First Job, Help Needed!

C

Coo1eo

Member
Well guys! I just picked up my first Photography job & I found out about it with ONLY 2 days to prepare. My son's Swim Team is hosting their annual Championship meet this Saturday (Yes, Tomorrow) & the Photographer that normally works the meet cannot be there. Our team's coach asked me to do it yesterday. I have printed some Business Cards to hand out & I will have some of my work at swim meets on display, but I still have a couple things to prepare.

1) I am not quite sure what I should charge. Last year when I did it as a fundraiser for our team, I charged $1 for 4 x 6, $2 for 5 x 7 and $5 for 8 x 10. What do you guys think?

2) I think I will need to get a Web Release Form for parents to sign so I can upload the pictures for the parents to view. We are talking about 300 - 400 kids that will be participating in this swim meet. Does anyone have a form like this they wouldn't mind sharing?

3) I have not even set up my own website yet. Do you think it is OK to upload this many pictures to my Flickr site? I have a Pro account.

4) As far as keeping track of all these kids, I will have a spreadsheet that shows each heat along with the name of each child & what lane they will be swimming in. I plan to have someone sitting at a table pool side writing down the picture numbers next to each childs name as I take them. This way I can identify them later when the parents want to place an order.

5) As for payment, I do have a PayPal Account & figured I could have the parents just pay on there.

Any other tips or suggestions would be Greatly Appreciated. There are soooo many things to think of on such short notice. ; :-\ ; :o
 
Sounds like a great start and a wonderful opportunity. ; I might be a little more inclined to charge a little more for the photo's, though. ; Do you know what the other photographer normally charges? ; I wouldn't match his price, but maybe come in no less than half of what he charges. ; Your time, effort and energy is worth something. ; Plus, you need to make sure that the price you are charging is going to cover your costs of possibly printing these images, and even shipping them. ; There isn't a problem adding this many shots to your pro account, however, I might be inclined to go with a site like zenfolio (I use and like this one) or one of the others that will actually allow you to charge for your shots, right on their site. ; They will then be responsible for collecting, printing and shipping your photo's and they are usually printed professionally. ; Other then that, I think you have it all covered. ; Good luck, and let us know how it all goes for you.
 
imho

1. do not charge a lot less than the usual, or you'll find yourself a. selling your own work too cheap, b undercutting a pro, who if he or she feels your work is up to grade, may in the future need a backup/second shooter somewhere, that may pay some real money.don't burn that bridge behind you

2. control the printing, i have just started to get my first orders, i have disabled the print ordering option on my phanfare site, all prints must go through me, to ensure quality control, yes i'll have to charge a substantial bit more, but these will be high quality commercial prints
i don't want or need junk prints out there with my name on them

3.you def need a release form, parents absolutely freak these days about people taking kids pictures unless they are certain it's legit

4. if this can pan out, look into using a commercial hosting site, i use and like phanfare, lots of options, and takes full res jpegs, so it's yet another offsite backup, you can disable download, as i have done, so no one can steal your work, and you can make private/invitational only galleries, such as i do for family functions

5. paypal works fine for payment

6. keep those spreadsheets for reference, one of the advantages to having a lot of cards, is when i do the motorcycle races, i use seperate cards for practices, heats and features, i use my xti body set up with flash and 50mm 1.4, all dialed in, just for victory lane photos, i just keep it at the trophy table in the infield and run over there, when needed
 
Well, I decided to go with Zenfolio for now seeing as I needed to do something quick due to the short time frame I am working with. My site is: ; 8) http://cooleo.zenfolio.com/ ; 8) here. I have set a price list created a Watermark, created a couple empty galleries for now & set most all preferences as needed. I like the fact that you can set a restriction so no one can download the images. Starting tomorrow evening, I should begin uploading a bunch of images. I have also created a Business card & I have several of my images from previous meets that I will have on display tomorrow. I still need to come up with a Web Release form. Any suggestions, templates that anyone might have to share? Thanks for the feedback guys.
 
Well, it turns out the day went pretty well yesterday. There were 8 teams in the meet which accounted for approximately 500 swimmers. I ended up shooting just over 1,00 pics & have decided to keep around 650 of these. Having the spreadsheet sure made the whole process much smoother than I anticipated. I got my wife set up with a chair alongside the pool & I would just call out the last picture number along with the lane to her & she would log it onto the spreadsheet. This way, I can just put a seperate gallery for each team on my website so that it will be much easier for parents to find their child's pictures. I have gotten everything sorted & should start getting the pics onto the site by tomorrow. hope to have them all up by Tuesday or Wednesday at latest.
 
I am a little late to this party and I am happy it all went well. Ones first job is always exciting.

In my area we have discussed internet posting of minors with the local police and FED personnel on the Children Exploitation Task Forces and they suggest sites that are strictly controlled with passwords that only parents can get from you and you only. So many perverts out there today with so many fetishes. YUK!

A few years ago when I was still in youth sports (glad that's over but HS Sports still have a lot of parent issues too, OMG!) we have an outfit which was really good at capturing not only the action, but the expressions and downtime on the sideline at our football games.

She set up at the games with samples and left a rep at the table. She shot each game and then printed thumbnails after each game (we had 6 games a day) for parents to see. If you wanted to see a bigger shot before ordering then she also had a monitor to review them on. You filled out a form and paid and she sent the photos to you or brought them to the next game. She also offered custom framing with the kids numbers and other items in the matting etc. No releases were necessary.

The only time releases are really necessary is if you selling them to someone other than the parents. Technically if their in a public place their fair game. ; Now if I did not know our organization gave this particular outfit the OK, I would be a little suspicious. We have a "pro" who now shows up at our HS games and he will hand out cards. He also shoots surfers and post them all on his site for anyone to view and offer to buy. That's the point he needs a release if the purchaser is not the person in the photograph or the guardian.

Remember once they are publicly posted on the internet they are out there for ever.

All thru the season I had parent asking to buy my pictures. I told them I was volunteering as the team's photographer and did not feel right selling them. They were supposed to be for the schools website etc. Our board is terrible and the webmasters could not link to flickr and complained later all my photos had watermarks so they never posted them on the schools website. So I decided what shots I wanted the parents to have and made Cd's with 25-30 photos per game with 2 games per CD and sold them for $5 per disk just to cover my costs. If I was there under the auspices as a business I would have never gave my work away, but as a volunteer I felt I could not sell them. Maybe this year the booster club will get their act together and at least sell them as a fundraiser.
 
Thanks to all for the feedback. Things have progressed well & it looks like I may be getting a couple more small jobs soon as a result of doing this one. I really do want to set this up so that the images will be restricted to being viewed only by those that need to see them. Fortunately my website does have that capability.
 
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