On 10/26/2011 12:46 PM, frank theriault wrote:
I'm in the process of starting a part time photography business. Here's the idea: You've got a kid in Little League baseball, minor league hockey, high school football, soccer, whatever. For a fee, I show up with cameras in hand and take hundreds of game photos, concentrating on your kid. It doesn't have to be your kid, it can be anyone you want to pay me to photograph. Then I take the best of them, we look through the proofs and you choose which ones you want have prints made of. I guess it would be a bit like what Dave Brooks used to do at horsie shows except rather than take the photos and try to sell them, I'd be paid in advance to take the pix (my fee would include one free 8x10, after that you'd pay per print - I'd say my retail plus 50% is realistic, but I wouldn't tell the clients that).
If you don't process the photos, or you don't value your time.
I've done a bit of research and no one else in town provides this exact service, near as I can tell. There are guys and gals doing sports photography, but they'll do a whole team and charge like $2000. Or, they'll do something similar to Dave where they shoot an event, post the pix and parents are invited to look online and order the prints which are then mailed to them by some printing service in the USA. So, this would be a more individualized and customized arrangement, where I'd concentrate on a single player over the course of an event so the person(s) who hired me could choose from hundreds of photos.
You'll sell more if you give them fewer photos to choose from. The problem is, narrowing it down takes time.
My question is: What does anyone think I should charge for that one time (up front!) fee? I'm just starting out, so I can't go too high, but I also don't want to look like some amateur hack by underpricing. I will be able to show the baseball pix I took this summer along with a few other events in my on-line ad, but I don't have a web site so I'm not going to look terribly professional as it is. If this thing goes well, a more professional presentation will be invested in. I won't tell anyone what I'm thinking my fee range is just yet, so as not to skew answers. I'll be most interested to hear what you have to say.
That depends on whether you are treating this as a business, or as a hobby that generates enough money to buy a few beers now and then.
I figured out that if I wanted to make my living at photography, I had to bill my time shooting at $100/hour, which would work out to about $20 per hour if you include setup, teardown, transportation, sorting, processing etc. That's not looking at the time spent marketing.
I'd guess that $200 to shoot a game would be a bit closer to "beer money" than "making a living". You could do something like $200 for the first kid, $100 for the second, $75 for each up to 5 and $1000 for the team.
My nominal price for 8x10s is $20 for the first one, with discounts for multiple prints of each one.
Thanks in advance for your input!! cheers, frank
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