing the math it would take many hours.
So, I was wondering:
1. What is a reasonable amount of time to take a few still photos of each subject? Five minutes, more, less? I have done photos like this for our church religious classes and at least three minutes seems about right. What do you think?
2. How much time to shoot that many in one time period with one photographer?
3. Would the attendees buy the photos if I had a viewing station with a big monitor and sold photo(s) stored on a CD with a link to my Smugmug website for the processed photo as a download and possibly prints. I could also do a large order of 8x10s for all those who bought a photo on a storage device and give them to the girl scout leader for distribution. Any thoughts on this is deeply appreciated.
I would have help in saving the photos to CDs. i thought about flash drives but they seem to be too expensive even 256mb drives. Thoughts on doing either storage device?
Thanks in advance,
Phil
0
Comments
What exactly are you trying to do and what are the pics for?
I do T&I's of sporting groups and I can easily shoot the individuals in under 30 sec each with multiple shots of the same basic pose.
3-5 minutes seems way too long to me unless you are trying to do multiple portraits/poses of each kid and sell them as a package or something.
On saturday night I did an event and shot 80 people (In multiple combinations) and printed over 140 5x7's in under 2 hours with help from my son. the greenscreens werent batched wither, they were all differening backgrounds we selected on the fly from a batch we had pre-sorted.
I took 2 printers but we didn't even bother pooling them in the end, the one was OK.
As above, all depends on what you are trying to do.
Why are you taking pics in the first place? If this is some special gathering or occasion, I'm not sure that taking multiple portraits is the right hook to selling them. I'd be offering something like a group shot with the individual pic and putting boarders and and a title on the prints to make them a commemorative thing.
I think that will be better for sales than just portraits they could have done at any time and don't have any special significance.
Firstly, for 100 attendees your going to want a lot more than one viewing station. By the sounds of your time frame you will run out of time for them all to see their pics. 10 Vstations would be a bare minimum -IF- they can see the pics progressively after you shoot them rather than looking in one big bunch. If you have to present them like that, then i'd say the more stations the better.
Personaly I think your sales model is waay too complicated and will get a low sales yeild.
What I would be doing is what I have done many times in the past and forget Vstations and smutmut and all the rest of it and just do the prints there and then and sell them.
I do this with charity balls and corporates and we always kill it.
there is nothing as effective as being able to pick up a finished print, walk over and pay for it and be on your way, end of section.
Yeah, You'll have a few prints left over, I have had as many as 100 left thanks to getting lost in the printing and doing multiples of the same image ( only made that mistake once!) but even in that worst case stuff up, the cost of the leftovers was insignificant and the $1100 CLEAR i made from the 5 hour event was Very worthwhile.
In any case, whatever you have left over you can use as samples or even if you just throw them out, your still going to make far more PROFIT than putting pics online or even with Vstations. When I do the preprinting, I just get a bunch of tables put aside by the organisers, take my roll of black felt to cover them with and lay the prints out on the tables for people to find with signs as to the price. We get requests for extra prints which we just run off on demand as well as different sizes if asked for. When people purchase the prints we put them in envelopes rather than folders as envelopes are far cheaper and costs saved are $$ in your pocket and no one minds the envelopes. Of course you pre print the envelopes with your Business details and a blurb on what you do.
Then get help with doing prints.
For Golf days I can easily print 100 Mag covers in an hour, or should I say, my rather photoshop illiterate wife can. I set up an action in PS that does all the overlaying. She opens a pic, hits an F key and the cover is assembled and then stops. She can refine the position of the player, which dosen't take much because I use the grid in the camera to get them the same height and position as best I can, and hits another key and the print spits out the printer.
We use 2-3 inkjet printers and can process prints up to 3 a minute.
We do similar with T&I. An action is set up and the images to print from the 2-3 taken are sorted and put in a folder. Hit the button and each image is printed in multiple sizes on a sheet automaticaly.
We also do a combo print where the borders, name of the club/ team is overlayed and each individual is put with the team shot automatically.
All the levels and sharpening etc is done in the action so it's literally 1-2 presses of a button from the base image to the finished printed product in your hand.
If I had to do this event your talking about on my own, i'd say I would be pushing it but It would be achieveable.
If i had my wife or kids to help me, No biggie at all. If I had to get the doorman at the hotel that just finished his shift to help, still easy done because the actions are all set up so there is nothing to know about what you are doing, it's basicaly buttom pressing.
The key is to have everything set up before you get to the job, to be consistant in shooting and to pound it into the organisers/ kids that the whole thing hinges on them being ready and basicaly lined up behind you ready to go ON TIME.
I have an ink jet printer at home but I do most of my printing at local print shop or via Smugmug, so my inkjet is not a great printer.
Do you have suggestions for a printer? Maybe I could rent own if they are expensive.
Again, thanks much for your detailed response and experience. I have followed some of your postings and I am really impressed. I have a background in IT, one of my jobs was to build and manage a nationwide network of 300 servers and 10,000 workstations from scratch is less than a year.
Phil
"You don't take a photograph, you make it." ~Ansel Adams
Phil
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I just use Canon inkers, the ones with the 5 or more individual cartriges.
