A while back I made a thread about doing event photography.  The rodeo area didn't work out that well, rodeo people are cheap and wait until the year is up to buy photos.

Last weekend an organizer called and asked if I wanted to do figure skating. It's definitely not my forte, but I said sure. Ended up taking photos all day Saturday and then sat with my laptop and printer Sunday. I took about 17,000 photos. On Sunday I made $800 cash and $362 in cheques. Which I think is ok, I was aiming for making about 2-3 thousand though. The lineup was 1.5 hours long and I know I lost quite a bit of sales because people didn't want to sit in line for that long, my plan is to buy 2-4 computers for people to use. Also with my Canon Pro-1 the prints were really slow, I will be upgrading to 2-3 dye sub printers if I continue doing this. People were complaining they had to wait an hour for prints, which is what they would have to wait for someone to develop them, I think people just like to complain.

My prices were $8 for 4x6, $10 for 5x7 and $20 for a 8.5x11.

Holy crap.  Camera still smokin'?  





 

haha nah, My Laptop hard drive was full and I had 9 memory cards full though. 500 Gb of photos.

I truely wish you the best with this effort. A friend and I tried and just never got the sales where they needed to be. We had multiple terminals, an on side dye sub printer etc. we had tons of looky loos and always a few kids who just snapped pics off the screens with their phones but it was a ton of work for about $10/hr. PLUS we were burning our camera bodies up. Make sure you spend a few minutes working out organizing the shots so people can find the shots they are interested in rather than trying to scan thru thousands of shots.

Our most profitable item was a DVD of all our pics of a given player.

Thanks. I think when I take the photos I will have my laptop sitting right there and keep switching cards and uploading to the folders. That way it will all be organized and I will spend less time. I plan on running 3 laptops connected to a router that is connected to a hard drive. That way I only have to upload to one hard drive. The USBs, internet and dvd drive will be disabled. I still have more orders coming in, so right now I am looking at $50+ gross, which isn't bad. I will look into the DVDs, I didn't want to slow my computer down too much burning a dvd. How much did you charge per DVD? I was thinking $50-75 each.

I ordered 2 DNP DS40 dye sub printers one set up for 4x6 and one set up for 5x7. Going to get 3 laptops, router and a NAS hard drive this week.

This weekend I am doing a hockey tournament, I think between each period I will upload the photos to the hard drive. Between games catch up on orders.

When we did team events where all the parents could go in together and buy a DVD of all the team shots of a tournament we charged $300 per disk. We did scale it so if a team got knocked out early the parents paid less since they were getting less photos.  We did have to contend with parents with nice cameras so the event organizers gave us preferred access and helped enforce it. We gave them a percentage of sales so it kept them motivated to help us.

I did a hockey tournament today, it went ok. Took over an hour to get my dye sub printers to work. I have to run everything through lightroom now. After that the printers were super fast, I might be getting the bigger one soon.

The laptop screens were no where close to what I see on my macbook pro. I might return them and get desktop computers. I think it might have hindered my sales some.
I ended up doing better than the figure skating competition. A lot of people loved my collages.

Once I get my table cloths it will look a lot better. My setup at todays hockey tournament.

So I did a dance competition two weekends ago. There were 880 dancers and I took about 40,000 photos. It was 5 days of standing on a aluminum sawhorse taking photos, next year I will get a platform to sit on. I switched my set up around, I bought 4 mac minis and 4 23" monitors since the laptop's screens sucked. I bought photo cart from www.picturespro.com and hosted it on my laptop so everyone could view my photos and have an online form instead of writing each image number down.

Everything worked great until my laptop died. Then I couldn't run any computers or edit photos. I ended up buy a new Macbook Pro, found out I couldn't swap my old hard drive into my new laptop and that you need special pentalobe screwdriver to pull the cover off of a new Macbook pro.

Next on the list is to buy more MacMinis and monitors. Probably 4-8 of each. I am setting my enclosed trailer for people to view photos in during summer events, I would like to take baseball tournament photos this summer and maybe track and field.

What are you using to store all the pictures that the laptops have access to?

What do you do with all the pictures after the event?

Are you shooting raw?  Can't imagine 40k raw images, especially if taken with something like a D800 or larger MP camera.

I am using a 4 TB external hard drive with Thunderbolt to keep all of my original photos. Seagate backup plus with Thunderbolt

My server(which is my laptop currently) processes my basic small jpeg into thumbnails and zoom photos. So I keep all the thumbnails and preview photos on my server hard drive. The other computers access these photos just like a normal website. (I have my website online right now, just the photocart though.)

I keep all the photos after my event. People are still asking me and ordering photos from the start of winter.

I shoot raw and basic small jpeg with my D4 for this event. I needed ISO ~10,000 and my D800 does not take that great of photos at that ISO.

You must have a $100 bill printing press.

Yep, let's keep that our little secret though.