A few basic business things do help… acting like a business person, being professional, being on time, always delivering on time, tracking orders and payments very well, and guaranteeing that they’ll love your photos or they don’t have to pay. But it’s tricky. And I find that today, people are fine with an average snapshot for free (taken on their cell phone!), compared to an amazing photo for $10… You just have to find the niche’ where people appreciate great shots and you can give them good value.

He was a great kid and I love to see that kind of initiative and entrepreneurship (and he took nice photos to boot!). I wish him well.

Here was our conversation:

i’m the photographer

of monroe high school i dont know if you remember me.

You bet… I enjoyed looking at your photos, and it was impressive that you’ve already had photos published!

i can take any picture but i need more expirience in this jobbecause in this work is easier to find problems that take a picture.I’m taking pictures in the volleyball games in the school and i sell the photos to save money to buy the camera I want
but the people do not take me seriously and do not like pay me

Yes, that’s a big issue. Even when I sold photos to friends, they sometimes thought they should just get them all for free. Tough issue. I totally believe in being nice and giving lots away, but then you spend lots of money on the camera and lots of time taking the photos.
Maybe what you could do is offer to the parents something like this… for $20 (or whatever you think is fair & they’ll pay) you’ll take lots of photos at a few games, really focusing on their child and then you’ll just give them the photos on CD. That way they totally know up front there is a cost, but that you really are working for them, not just taking a lucky snapshot and trying to sell them something… If you have 3 or 4 parents do that per season, it could be worthwhile.

Or maybe even go further and say you’ll get one nice portrait of them in their game clothes after a game, and that’s part of the package… maybe throw in a print or something. I don’t know… but the idea is… what can you do to make it so much more than the parent can do themselves and it’s worth some money to them.
And if you are making money this way, make sure they are getting tons more than they expect, and if you just can’t get good photos of their kid… don’t charge them and give them what you take for free. Maybe that can be your guarantee.
Maybe go to the first game of the season and give away all of those shots, or share them on Facebook in smaller sizes… that’s good free advertising, and people can see you take good photos, and aren’t *just* out for the money, you are willing to share.
So that’s one idea. After you get enough money, you can use online labs like Smugmug.com and sell prints for more than they cost you… but there’s usually a yearly cost to do that. Also check out Printroom.com… see if either of them have smaller yearly plans for free.
Or maybe you could try this… print all the nice shots from a few games… post them for free on facebook, Flickr, etc and tell your friends they can grab them for free… but that you’ll have prints in school for $1 per 4×6 (or whatever)… or you print them up ahead of time, and just have all the 4×6’s. That’s what I did. Had them all with me… sold them pretty cheap per print. At the end of the season you can give the extras to the coach or yearbook.

and I do not like that because nobody in that school can take picture as
which I take. i think – I do not think myself better than anyone thats whay

I need advice about working in this business.

thanks    

It’s good you know you do a good job. Look at lots of photos and what good photographers do and keep improving. But deep inside, knowing you are good will help a lot in tough times.
I’ll post this question to my blog (without your name of course) so other students can learn as well.

Keep it up and shout with any more questions…

I’ve been fortunate to be involved in this event for over 5 years and it just keeps getting better. It is hosted by Danny and Stenci Wegman and each year the money donated goes to fun two things… one is specific department at the Med Center, and the other project is a community-wide health need. This year’s URMC department was the burn and trauma center, and the community project was to fund special emergency room beds. What a great time for a good cause.

BTW, check it out HERE.

And that means that I’m moving a bunch of shoots off of the home page to their client page… So here’s the list of them in case you’d like a peek at the events & many have slide shows:

• Harley Commencement 2009. I posted some fun shots on Facebook HERE

• For JPMorgan Chase: 3 views of the wet and wonderful Corporate Challenge 2009. ••Photos from Rochester & Buffalo HERE

• ‘Fences’ @ Geva Theatre. • Slide show HERE • All Photos HERE

• Wilmot Cancer Center’s Discovery Ball. Slideshow of great shots HERE

• The Harley School BLAST   was a blast back to the 50’s with Sky Sands MCing the Auction. •• Coolest shots HERE

• Everyone got the Red Carpet Paparazzi treatment at the Eastman House Oscars Party •• Great slideshow HERE

• Sweeney Todd at Geva is a dark comedy/tragedy and amazinly well crafted. Favorite Images • HERE

• RIT’s Father-Daughter Dance was wonderful. All Photos • HERE

• FIRST Robotics Rochester Regional Rolls on. Gallery HERE or see my FaceBook.

