Like any photographer with an online presence, I wanted to be able to sell prints of my images online. I have a number of images that I think are worthy of hanging on the walls of homes and businesses (corporate art I guess), and I also have portraits that I have done of various people (mainly my daughter’s senior pictures and the Lakewood High School Cheerleaders). In either case, it is the ultimate convenience for my customers to be able to review their images online, tell me if they want any of them retouched, then be able to order the final versions in whatever dimensions or on whatever material (canvas wrap, coffee mug, etc) they want.

I took these things into consideration when I started looking for an online gallery source. I could have done it myself, using Gallery2 or similar software, but I honestly didn’t want to handle the back-end pieces of fulfillment. A one stop shop was a good idea. So I researched the different sites out there. Smugmug is widely regarded as the market leader. The there is Zenfolio and a bunch of others.

I have friends on Smugmug, and I never really liked how the sites looked. I know customization is possible, but I was hoping to avoid that. Zenfolio, however, had a nice, clean interface. The ordering process was straightforward. They let me do coupons and all that sort of stuff. The only thing they were lacking was digital downloads. This is a pretty big deal in this day and age. A number of other sites offer this. As recently as July, they indicated this was a priority and they were working on it. As recently as 10/28 though, they made it crystal clear that we won’t see it in the immediate future.

Instead, Zenfolio is putting their development focus on allowing comments on photos. I have a couple issues with this.
1. Zenfolio is not Flickr. It is a commerce site. Comments are secondary in nature to the sales process.
2. Digital downloads offer immediate $$ returns. As a photographer looking to make money from my images, this is a priority to me.

I have already lost at least one sale that I know of because I didn’t have an immediate download option available. And that was someone who took the time to let me know. How many opportunities have their been that I was not aware of?

It’s my own fault really. I have this need to be different, and give “new guys” a chance even when it might not make the most sense. I have learned my lesson though. I am signing up for my Smugmug free trial today and will start using their tools to migrate my stuff away from Zenfolio. The good news is that the “Print of the Week” entries will now be available as digital downloads, so you can use them as a desktop, print them for yourself at home, or however you want to use it. Commercial licensing will also be available if you want to use one of my images for an ad campaign or something similar. I’ll let you know as soon as this is available.

By the way – if you have found this post and are a dissatisfied Zenfolio / Flickr / Picassa / Phanfare / Yahoo / Photosite customer, go to smugglr.smugmug.com and see how you can migrate your stuff to Smugmug, and save significantly on your first year with them.

A few months ago I took some photos of a very corporate restroom, thinking (for some crazy reason) that they might make good stock photos. I put them up on iStockphoto and pretty much forgot about them. In fact , over the last several weeks, I pretty much forgot about stock photography altogether. I have been travelling for work, trying to figure out how I want to do the real estate photography thing, taking senior pictures of my daughter, taking pictures of the Lakewood High School cheerleaders, and still trying to have a family life. Yep, pretty busy, just like you.

Then I came across a blog post about fotoLibra. I checked it out. I liked what I saw. I made some uploads and then wrote about it briefly yesterday. And in that writing, I made a mistake.

I said I hadn’t made any money off of my stock photo endeavors so far. After I wrote that, I checked in at iStockphoto (haven’t done that for a very long time). Sure enough, I have had some sales. 3 to be exact, garnering me total commissions of $3.92. For the bathroom photos. That’s right – the bathroom photos. Not the pretty picture of golf carts all lined up in the morning, not the pretty cactus or the corporate biz jet. The bathrooms.

It’s kind of funny really. Some friends of mine thought I was crazy taking a photo of a bathroom, much less a few of them. But you never really know what people want (which is why I like fotoLibra), but apparently I must have at least a little bit of an eye for it. To the tune of almost $4 right now. Woohoo. I might go buy a Chai at Starbucks. That’s only enough to pay for a small though.

Hopefully this is the start of something wonderful. Hopefully fotoLibra is more successful. I really want them to succeed. But as long as my photos are selling somewhere, I guess I am happy.

Trying to determine where to host an online gallery is a pretty big deal. There are a plethora of choices, from software to host your own on your own website, to full fledged service offerings that will host all your images, maybe do some marketing for them, and offer a shopping cart system. It seems that every day a new one crops up, and one or two fold. It’s pretty difficult to keep up with them. On top of that, they all have different pricing, which factors into decisions as well.

So, what is an up and coming photographer to do? I have sat back for as long as I could and watched how other people built their sites and learned from them regarding what they did and didn’t like about certain sites. And then I decided to wait until I had to make a decision. For normal hosting of my photos, along with the community features, I really like Flickr. But Flickr doesn’t offer any ecommerce capabilities, and that site isn’t really geared towards sales at all.

Then I stumbled across Imagekind (via Flickr). They have an entry level offering that is free, so I put some pictures on it to see what happened. I linked to it from this site (“Prints For Sale“). I have 16 images there, and they have garnered 96 views, 3 comments, and 0 sales. Certainly I was hoping something would sell, but so far, nada.

Then I did the Lakewood High School cheerleader shoot last weekend, and I needed substantially more capacity, along with some other features. I took this as an opportunity to try out another service – Zenfolio. They have a two week free trial offer that gives you all of the features of the top level account, but limits you to 1GB of storage. There are some pro’s and con’s to the service, but all in all I am happy with it. So much so, that I have subscribed to it for a year. I am not 100% sure how I am going to market my prints on this site, but it definitely made it easy for me to keep the cheerleader pictures private for each girl. Additionally, I was commissioned earlier this week (at the last minute) to do a corporate headshot. I was able to quickly setup a “gallery” for the headshot proofs to go into. After the shoot, I uploaded the pics, my watermark was automatically applied, and the company was able to choose which image they wanted to buy. The bonus? That commission covered the cost of the Zenfolio site for the year. Now, anything I make off of print sales from the cheerleaders will be profit. Not too bad a deal at all.

