It was 2:45 am and I was wide awake. Before bed the night before I had written down a list of all things I need to get done each day for the next week and a half. It was a little overwhelming. On days like this I frequently wake up between 2-3 and have trouble going back to sleep. Usually I find it is best to just get up, knock one thing off my list, then go back to bed. So tonight, I'm counting ponies, not sheep.
Saturday I took pictures at a Princess Pony Birthday Party. So I had lots of pony pictures and most of them were individual pictures of the kids from the party riding the ponies. I had offered to the mom to show her a picture of each kid and if she wanted to I could give her a discount rate on 4x6s if she just wanted to order one of each kid for their thank you cards...which she thought was a great idea.
Now, normally it takes me a while to proof because I like to fine tune each image but in this case, I only did adjustments in lightroom to enhance the color of each image and I used lightroom to also create the proof site that I can send to the mom to OK the prints. This needed to be a down and dirty activity because I wasn't going to make the same money on these prints as on a the portraits or even other birthday party pictures. And because I needed to turn around time to be much faster due to the urgency to get the prints made for thank you notes.
Some days I wonder if I should stop offering the birthday party packages. I know I don't charge enough for the actual time it takes me. But, I have found it is a great way to network for clients, and I almost always have decent add-on sales from the party. There is one circle of friends whom I've taken pictures of four of their birthday parties - it seems now I'm in their network and I expect that'll pay off!
So there you have it..a random thought at 3:25 am. Back to sleep for me...counting ponies.
Lightroom is a great tool to reduce your time investment and increase your per-hour profitability. I have found it has really made my on-camera results more consistent as well - I guess seeing all of my shots together makes me more aware in future shooting of exposure variation and things like horizons.
Posted by: Dennis Murray | February 18, 2008 at 06:27 AM