• For the George Eastman House opening of TruthBeauty. • • Event Slideshow HERE

URMC A Toast to Your Health Wine Auction: A really amazing night!

I’ve been fortunate to be involved in this event for over 5 years and it just keeps getting better. It is hosted by Danny and Stenci Wegman and each year the money donated goes to fun two things… one is specific department at the Med Center, and the other project is a community-wide health need. This year’s URMC department was the burn and trauma center, and the community project was to fund special emergency room beds. What a great time for a good cause.

I was just running the numbers on how wildly popular my web site for the RIT Reunion Photos was this year. We create a custom web site for the event and upload to it live all weekend. Here are some of the numbers.

So you understand… we have two things:
The Reunion Photo Site that people visited first as the home page, then the Photo Galleries themselves (on another site).

(photo by Natalie Best… see web site linked below)

And the photo gallery site stats are pretty impressive:
A total of almost 322,000 photos from the event were viewed.

What was most popular (rounded)?

107,000 President’s Ball Candids
62,600 Ball Couples & Elvis with Couples
52,000 Campus Receptions & PM Candids
48,000 Hockey Event & Receptions
29,000 Athletic Reunions

It’s hard to quantify just how huge this event was… But on just one day the Reunion Photo Site  served 1.22 Gigabytes of material.

This is the main photo site, not including the photo galleries with the big photos… but just the small stuff on the home page of the photo site.

That’s 15 times the volume that people normally see on my entire, main photo site in a day.

The photo galleries served 27.2 Gigs of photos total since they were put up.

Where did they come from?
1700 came from RIT.edu
400 from Facebook: This is the big news.

I can’t promise those were all RIT people… but Facebook didn’t even show up on my incoming links list last month… so I’d guess it’s mostly RIT.
The rest would have been directly coming to the site via the cards we gave out and notes in our slideshow at the Ball, etc.

So I’ve got to say, I’m really excited about the impact of our HuthPhoto Web Event. And the web site stays up for at least a year, continuing to be viewed by visitors. I’ve even see some of our web slide shows from events googling higher than the client’s official web site. What a great way to promote next year’s event, by using the previous year’s photo galleries, web site or slide show.

Thanks to everyone involved in making this happen!
Rob Grow and Kelly Redder @ RIT Alumni have given me free reign over the past 5 years to create this idea.
Peggy Glitch, Rachel Pikus and the other staff work to get it all linked up and promoted to Alumni.

Bob Finnerty at RIT News Services gives us massive play with a prominent link to the photos on the main RIT homepage (this is *critical* by the way, if you do this for your events!)

And my amazing photo team that helped cover over 17 events for 4 days:

Brady Dillsworth
Natalie Best
Richard Baker

I was looking at the photos you took for our production of ELEGIES at Nazareth. They came out great (as usual!)……I was thinking of putting together a slideshow of sorts for our Dean, chairperson, and our tiny cast…..What do you suggest? Slide.com? or something like that?

Thanks! And Happy New Year!

….Don

Here’s what I suggested…

For a computer show:

If you have access to a Mac, this is great software for easy photo shows… Boinx Software’s PhotoPresenter.It’s only $20. It has tons of slideshow templates from clean and classy to tacky, so you’ll have plenty of options… Just choose wisely, young Jedi!
To get really fancy and do a pro-level show with everything timed and all, they make ‘Fotomagico‘, which I love and use for client work. You can output to iPod or DVD as well as play from the laptop. So I’m totally backed up in case of hardware failure… just play it from my iPhone or a DVD.

