Need advice for selling basketball photos

gaetanphoto · Jan 7, 2010

I have recently been asked to shoot a basketball provincals (Canada) tournament at a local high school. They had seen some of my hockey pictures and liked what they have seen so they took a shot and asked me.

I am not new to business as I am a small business lender however I am new to the photography business. What would be my best option to go about selling the photos I take at the event without dropping thousands on a large viewing station setup.

One person who asked me to do this suggested maybe just uploading the photos to a website and give the website to people who were intereseted and they can just place orders after the fact.

Any other suggestions what I should do? The tournament is still four months away so I have time to brainstorm.

Thanks in advance!!

Big Mike · Jan 7, 2010

The website option is fairly common and there are a few different ways to go about it.
One would be to just use a photo host type site. Smugmug is one that gets mentioned often. They have a 'pro' account option which would work well for this type of thing. I believe they can even take care of the printing & shipping, so all you do is upload the images and sit back while the money rolls in. Of course, they do take a commission.

Another options would be to put a cart system on your website (if you have one). The one that many photographers use (myself included) is called Photocart. It's an application that you buy once, and it resides right on your site, so you don't have to send the clients to another site (Smugmug etc)....and you don't have to pay any commission. But you would have to print and ship/deliver the orders yourself, which may or may not be worth the commission savings.

The good thing about this method, is that you have have the pictures up for a long time, giving everyone a chance to order them. It also gives you some time to process them before putting them up onto a web site. If you were running a photography business, the site traffic generated from something like this, could be very valuable.

Another option for print sales would be to make the sales right at the tournament. This would probably involve setting up a booth or station where people could view the images and make their orders. Or to take it one step further, you could make prints right there on the spot and sell them.

There are some issue to deal with for this type of set up. Firstly, the quick turnaround. You would have to shoot a game, then have the images uploaded right away. They might require some minor work before they can be put on display...they might require a bit more work if you want to make prints right then & there. It could be done, but you would probably need one or two more people doing that while you continued to shoot.

You would need a good system for displaying the photos and organizing the orders, maybe taking money or credit cards etc. If you're doing well, it could get pretty crazy at your booth.

I think that one of the big issues, is that it's probably easier to make a sale on-site, when the emotions are running high and when they first see the photos. Especially if that's their only choice to buy the photos.
But if you just put them on a web site, they may not see the images for another week or two, by which time the emotions are cool. Then, they might get excited when they first see them, but they don't have to buy right then, so they will cool further. By the time they actually make an order, it might only be for a small print or two. But if you get them right after the game, they might be temped to buy more images at bigger (more expensive) sizes.

keith foster · Jan 7, 2010

I have done that a couple of times for tournaments for school. The website is a good start. We also download to a laptop after each game, do a quick sort to get rid of the totally unusable shots and then put them in slide show mode on a tv or large monitor that people can stroll by and see when they are between games or waiting to play.
Check the school, I bet they have a tv on a cart or something like that you can use so you don't have to haul one.
Another thing that works is printing off some samples of shots to post around your station where you are selling from. This is easy enough to do if the tournament is spread over several days. This shows people the quality of your work.
(If you print shots overnight make sure they are of a team that is still in the tournament) The winning teams will be more interested in remembering the game than the early departing teams AND they will still be there to see themselves.
Good luck and have fun.

I need to learn to type faster. Good advice Mike.