Your thoughts: Is this an opportunity?

FerociousDave

Hello all,

Just looking for some advice really. I'm looking for a secondary income in photography and hopefully moving towards making that more 50/50, if you see what I mean. So I was looking around and came across this website:
http://www.myeventphoto.co.uk/

Which is offering 'opportunities' for photographers. I sent them an email saying I might be interested and they sent me some details back. I suppose I'm just asking whether you think this is a decent proposition or not?

You (I) pay them £50 for the booking. Then you go to the thing, photograph it, and after your costs whatever you make is profit. Kind of. You see, that's the deal for any sales you do on the day

Because the other bit is that you send them a DVD with photos on afterwards and they upload them to their website. Any sales from their website they get 60%, I get 40% (but they pay all costs).

So, any opinions? I guess the most money would be made from selling as much as possible on the day, but this would mean some investment in equipment. I'll have to research that?

Thanks in advance!
D

edit: Also, as you can see by my signature, I'm not in the best financial position at the moment!

MORPH3US

Hi mate,

Not sure if this is any good at all, but check out:

https://www.picturenation.co.uk

its a new site that I stumbled on a while back - because its new its not got so many users so you won't make a million any time soon, but could bring in a bit of extra £££

M

motorguy

FerociousDave wrote:

Hello all,

Just looking for some advice really. I'm looking for a secondary income in photography and hopefully moving towards making that more 50/50, if you see what I mean. So I was looking around and came across this website:
http://www.myeventphoto.co.uk/

Which is offering 'opportunities' for photographers. I sent them an email saying I might be interested and they sent me some details back. I suppose I'm just asking whether you think this is a decent proposition or not?

You (I) pay them £50 for the booking. Then you go to the thing, photograph it, and after your costs whatever you make is profit. Kind of. You see, that's the deal for any sales you do on the day

Because the other bit is that you send them a DVD with photos on afterwards and they upload them to their website. Any sales from their website they get 60%, I get 40% (but they pay all costs).

So, any opinions? I guess the most money would be made from selling as much as possible on the day, but this would mean some investment in equipment. I'll have to research that?

Thanks in advance!
D

edit: Also, as you can see by my signature, I'm not in the best financial position at the moment!

Can you elaborate a bit on this 'You (I) pay them £50 for the booking. Then you go to the thing, photograph it, and after your costs whatever you make is profit. Kind of. You see, that's the deal for any sales you do on the day'

How do you make your money?

MORPH3US

I think he pays them £50 as kind of a referral fee and then once he has photographed whatever it is, the people who requested the photographs can buy them off the OP so he makes his money by selling the photographs...

M

FerociousDave

pgilc1 wrote:

Can you elaborate a bit on this 'You (I) pay them £50 for the booking. Then you go to the thing, photograph it, and after your costs whatever you make is profit. Kind of. You see, that's the deal for any sales you do on the day'

How do you make your money?

Sorry, it is still a bit garbled isn't it?

You can make money two ways: -
1. You sell your prints there and then on the day. This would mean investing in a decent printer (about £350) but it does mean that you have the flexibility to set prices there and then, and wooing people with your wonderful sales banter. You get to keep everything after costs.

2. After the event, you send the photos to the company who upload them to their website. If anyone buys a print from the website you get 40% of what they pay. The advantage to this is that there are no real costs. The disadvantage is that you get a small cut.

So, I imagine this is a typical scenario. A ball organiser rings up the company who offer you the job. You pay them £50 to do it. You go to the ball and take photos of people as they are going into the ball. After that you could leave and make all of your money by method 2. Or you could have a laptop and printer set up and during the ball set up a slideshow of pictures or something and then try to coax people to buy.

Any more sense?

FerociousDave

MORPH3US wrote:

Hi mate,

Not sure if this is any good at all, but check out:

https://www.picturenation.co.uk

its a new site that I stumbled on a while back - because its new its not got so many users so you won't make a million any time soon, but could bring in a bit of extra £££

M

Thanks for this, I'll have a look!

Astaroth

It is a novel idea... traditionally however a photographer would be paid simply for turning up rather than having to pay for the right to turn up and would get photo charges ontop of that.

Given that as a photographer you are going to have a relatively limited radius of area to cover I would imagine that you would be much better off spending money on getting together a portfolio, advertising and a website than paying £50 a pop to then have to travel to a gig and potentially never make a penny from it.

skippy64

Hi there, I've done quite a bit of 'event' photography in its early days with digital equipment & whilst you can make good money on the day you do start to physically burn out if you are doing alot of evenings & weekend work. The main thing to consider is that you will need someone to operate the computer & printer & to sell & pack the photos up as well. You can't do this on your own and also take pictures at the event. I personally found a balance by covering the event & then selling afterwards on my own website. I use morephotos.com as my host but there are plenty of others who also offer the service. Bear in mind this suits my way of wanting to cover an event, as I got fed up of being at an evening event having to deal with drunks who reach the stage of wanting to haggle over the cost of having a picture. To cover an event & want to sell on the day I personally feel it needs at least two people to be there so you will have to cost in for another wage. Also check your insurance cover & keep your public liability document with you at an event as you may be asked to provide it to the event organiser to comply with their insurance for the event. HTH, Steve

FerociousDave

That helps a lot, thanks. I think I need to ask them some questions.

Cheers all

Kilty_2

To be honest, it sounds a bit dodgy to me. As I see it the company wins whether you make enough money or not.

Couldn't you just set up as a freelancer offering event photography and keep your prices low enough for a while just to pay for the equipment that you'd need to buy (and obviously expenses etc), building a reputation and slowly increase the prices as you get more custom?

MDUK

I encoutered this for the first time this year. A friend booked a photographer to record his 40th birthday part and there was no charge for this. We were all photographed on the way in and random pictures were taken during the evening.

We were given a business card with the web address to look at them the next day and order what we wanted.

I am sure he wouldn't have booked a photographer if he had had to pay for it, we got a couple of nice pictures (might have bought more but they were about £7 each) so all in all it worked for everyone. the host had his party professionally recorded, we got a couple of nice pics all glammed up and the photograper got a booking he probably wouldn't have if he had charged a flat rate.