So…one of the things I do is small schools and team photos. I am a one woman shop. These endeavors don’t make me a ton of money. It’s a lot of work up front with no promise of who will order what and if you’ll make a profit or barely break even and pay yourself minimum wage for the hours you put in.

Remember picture day at school? You brought in your envelope that mom had checked off what package she wanted to order, put a check in, sealed it up, and tucked it all in your back pack as she sent you to school with your new outfit and freshly brushed hair and hoped for the best. Then three weeks later you got sent home with an envelope of prints (side note: remember trading wallet pics with your friends?) and your mom hopefully had a sense of humor b/c more likely than not the pictures were…special. There’s something delightful to me about bad school pics and they crack me up.

Now, as a photographer, doing small groups, I do my best to coax the most natural smile out of my tiny clients. I photoshop out tattoos and google marks and scabs and acne. The big corporate folks don’t do that. When you get to be a big kid you can pay more for “additional retouching.” The problem I’m finding now is that parents want a preview. They don’t want to make a decision unless they know. I get it. The problem is I haven’t figured out how to hunt everyone down to make an order after the fact. I do it now in a way that when you fill out the online order form you get the best prices. If you wait till it goes in the team or school album, the prices are a little higher and you have to pay shipping. For the volume I do, it’s not cost effective to own my own printer, ink, paper, maintenance, upgrades, etc. So I send everything to a professional lab and the quality is better than what I could afford to do in my house.

And this is the conundrum. Do I start charging schools/teams a minimum amount per child and if their print orders don’t meet that minimum then they have to pay me the difference? I don’t want to have to do that. I know with some of the smaller school groups that would be a huge imposition. Do I collect everyone’s emails and hound them with threats of closing the album or raising prices even higher? The closest idea I’ve come up with is a coupon code that expires a week after the album goes live. One of the things I do that people really like is sibling photos. Especially for the summer swim teams, the ability to get all 2-3 kids in one shot that’s genuinely good is priceless. I know folks who have used summer swim sibling pics as holiday cards or gifts for grandparents. I’m not sitting her making bank every summer. I work my ass off and net about $10-15/hour. Sometimes the whole thing makes me just want to throw in the towel. It’s a lot of work. At the bare minimum I’ll keep doing my kids swim team pics till I don’t have a swimmer or a coach on the team. So 3 more years?

*sigh*

Folks don’t realize how hard this kind of work is. I’m principal artist, technician, editor, accountant, administrative assistant, and office manager. I’m tired, that’s all.