Do you shoot?

I've thought about it. Honestly, I've got too much on my plate right now to make it worth my while but, if I were doing it, I would charge based on what I thought my value would be. If it were something where I could get one parent to be interested, I'd charge for the one assignment. But if it's something where I thought I could get multiple parents on board, I'd charge for prints.
I've got a colleague whose grown quite the lucrative business doing this. He started by just shooting a couple of events for our newspaper and then slowly turned it into picking up games here and there until now he's the official photographer for the state's high school sports association. The money for him isn't in selling photos because most people only want a small 4x6 or something. Where he gets the money is in the webhits for his photos and in turn selling ads. He just dropped $8K this week on equipment so he must be doing pretty well for himself. lol

 

I took pics at my wife cousin's kid's pop warner Super Bowl game. Since he was only I a handful of plays, I shot the whole game and put the photos up on a Flickr site with my contact info. Charged cheap prices, but my printer told me this - whatever it costs to print, triple that (at least) for your prices. I charge $4 per 4x6 and 6 per 5x7 and go from there. If someone wanted you to shoot a game, I'd charge minimum $75 to show up.

 

What lens do you use to shoot football?

 

Yes I do. It hasn't worked for me -- been largely a waste of time and money. I estimate I've spent about $500 for the photo website and advertising (that, of course, doesn't factor in all the photo equipment). I've brought in probably half that. Prices vary for products, but I've discovered selling wallets for $4.50 doesn't add up.

There have been varying factors to my lack of success. First is competition -- there are full-time photographers in my area that were set up before I came along. About half the schools around here have contracts with certain photographers as well, so that pretty much eliminates any chance for me to sell anything to people from those schools. Most (though I don't think all) of those photographers are better than I at both shooting and editing/design (as in they create a bunch of special poster and stuff that they sell).

I haven't promoted it that much, either. And it's at the bottom of my priorities list -- I have plenty of other things that keep me busy most days.

 

Have you thought of charging $50 to shot a game for a family?

 

Suit breezing through office: Run that one column, with the girls celebrating cut off at about the waist. That way we save space and the page isn't cluttered up with crying girls. I know the crying ones aren't area kids, but someone would complain. Bad PR.
Also make sure your writer gets all the names in. Grandparents love that.
Heading home now, but let me know if you need more help.

 

Yeah, you say that in jest but a couple of years ago Rhody and I got into a discussion about a very similar photo and one of the people there argued we shouldn't run it because there was a sad girl in it. How did we comply? Ran it HUGE. It won Rhody a state award.
Coincidentally, neither of us are at that paper anymore but I can tell you, without a shadow of a doubt, that if we were and we had this photo, we would run it huge. And if we were covering the losing team in this pic, the publisher in charge there now would more likely than now tell us we couldn't run it.
Luckily, the place I work at now is awesome so I don't think that will be an issue.

 

An 80-200 2.8 that I'm borrowing from the photo studio I freelance for and, hopefully, a 300 mm 2.8 that I need to get fixed this summer. Bought it for $200 off my old company after they fired me. Needs about $700 in repair work.

 

Thanks, Rhody.

 

That's not a bad price 1.) If you can get it, 2.) If you don't have to do (much) editing and 3.) If you don't care about having a day off.
I know you might think a two-hour game isn't a huge inconvenience but if you keep taking assignments that don't pay well on your days off, even if it is a one or two-hour job here or there, you'll eventually hate the fact that you're working every day and not making much from it.
I mean, if you like shooting sports it can be fun but eventually $50 isn't going to cut it.

 

You charge $50 just to show up.
After that, you charge per pic.

 

If I'm laying out that page it goes 5 or 6 columns! Really fine shot!!!