Event Photography
Offering one of the fastest turnarounds from taking a shot to making a sale, event photography holds obvious appeal. Here's the low-down on how to play the market
Words Gavin Stoker
Broadly speaking, event photography falls into two different categories. There are the corporate events - the black-tie dinners and balls, the party circuit if you like - and then are the more specialist events; the air shows, the balloon days, historical re-enactments, amateur showjumping, plus local sports matches and tournaments. The lure for any photographer is obvious. The target sales market for your work is already present, and either very enthusiastic or slightly tipsy - both of which can loosen the purse strings.
As you're selling direct to the public, turning around and presenting prints while the event is still taking place, it not only helps to be well organised - with assistants and a team at your disposal if necessary - but also to be as good a salesperson as a photographer. According to the many pros we canvassed, up to £1000 a day is achievable, while one admits to taking £400 in two hours at a black-tie bash.
Know your market
Specialising in covering equestrian events is South West based photographer Nick Jay, whose background in IT has proved a useful asset. He currently advertises his services across two related websites - one for shooting point-to-point amateur horseracing and the other for purely event photography. "There are far more horse shows than there are photographers to cover them," he reveals, adding that it helps to have natural empathy for the subject. As well as taking shots of enthusiastic youngsters and their four-legged friends at pony shows, Jay doubles his chances by also visiting point-to-point races, where he can not only sell his output to the jockeys but also to the watching public.
It's not all horseplay though, as the photographer has cannily tried his hand at black-tie events too. "If it's a relatively small scale event, say 100 people, we'll work slightly differently and print all the photos off," he reveals of his working methods. "Although it sounds wasteful it can increase your turnover dramatically."
This is because, says Jay, he'll take a picture of a husband and wife as they arrive at an event, in the hope that, after they've enjoyed a meal and a few glasses of wine, they'll wend their way over to him. "At that point, if the husband picks up your picture you've sold it," he adds. "If you're any good a salesman at all."
The chances of making a sale at an event are further increased by a wide range of print options. Not just 7x5in or 9x6in hard copies, but also coffee mugs, key rings and canvas prints. It's no wonder then that Jay needs his workstations set up in the back of a converted horse-wagon.
The result is, says Jay, "there are events that no competitor could get me out of. Everything we do is based totally on our levels of service. People have been burnt before by photographers taking their money and then never sending the prints."
What to charge?
As regards the thorny issue of what to charge for a photograph, Jay's approach is again dictated by his comprehension of the various markets. "Something like a pony club will charge a price of £7.50 on the website for a 7x5in print and we'll do it for £6.50 on the day, which is the going rate" he says. "My production costs for that print stand at 50p, so the markup is absolutely phenomenal and beats any other business. If you sell in volumes you get a very reasonable return on that."
That said, at a black-tie event Jay's prices will be raised to a slightly less modest £10 for a 7x5in print. "We will change the price slightly knowing what the market will stand," he says. There's also the attendance fee that some events charge photographers to take into account; this tends to either be a flat fee or a percentage of their eventual takings, with the photographer sometimes left to decide which route they'd prefer. "What we normally do is make a donation equivalent to roughly 10 per cent of our takings," Jay reveals. "We do that in one of two ways, either saying flatly ‘we'll give you 10 per cent' or ‘we'll give you 50p for each print sold', which sometimes works out fairer. If it's snowing or pouring down with rain at an event a burger van will still sell its burgers, but you might not sell photos."
Fellow events photographer Gareth Jones, who runs the company Sports Alive, shares his experience: "A lot of people who organise events now think you're making money hand over fist as a photographer, and so are demanding bigger financial kick backs," he cautions. "Personally I'd rather pay a fixed fee than a percentage because you can never tell what an event's going to do - there may have been similar events the week before. I've always found football tournaments quite disappointing in sales; rugby's better, which could be down to a class thing - it's down to who has money."