I am aware that Smugmug is the heavy hitter in this industry, but for some reason I didn’t like what I saw there. I certainly have some issues with the Zenfolio people, but I have taken it up with them and it sounds like they are working on things. I’ll continue on there for the duration of my subscription, but I will also keep an eye out on the competition. If someone clearly does it better, at a similar price point, it would make sense to move. But if Zenfolio proves they can meet my needs, I’ll stay on, and likely become a strong advocate (for whatever that is worth). I work in a customer service type of industry too, and I know what my standards are. Let’s see if Zenfolio can keep up.

BTW – I am probably giving up on Imagekind for now. I’ll still keep the WordPress plugin for Imagekind up and running. I don’t know for sure if anyone is using it, but I suspect some are. Let me know if you do.

Also, I am going to stop writing posts on Saturdays. 5 days a week of my random thoughts, experiences, rants, raves and reviews ought to be plenty for everyone.

I have finally finalized the pictures for the Lakewood High School Spirit Squad (cheerleaders). The last step was to put the “squad” photos into a template with the name of the school, the year and “team” and some mascot logos.

It was during this process that some small details started to shine through. The biggest one that jumps out from the photo above is that not all of the girls were holding their arms the same way. The devil is always in the details. The unfortunate thing is I didn’t see it until it was too late. While I feel like I am doing some things well, clearly I have a lot to learn still.

When I started thinking about how I was going to present and offer the photos to the Lakewood Cheer Squad after their photo shoot last weekend, I debated for some time on whether or not to offer “packages” or “sets”. Ultimately I decided against it. Instead, using Zenfolio (and their awesome free trial), I just made the photos available as individual ones and let the girls and their families choose what was going to work best for them.

The main reason I did this is that I remember after I had my senior pictures taken way back when (1989). We had a ton of pictures left over because they didn’t have a package that was “just right” for me. By going the way that I did hear, parents and extended family can order what they want, when they want. I’ll probably keep the pictures online for 6 months to a year (Unlimited and Premium accounts have no limitations), so they can reorder when they want. This is the way business should be run, in my mind. Let the consumer decide what is best for them, not what is best for me to sell. Hmmm, I wonder what other industries could put this notion to work?

I think it is going to be important for me to keep notes of what went well, what I learned, and what I can improve on when I do a shoot. I haven’t been doing this for Megan’s Senior Pictures, although I have been thinking about it all in my head. But after photographing 16 cheerleaders (333 pictures in total on Saturday), it’s good to get this down while the experience is still fresh.

What I did right:

• Prepared 16 individual galleries in Zenfolio (click on the link to save $5), underneath one password protected collection. This way the girls can go straight to their galleries, but can browse across them all.
• Pre-printed notices, customized for each girl, with their unique gallery URL and also a date for when they can expect to see the photos online.
• Had the cheer coach schedule the girls in a staggered fashion, so they wouldn’t all be standing around or a long time waiting their turn.
• Shot early in the morning, starting at 9:15am.
• Researched and printed cheerleader specific pose examples for the girls to review.
• Used my Cactus Wireless Flash Trigger.

What I learned:

• The sun is very bright, even at 9:30am.
• You’ll get sunburned doing a long outdoor shoot (we were there for roughly three hours).
• Bring water.
• Backgrounds can be hard to manage in a public park.
• When allowing “group” shots, try and manage how many you allow so the other people don’t lose interest.
• Lightroom 2 is wonderful, as is the Zenfolio Plugin from Jeffrey Friedl, but they aren’t overly fast (or it could be my network connection).

What I can improve upon:

• Have a giant diffuser made for the sunlight.
• Learn more about manual flash settings.
• Develop more skills for dealing with mid-day light.
• Learn more about Lightroom/ Photoshop.
• Learn more about posing (reading a book right now actually).

All in all I still think it went well. The proof will come when orders are placed. Uploads should be finished today, we’ll see how it goes.

Saturday was my first “paid” shoot. I took pictures of the 2008 / 2009 Lakewood High School Spirit Squad (cheerleaders). I didn’t charge a sitting or session fee, but I will get a percentage of any resulting print sales. I took nearly 300 pictures, so there are apt to be some that the girls or their families will want. It was a good experience in terms of learning how to manage a shoot with so many people. I also got to practice with my new Cactus Wireless Flash Trigger (more on that in a future post).

There were 16 girls total, and we did 4 poses for each one. We then did a few “team” photos, and then I let the girls group themselves and had a bunch of 2, 3, 4 or 5 person photos taken. All in all it went pretty well. I will be doing the post processing today and getting them uploaded to the respective galleries on Zenfolio. I am sure a few more from this shoot will appear here in coming weeks.

This was a nice departure from the senior picture stuff I have been doing for Megan. The girls seemed to enjoy themselves and at least one said she wants me to do her senior pictures. Of course, she is only a sophomore this year…

The deadline for turning in the headshot for inclusion in the Lakewood High School 2008/09 Yearbook is October 3. Auto submission of the shot is something I plan to do for seniors I take pictures of. In all reality though, you don’t need to get the bulk of your pictures taken until February or March. This gives you time to pick out the ones you really like and have them back in time to mail out with announcements. It also gives you a chance to take some outdoor winter or late fall shots if you like those sorts of backdrops.

While I haven’t started officially doing the senior picture thing as a business, I will be taking portraits of the Lakewood High School Spirit Squad (cheerleaders) today. This will be the first step of creating the business, as I will be offering pictures for sale via my new Zenfolio site, where I will also offer selected prints available for purchase. These prints will be chosen from the various landscape and other pictures I have taken over the years. Hopefully other people will like them as much as I do.