Printing on the spot

[Flower Child]

Until recently, my main concern with my future photography career has been the technical issues/composition ect. of my photos. Now that I am a junior in high school getting closer to graduating and making it my career, I have began to ponder more about the business and money making part of my photography future. I have been trying my best to understand some of the procedures of getting your photos sold but there are still some unclear areas so forgive me if this is a dumb question.

I ran across a thread just now that was talking about printing your photos on the spot of an event and selling them before it is over. (I didn't want to barge in on that thread with this long question)

How do you go about doing this? I have seen the printers they use at Wal-Mart and they are huge. Do you load your photos to a computer and just use a very high quality printer you have on hand hooked up to your computer. (I don't know much about the self printing process, I get all of mine done at Wal-Mart). How do you get all of this printing and stuff done in a short amount of time on the spot in order to sell the actual prints right then.

Sorry this is a long post but I would really appreciate if someone could help me with this.

 

[DRoberts]

Most people who do that have at least two people on site. One photog and one doing processing. Having three is nice so you can have one person handling sales and prints. A couple of laptops and good printers is all the hardware you need. Some have printers that print poster size and some mainly do 8x10 or 14x11.
Around here they can cost anywhere from $25 for small prints up to $60 or more for poster size. The guy who owns "Event Photo" says the key is your software. He has custom software that really makes batch operations easy and works with alot of presets for speed. It also has multiple layout templates that autosize to the area of the template you insert the photo to.

 

[Flower Child]

Thanks DRoberts you helped out a ton, I didnt know they used custom software. I wondered how they were able to watermark and mess with that many photos in a short amount of time. how much do these very good printers run? And where do you find that official looking paper that the printing places use?