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Event Photography Handbook: How to Make Money Photographing Award Ceremonies, Corporate Functions, and Other Special Occasions

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Retail Price: $34.95

Amazon Price: $20.84

by Peter Wong

If you focus on event photography you can make quite a bit of money. It is a varied and widely sought after field of photography.

How to do it

The key trick is in choosing your market slice. You must choose a slice of the market where people want to keep memories alive in print. It must also be an event that is hard to capture for a not professional so that they will need your services.

One idea is to go to kids sports events. Get permission from the coach to click pics for the parents watching and then start clicking away. If you turn up with a huge telephoto lens like the ones used for pro coverage of events, you will be taken seriously. Make sure you get all the kids doing great action shots and then hand out flyers to all the kids parents watching with you’re web address. If you can write down the parents email address so you can email them the URL of you site then upload the pics to your web site that day and email everyone. If you have a simple shopping cart set up you can make money in a few hours as people pop in to see the pics and buy them for $20 or more a pop.

You can do a similar thing with weddings. Take all the regular shots as part of the wedding coverage but then get your URL printed on the wedding invites and all the other wedding materials and also get an email list of all the wedding guests, offer the couple a nice 20% discount for doing this and then take lots of extra pics at the wedding of the guests doing all the things they do. Upload all the pics to your site and send the emails. You will then make a lot more money than the 20% discount it cost you because then 30 or 40 people will be also purchasing your pics at $20 or more a shot straight from your site. Also charging them more for higher resolution shots is a great bonus income as well.

The key is to just find a corner of the market where you can take the pics and then sell them easily online.

Dog shows, fashion shows, horse shows, car shows, livestock competitions, rock shows, – the list goes on. Keep your eye out in the events section of your local paper to see what is happening. Always ask for permission to shoot pics and if you need to offer the people 10% of the income if feel you need to so you can get easy access.

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