I reccomend downloading the ICC profiles from Ilford and installing them no matter what paper and ink your using. They seem to work very well with everything I have tried!
You should easily be able to get the printers for $100 ea or less. Get 2 at least, 3 is better.
I'd also reccomend buying yourself a good CIS System to reduce your ink costs. This will make it more economical ( feasable) for you to pre print shots as the ink can be more exy than the paper. Failing that, You can refil the OEM cartriges as I have many times now with the aftermarket ink. If your interested in that, PM me and i'll tell you how to do it much easier and better than any way I found of doing it on the net.
This type of thing is PERFECT for doing onsite printing and with the numbers you have to work with, I would almost gaurantee just the extra you will make by presenting finished prints on the night will more than pay for your printers over the lesser amount you would sell doing it online.
Pretty good when you can pay or profit from an assett first time out!
With paper, I found some Kodak super ultra, mega twin Turbo peimum or whatever it is today on special at the local Kmart. I was in A3 size. I bought 4 packs of 20 which made 160 A4 sheets which worked out to .37C ea. The cheapest I can buy any comprably quality paper is .90C a sheet. It took me all of about 10 min to cut the lot. I marked a line On my rotary cutter board and went off that and had no problems.
The savings are well worth my time.
I think I'll go back tomorrow and clean them out of whatever they have and get my wife to do the same at the store near her work.
Keep an eye out for this sort of thing and stock up when you can.
I have a couple of T&I's coming up which I'll use a probably 500 sheets on so I found this at the right time.
I think this is a very flawed view.
I also don't see why you automaticaly assume that because the deadline is tight, that automaticaly equates to an "Inferiour Quality" product?
Like I said, it's all in the pre preparation and being organised and consistant. If you are set up in advance, you can still turn out a quality product that exceedes the customers expectations and satisfys them comopletely.
The majority of my work is done to tight deadlines and in fact I have promoted my business on that very fact that we can deliver very quickly to get myself into other markets and compete on service rather than price like most shooters these days do. In fact I purposefuly charge a preimum on my work for this fact and I get the work because of the ability to deliver quickly over price.
As i have said before, I think many shooters on forums anyway are far too obsessed with quality over making money and getting paid for their work.
This isn't an expensive family portrait session the OP is talking about, its a quick, cheap and cheerful opportunity to cash in on a circumstance that will be a one off with a fixed timeframe.
Some shooters seem to think every single frame they take has to be Photofiddled in order to be saleable and anything not stuffed around with is rubbish they could never let anyone see lest it ruin their reputation.
I say thats a load of crap and put my money where my mouth is most weekends to prove it.
The way some shooters carry on, if they were running McDonalds they would only hire 3 Michilen star chefs to cook the burgers and Matr'e d's from the worlds best restaurants.
And Of course they would have the company bankrupt in a week.
You don't have prime marbled Wagu beef mince for burgers (unless your selling them for $50 each!) nor do you you have burger mince on the plate in a fine dining establishment.
As long as you meet a standard commensurate with the occasion/ and expectation of a reasonable client, there is nothing wrong with quick or low cost. Only an idiot would get caught up stuffing around with trying to make perfect prints to sell at event type rates while the clientele went cold.
Customers are more focussed on the content of the pic rather than the obsession many shooters have over quality. I gaurantee that if you took a few days to " perfect" the images before offering them for sale, I'll triple at least your sales with my automated handling of the images and pre settings of the images I create.
Retouching every image and taking your time is entirely appropriate when your selling prints for $200 a throw but when your selling the same size for $30, perfection is a completely flawed objective.
The key to event photography is not to sell pictures, it's to sell speed and a memory. And that is exactly what I tell lots of my clients.
Shooters also crap on that you can't sell a client an image off a $100 inkjet printer. I do it all the time and if it were just luck it would have run out years ago. My clients always LOVE what we do, even when we occasionaly stuff up and miss an out of focus image. You tell them the pic is no good and can they select another that is in focus and if you hand them the garbage one to see, you can't pry it back out of their hands with a crow bar or any amount of requests to print a better image as a replacement.
Thinking about it, perhaps you are right.
People DO come to me for my work. My work in capturing the image and all the work I have put in to creating systems and workflows to put the images in their hands before they go home.
Matter of fact, they keep coming back to me for that work time and time again.
I won't tarnish that buy taking too long to show or produce the images as they have now come to expect from me, I'll keep turning them out as fast as i can to the best i can within the timeframe restrictions I have and cannot do anything about.
Glort, usually I am annoyed at you after reading your posts!
But you hit the nail on the head here. Great reply man!
<Insert some profound quote here to try and seem like a deep thinker>
Michael Wachel Photography
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You suggest buying equipment, which changes the parameters. You can always throw more equipment at a problem and can usually solve it. The hard part is making the numbers work out. But you've shown that it can. Kudos.
I saw in another thread somewhere that it's not the photography talent that determines if someone succeeds, but the business talent. Knowing the cost of quality and when it doesn't make sense is where I think a lot of photogs lose business, like you said.
The only thing I think the OP would have to deal with printing on site is an unfamiliar setup. But like you said, prepare beforehand.
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