When I’m doing something very text-heavy and with photos, I uses Apple’s Keynote. Before I found PhotoPresenter, the easiest thing was just using Apple’s iPhoto. It’s free on all Macs. At the lower left of the iPhoto window is a ‘Play’ button to play any album as a slideshow… that creates a show that you can view immediately or tweak the settings on.
If you are on the PC side, I’m not really sure… I know lots of folks just use PowerPoint, which does the job, but isn’t very elegant or user-friendly for shows. Just stay away for cheesy transitions.

For a web-based show:

Slide.com is nice if the goal is a small Flash slideshow on the ‘Net. Very easy to learn. Lots of options. It’s grab your photos from Flickr and other sites. Watch out for cheesy templates.

But for doing bigger web slide shows, having more display options (and some shows with real class), I like JAlbum. It is designed for posting web galleries and shows. It’s donation-ware, and I liked it enough to pay. It’s available for Mac, Win, Linux, etc.

You download the software, then the ’skins’ which are the different ways to present the images (gallery of thumbnail images, or slideshows, etc).
Autoviewer  is a standard on the ‘Net and PostcardViewer  is fun. PhotoStack  would also be good for a big slideshow online. Just check out the online examples of the ‘most downloaded’ and the ‘highest rated’ skins and you’ll see the ones I mentioned.
You would have to invest a bit more time to learn the JAlbum settings (or find a geek actor to help). If you wanted to do lots of this sort of thing, learning JAlbum is pretty easy and really worthwhile. And once you get the settings where you like, you can save that as your default.

PS- for anyone using Apple’s Aperture, what I do most often is just use the Flash Album Exporter plug-in. They also have an iPhoto version, but sadly, the developer isn’t working on it any more, so someday it’ll break. Hopefully someone else will create a similar plug in. It’s great to create and export a Flash show right from Aperture.

Hope that helps everyone in creating shows… send me a link when you create something cool!
Cheers for your ‘09!Ken

FYI: I don’t want to argue with lawyers, but I’ll just give you my understanding of it… just my opinion, don’t sue me

They always say that photo rights are on a sliding scale of ‘Location’ and ‘Usage’… the more public the location and the more ‘news’ the usage, the more clear the ability to do what you want with the photo. The more private the location and the more ‘advertising’ the use, the more you need signed permission. You have to decide on how far the balance is tipped in each situation.

This is pretty consistent with what my clients do. At the biggest college I work for, we don’t get photo release permission forms on anything during Reunion. And those photos go up in several online galleries.
We do get them when I photograph in a hospital (no surprise… not ‘public’, very private and with HIPAA rules) and I’m sure the Marketing team gets them for the Billboards and ads (which I don’t take the photos for).

What shots don’t need releases?

There is a point where the group is large enough in a photo, that a release isn’t expected. If it’s a very public event, and a very wide shot of the crowd with no real main subject focus, you would be less apt to be told to get a photo release for fairly ’safe’ uses, like promoting the event next year, etc.

And let’s not forget the classic ‘no faces showing’ option, where people are only seen from behind. When done well, you don’t even think about it.

(in this photo, the only face showing is a staff member)

But the lawyers!

It’s totally possible that lawyers might say that you must have every single photo released before using it in any fashion… but that would be crazy and impossible to do on a large scale event. But a lawyer’s job is to play it super-safe and they may not think through the implications.

I’d estimate that getting permissions would cut the number of photos by a factor of 10 and add one or two workers to follow me. Imagine getting the form from every subject in groups taken on the run. I’d be holding things up and being a pest. Really, I’d just have to focus at each event on 2 or 3 good shots, and not get the other 20 things I get. And that becomes a decision you’d have to make.

We did releases once for a brochure (so it was marketing use, not news), at a very public event and it was so crazy, I’d think twice before doing it again… or more likely would change what I attempted to do… and for that shoot, I had 2 helpers getting forms signed.

Hope that helps explain the difficulties of a system of having every photo taken having a signed release at every public event.