Senior Portraits

[Izzy]

I am once again thinking about getting back into senior portraits. They are about the easiest subject I have ever done and generally fun.

Back when I did them before I did 3 different packages with different promised picture numbers. IE 100,150,200. All pictures were retouched a little, nothing serious. Got it down to about 2 minutes a photo. In the end I provided the pictures on a CD and 4X6 proofs with open copyright to print and gave them a list of reputable printers. I would say that 3 in 10 were real poppers.

I did this because the "Joey wants 100 wallets" has never been a part of the biz I was interested in. I will get interested should I ever get work into galleries.

Keep in mind that usually "Joey" was the one paying for his own senior portraits. Raping him on the cost just did not seem fair. Besides people smile more when they feel they are getting a great deal.

I usually sold these packages at about $2 a print and kept image files for one year less stuff that went into advertising. The key here is volume and doing my best to not repeat a shot all year.


MY QUESTION - Is there anything that you can think of to improve this? The base model I will not change as I hate being a digital packrat and Joey's pictures are in fact not safe on a cd forever so I would have to house them on yet more hardware. I do warn them of this and provide multiple cds to share with friends and family. Redundancy can beat the weakest media.

[Izzy]

I think maybe the first thing I should cut the numbers of promised prints down and stop working so hard.

[Brian Mullins]

Izzy.. to be honest probably the best thing you can do is to stop offering digital copies and show only the best work either online or (preferably) during a viewing session - then sell by print only. Wedding photography (which I also do) is pretty standard (now) to get the images on DVD but for portraits, including the digital files is a good way to loose money.

I understand that you don't want to rape your customers on pricing however its your time, effort and talent that are being used and that HAS to be worth something. The reason people come to professional photographers is not only the initial photo, it's to get professional quality finishing, prints and other products.

I know this likely isn't what you wanted to hear but, if you like, I can PM you some sales statistics from "after" I decided to move to a print model and compare it to what I had "before".