Selling photos

I'm thinking about selling photos of action shots from some local high school games for a little extra cash. I have high-quality photo and printing equipment. I printed out an 8x10 glossy of a photo I recently took just to experiment and it came out really good. I think there's a lot of parents that would jump at the chance to buy a large, quality glossy print of their son or daughter, especially if I could keep the cost low. I was thinking of making a website and putting them all in albums and they could order right from the site.

Has anybody ever tried this or know someone who has? Any advice, suggestions, etc? Think this would work or am I crazy?? Much appreciated.

 

Is this for you or your publication?

If you're shooting these on company time you may be prevented from selling them for personal gain.

 

No I'm strictly a freelancer right now. No employer.

 

A friend of mine is a free-lance photog and makes good money doing this.
He also has "deals" with some local high schools to shoot sub-varsity games and sell them to parents.

 

Yeah I'll actually be busy stringing at varsity games on Fridays so I figured I could hit up JV games on Thursdays for photos. Not planning on getting rich off of this but anything will help right now. Plus my production cost will be quite low. I'm kind of surprised there isn't more of this kind of thing and was wondering if there was any reason why. For all of us that have worked at small town newspapers, we know how crazy parents can be at times. It's those same crazy parents that will buy photos of their kids like hotcakes.

 

A nice-quality shot of game action of my kid in a JV game? I'd pay ten bucks for that. He was on the OL, so my point-and-click shots were for shit.

 

Yeah I see a lot of parents at games trying to get shots with little hand-held digital cams that just aren't made for that sort of thing. I have a newspaper-quality camera with different size lenses so I figure I may as well have it at least pay for itself.

 

I do this and I instead of trying to handle the orders, process the prints and ship, I use PhotoStockPlus.com.

I set the price of the prints and do pretty well, even selling 8x10's for $3-4. The margin is very high!

I've seen other photog's selling 8x10's for $10-15, so parents love seeing something under $5.

The best thing about PhotoStockPlus...there is a great upload tool that will simply pull a thumbnail version of your pic and when there is an order, you open the tool and click "start upload." It will upload the hi-res image and you are done.

It's very simple.

 

why even bother with the glossy prints? let them purchase the digital image and then they could male their own prints if they want.

 

Because unless you lock that image somehow they would have the ability to make prints and give them to other friends or family, meaning you lose money.

One option for that is to offer the digital image to them at a high price.

 

I plan to "watermark" the images on the website (have a big word like "SAMPLE" across the middle to deter thievery). The only problem is that I have no idea how to estimate the cost of ink. I guess eventually I'll get an idea for how many I can print before my cartridges begin to run out.

In any case, I think I'll sell them for $5.

At both newspapers I worked at we sold glossy prints of photos that we took but it was never too popular. I think the $10-12 price may have contributed to that.

One person on here said they would gladly pay for an 8x10 glossy of an action shot of their kid. Anybody else with kids willing to second that notion??

 

you don't lose money do you don't have. sell the digital file and save on the cost of prints and the postage of sending prints. make it as easy as possible for more parents and you make up the difference of multiple prints by selling to more customers. and it's a lot easier on your end, too. not near as much to keep up with.