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Event Photography - Probably the best business in the world - part 5 of 1 2 3 4 5

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Again, space precludes my going into all the details of how and when to apply the various workflows but also again (to make yet another plug!) I would mention that everything is covered on the day-long training course.

Pricing your product is really your call as to how you view your market but generally only offer one price and one size of print at an event. Giving the customers too much choice just confuses them and makes the event a great deal more complicated for you than it need be. A good all-round price for a 9x6 print in a quality mount is £10.00. It is not too expensive, it gives a high perceived value and it is easy to count and give change. That being said, you should really charge whatever you can get away with and are comfortable with. After all, the customers are getting your skill, time and the use of all of your expensive equipment - don't undersell your pictures!

Talking about perceived value, you must always present your pictures in quality mounts - not cheap bits of cardboard, and never sell the pictures unmounted. An unmounted picture has very little perceived value compared with one in a quality mount and always put the picture in a clearface bag which, at little extra cost, adds to the perceived value and to your professionalism.

On the sales side you must always have a cash float suitable for your price structure and keep a cash-tin otherwise you will look like a markettrader putting wads of £10 notes in your back pocket! Also the ability to take credit cards is very useful as I have found it increases sales by about 10% to 15% when the choice at a dinner dance is to buy a picture or spend the last £20 on another couple of drinks!

All this information is of no use if you are going to sit around waiting for the phone to ring and your expensive equipment won't make you any money if it is gathering dust in the cupboard. Event photography is unlike wedding or portrait photography as people generally know what a wedding and portrait photographer does. Consequently a Yellow Pages advertisement will eventually get the phone to ring as people look round for prices and services. They still do not know that they need an event photographer so expensive advertising will not work in this market.

This is where you need to let your fingers do the walking and work out who it is that is likely to hold the type of events you want to photograph. Good sources for this information include Yellow Pages, local directories and local free papers or magazines. Also don't overlook typing 'charity ball Hampshire' or whatever into Google - it's amazing what you can find on the internet! Once you have found a potential source of business phone them up and tell them who you are and what you do, then follow the call up with a letter enclosing a sample of your work. We cover all of this in more detail on the training course (which I may have mentioned before!) but the basis of getting your events is down to active marketing and not passive advertising.

I hope that this article has whetted your appetite to get started in event photography. It is genuinely an exciting and lucrative business and, for the time being, there is more work out there than there are photographers to do it. You can't say that about many aspects of photography at the moment. I also can not think of any legitimate business where the profit margin is so high and where the equipment pays for itself in the first couple of jobs.

The hours are long and often inconvenient but the rewards are great both from a financial point of view and from the satisfaction in knowing you have done a great job. Many of the photographers who have

attended our training course have gone on to be very successful in the event photography field and I am very pleased when they take the time to phone us up to tell us about their latest event. Please have a look at System Insight's website at www.systeminsight.co.uk for a lot more information on dye-sub printing and event photography topics in general.

When you consider the amount of time a typical wedding takes (say 20 to 30 hours from first interview to delivering the album), the net income can be the same as you would make in one evening at a large dinnerdance or ball! That's a very good reason why event photography is probably the finest business in the world!

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