We have seen creative uses for the new Pano size.  Many customers have found the smaller size more convenient when showing potential customers the Pano prints. Others appreciate the ability to offer their Attitude Pano designs in a lower price bracket to diversify their product offerings.  A few customers have carved a niche by selling them as “locker-sized” team images, or mini-posters.

In addition to the new size, customers can now mount their 5x15s on box mounting or gator foam, making the product even more versatile.  Box mounted 5x15s stand easily on desks and table tops for display.

Looking for another way to use the 5×15 print? Our new Freestyle Collage Builder is an interactive product your end-customers can build themselves using the images from your event. Customers can build their own Panos by choosing from a variety of backgrounds, adding titles and text, dragging and dropping images and more! This fun new product is now available in QuicPost and CORE, and instructions are available on CandidNET under “Product Information.”

Need more information about the 5×15? Give Customer Development a call at 800-336-4550 today, or visit

Are you looking for proven ways to expand your special events photo business? Searching for a better system to maximize your online sales in all photo markets?   Interested in investigating the endless possibilities of Green Screen technology—both for individuals and groups? Have you ever considered using an email campaign to increase event sales and maintain close contact with your customers?

Well, Candid Color Systems has all the answers to these and many others questions that challenge photographers on a daily basis. Each July CCS hosts a 3-day Summer Workshop for our customers and this year our workshop begins on Sunday, July 15^th and runs through Tuesday, July 17^th.

This 3-day program features hands-on photography and software training; live presentations on many topics and subjects; and, the best part: a chance to mingle and socialize with other professional photographers that share your love of photography looking for ways to improve workflow and increase revenue streams.  In addition, you’ll have the opportunity to participate in lab tours gaining a better understanding of how we do, what we do.

The real value in these meetings is that we can practically guarantee that you will learn a new marketing or sales tactic that will pay for the cost of traveling to Oklahoma City, where we are based.  In January, at our Winter Seminar in Las Vegas, one of our customers discovered a marketing tip that he executed upon his return home, and within one week had taken in an additional $2500 in online sales using this technique!

Attendance is FREE and we provide lunch and breakfast on Monday and Tuesday. What a deal!!  The meetings and presentations are planned with the professional photographer in mind.  We encourage you to attend and to bring key employees with you so that everyone in your organization gets the full details.

The meetings begin on Sunday afternoon with optional software and photography training.  Monday and Tuesday sessions run all day with various presentations and live photography shoots.  The Workshops are only open to existing customers of CCS.  If you are not currently a CCS customer and would like to participate in this 3-day photographic immersion, go to http://www.candid.com/get_started/open_account.aspx and sign up for an account today.  An agenda of all three days will be published shortly.

We look forward to seeing you in OKC in July!

*When compared to a standard checkout process 

Secured Payments

PayPal provides customers with a secure payment option that does not involve constantly typing in sensitive banking or credit card information. Payment information is stored securely online and credit card numbers and accounts are never shared with merchants.

User Popularity 

PayPal studies have shown that users feel confident when they click the “Checkout with PayPal” button and trust the services provided, which is evident in the increasing number of worldwide users. Barron’s online reported that PayPal’s registered users recently rose 12% to 110 million.

Streamlined Checkout Process

PayPal’s streamlined checkout process is simple, convenient and very user friendly. Customers can avoid sometimes lengthy checkout steps and can quickly finalize their purchases.

User Behavior 

A survey conducted by Jupiter Research in 2007 also concluded that 60% of consumers make their payment choice before they reach the payment page. Having multiple payment options available to the consumer guarantees a positive user experience.

In addition to all of the benefits listed above, there are no additional fees for using PayPal nor is there any additional admin set up required. You will also still receive your payment in the same amount of time as before.  Overall, the Express Checkout method is going to be a win, win for everyone and we are excited to see the positive effects that it’s going to have on your business.

Breaking in to a Middle School or High School that has a long and/or close relationship with a photographer can be challenging. But often the established photographer will neglect the smaller or more obscure sports teams. This opens up an opportunity for you to showcase your abilities as a sports photographer and to gain credibility in a way that no sales call to the major sports coaches can accomplish.

Cross Country, Field Hockey, Golf and Tennis are examples of obscure sports. These are typically smaller teams that are not aggressively pursued, creating an opportunity to introduce your business. These teams are excited to be photographed and can be profitable undertakings. If executed correctly, they can not only improve your bottom line, but they can be the bridge to the bigger sport programs. These teams don’t require a great deal of time to shoot and rarely require extra labor.  If possible, attempt to schedule these smaller teams all on the same day. A sports photo day will lower your overhead and will make it easier on the coach. Maximizing time and labor is critical to making these smaller team photo shoots profitable.

Make a great first impression

One of the major goals of photographing these smaller teams is to gain future business. After you schedule the booking, take advantage of this opportunity to showcase the highlights of your business. Show them how your company is better than the competition by meeting all scheduled timelines and delivering products when promised. Offer a unique product line and price them fairly. Send a follow up card, thanking them for their business. When you succeed in these areas, ask for referrals from the coach you are working with.  This can be the key to future business.

