Selling images at an event - Settings and advice help please :)

[martinslade]

This is a new project for the summer and would appreciate any tips or advice from anyone with experience doing this sort of thing.

There are 2 of us taking photos of an inflatable floating assault coarse and selling to participants afterwards. There are groups of 5-12 people starting at a time with a 20-30min interval. The course takes 30-40mins typically so there can be 2 groups on the apparatus at the same time.

We can get close enough from the banks to get portraits and can move around most of the set. We have a laptop in the bar lounge with a 50 inch screen and hope to sell full sets of jpegs to each group on a 1gb memory stick which will hold up to 285 medium res images.

We have a Canon 70D + sigma 120-300 f2.8 OS and a Canon 80D + 55-250mm STM. We are thinking of shooting RAW+M2(jpeg) and will sell the jpegs which are about 3.5mb each straight out of camera with no editing or cropping. Are there any in camera presets we can use to help especially in extreme sun or grey cloud or rain..?

Are there any flaws in our plan... or just some pointers... thanks

 

[Jim Saunders]

Get a grey card and set your white balance from it, each time the light changes. Do the best you can with your composition to capture the emotion of the moment, that's the valuable part of the day. Add light if you can.

Jim

 

[martinslade]

Get a grey card and set your white balance from it, each time the light changes. Do the best you can with your composition to capture the emotion of the moment, that's the valuable part of the day. Add light if you can.

Jim

Thanks Jim, the grey card should really help, especially with all the bright colours. I been experimenting with Canon’s Auto Lighting Optimiser as we're shooting jpegs and it looks useful for lifting shadows and preserving highlights in camera. We're still working out the best way to monetise as they are group shots and still considering selling full set of jpegs on a memory stick vs printing on the day. The former means a group consensus that may be problematic. Any thoughts..?

 

[martinslade]

We have been photographing this event over the past few weeks and things are going quite well. One of the biggest challenges is sorting out images for people to see. Initially we were hoping for individual groups to be starting the course with a 15-20min gap but it’s not happening that way. Usually 2-4 groups start at the same time and although it’s possible to concentrate on one group at a time, inevitably interesting thing occur at different points of the course so images from different groups often get mixed in the time line. This means that after about 30mins 2 SD cards get loaded to the PC and may or may not get sorted into groups depending on time pressure. There is often congestion as previous groups want to see their slide show and make a purchase when there are new images to be sorted. It can get quite hectic. Sorting of images often starts well but by half way through the day we are often unable to sort into individual groups and will show all the images of the 2-4 groups starting at the same time to members of those groups. Parents watching images of other people’s kid is not ideal and may be detrimental to sales. Any thoughts on this or possible quick solutions or higher investment solutions would be welcome… thanks