For the same reason Jones also cites the sailing fraternity and boat events as other potential high earners, reasoning that if someone can afford a boat, they can also afford to buy souvenir photographs for their crew. "There's the cost of materials to take into consideration, but £10 is also a nice round number," he reasons. "We also do a reduced pricing structure, whereby people get three pictures for £25. But you price what the market can bear - I have heard of a chap selling the same sized polo photos for two-and-a-half times as much, and that's because if you play polo you have to have 10 horses to do it so you've obviously got quite a bit of money. So pricing is sensitive to the market rather than being dictated by anything else."
While there is money to be made, there is always the unexpected to take into account which may throw plans into disarray. The unpredictability of weather at outdoor events being a good example.
"As a photographer some days you'll make an absolute killing," adds Jay, "and other days you'll make nothing because of the conditions. "What I would also say is equestrian is probably the most difficult event - because it's a tricky audience to please. A dressage rider will not buy a picture if the horse's legs are in the wrong position. Likewise a showjumper will not buy an image unless the horse is at the correct position over a fence, so it takes practice."
Achieving a fast turnaround
Because he needs to turn images around fast, Nick Jay's camera set-up is all digital: comprising a Nikon D2Hs, a D1X and a D100, and all the printing and processing is done in situ, in the back of his converted horse truck. "The speed of capture and the fact that I can take 8fps is important for shooting point-to-point, because you might have 14 horses passing you," he reveals. "But for show jumping I use single shot - because what you mustn't do with event photograph is saturate your client; give them a choice of four or five pictures, but never a choice of 10 or 15. The reason for that is that they will take longer choosing - and that's not what you want. You want more people and a better throughput and that is where the real skill of event photography comes in."
Gareth Jones' own kit comprises a Nikon D2H, a D2x, a 300mm f/2.8, a 70-200mm f/2.8 and 70-55mm f/2.8 "for the presentation or team shot", plus a couple of flashguns.
"You won't find one system that suits all event photography that you can buy off the shelf," he advises. "We have a network of eight viewing stations at events so that people can view the pictures - if we shoot wirelessly they can see the pictures within three to four minutes, or if we can't do that then 45 minutes after the match we'll have prints on site."
Although Nick Jay prefers to keep his business family based, Gareth Jones has built up teams of photographers so he can tackle larger-scale requests, like being asked to photograph the after-show party at the Brit Awards - an approach that came via System Insight in Southampton, a company that supplies a useful range of gear aimed specifically at event photographers.
"They wanted to be able to have pictures taken and prints produced on the night so everyone could have a souvenir. We put in place a system that had 12 people shooting wirelessly across the evening," Jones recalls. "We were feeding shots back to a series of Mitsubishi IT5000 event systems, and over four hours we took 2700 frames. That was part of a
fixed-price promotional deal, but it would have been fantastic if we'd have been selling that many direct on the night."
Jones advises that it's important to correctly gauge the size of the event before setting out. "It's very easy to start off at the local school prom or a few charity black-tie balls, with one photographer and an assistant," he notes, "but when you start shooting 400 or 500 people it becomes a bit more complicated getting their photographs taken, moving them through, producing a print and making sure that they can find their photo afterwards." In terms of scale the photographer reveals that he has covered three major rugby events this year, involving a team of half a dozen photographers shooting a colossal 3000 players. "I think we took pictures of every pitch and team at one point or another," he marvels. "Once I started using digital SLRs it became obvious that there was an opportunity to do this sort of event thing, and when I use other photographers I make sure they'll be able to take a very good sports photograph. "And that's the differentiation," Jones continues. "If you go to an event, there are bound to be lots of people on the sidelines with their cameras, but they won't have the right kind of equipment and the necessary skill to take pictures like we can, such as the big fast lens or the timing, or the imagination to take a shot that's different from everybody else's. The important route to making a sale is to capture something that nobody else can capture. And, while it also pays to specialise, don't ever limit yourself to just a narrow band of subjects."