Get to know your new contact

Coaches network with each other constantly and if you are successful with their teams, they can be your best advertisers for new business. Discover what tournaments or summer camps they participate in. One successful photo shoot can lead to many others. A coach of one smaller sports team may be a coach in a different season of another larger team. He will also know a number of coaches at his school and at other schools. Last, he may move from one school to another. All of this interconnectivity between coaches provides an opportunity for you to break into a school whose football coach says he is happy with the photographer he has been using. If your products, service, photography, logistics of the shoot and communication “wow” the coach, he or she will most likely tell others. This can lead to you booking all of the sports in that school.

Although the profits from these smaller teams may be less than the profits from a larger team, one benefit to consider is you have gained a new customer that can lead you to bigger profits. This new customer can be added to your portfolio and referral list. This is a great advantage when seeking new business. Marketing obscure sports can be profitable and a great way to grow your business.

Candid Color Systems can provide assistance in your marketing and booking efforts. We have training presentations, newsletters and custom marketing materials. If you need advice about booking and shooting school sports, Customer Development is here to help! Call 800.336.4550 and become a customer today.

We like to keep things pretty simple in our sports division. So, what I am going to share with you guys is very simple. We use a spreadsheet called a matrix to analyze all photography opportunities in our area and we associate a dollar amount to each of these events. This allows us to see the potential money out there waiting to be realized and it allows us to forecast the amount of revenue we expect for events already booked. Great, right?

Here are the 5 steps to making and using a Matrix.

1. Determine your dollars per person photographed
2. Make a list of all booked events and potential events in your area
3. Enter the list into a spreadsheet
4. Estimate the number of attendees per event
5. Multiply the number of attendees by the dollars per person

Let’s look at each step in a little more detail.

1.  DETERMINE YOUR DOLLARS PER PERSON PHOTOGRAPHED

In our division, we have broken this down on a sport by sport basis. We do this because we are able to more accurately forecast the revenue for each type event. However, if you don’t photograph sports you can still group the events you photograph into categories by grouping together similar events. Once this is done, total the sales for each of the categories and divide it by the number of people photographed.

(Total Category Sales / Total Participants = $ per person photographed)

2.  MAKE A LIST OF ALL BOOKED EVENTS AND POTENTIAL EVENTS IN YOUR AREA

Create this list representing each calendar month. This way you can estimate how much money you will be grossing from your events and you can staff according to what is economically viable. Begin by listing all events you already have scheduled and then list potential events that you would like to photograph. You can find these events online, in the newspaper or around your community.

3.  ENTER THE LIST INTO A SPREADSHEET

Open a blank worksheet in Excel and list all events or organizations you are working with or would like to be photographing. Then copy this list onto a new tab for each of the calendar months.

Here, I have listed the names of schools that we are currently photographing and schools we would like to be photographing.

Below, I added additional columns that allow you to more accurately forecast sales. I have one for dollars per athlete, number of athletes, projected sales, actual sales, status (where you are in the sales/booking process) and previous year’s sales.

4.  ESTIMATE THE NUMBER OF ATTENDEES PER EVENT

It is crucial to acquire the number of event attendees to accurately forecast how much the event will make. Most of the time you can contact someone at the event and find out the total number of expected attendees and if they aren’t sure it is ok to ask them for an estimate. Sports shoots are easy to predict because they know the number of players on each team. If you do not photograph sports and are unable to gather the attendee number, just gauge the number of attendees by comparing it to a similar event that you have photographed in the past. Now, enter this number of attendees into your spreadsheet.

5.  MULTIPLY THE NUMBER OF ATTENDEES BY THE DOLLARS PER PERSON

Enter the dollars per attendee in the appropriate column next to the number of attendees. Multiply these numbers together to determine the forecasted amount that the event will generate. In our division, we have a matrix for total events (booked and potential bookings) and one for booked events. We do this so we can see the potential business available in the total events matrix and then see what we are on track to actually gross by looking at our booked events.

Using a matrix will help you have a better understanding of the potential photography money in your area and help you gauge what months might be in need of additional bookings. It has been an amazing tool that helps our division staff events by being conscious of overhead in comparison to forecasted sales. It is a simple process with excellent rewards!

The organizers of such events spend hours on the phone enlisting the aid of retailers that have a product or a service to donate as an auction item.  Photographers are usually included in the variety of service providing companies that participate in these fundraising auctions.

Typically, photographers donate a photo session for a family or individual photo session, and offer a complete sitting with a minimum bid at around $50 to $75. Eventually the winning bid will top out at around $125 to $150; the entire amount bid going to the fundraising organization.  The session usually comes with a time limit such as a one or two hour session. The organization sponsoring the fundraiser takes 100% of the bid amount and the photographer, theoretically, does a great job and sells a lot of prints while creating buzz about his/her super photography skills and personal service.

In this particular model there is a serious shortcoming for both the photographer and the fundraising organization. Did you spot it?  There is only one bid package to sell.  In other words, when the bids close the photographer only gained one new prospect, and the school/organization only received one donation for that service.

Let’s look at it another way.  What if the photographer, instead of having his services auctioned off and bid upon, had a fixed price session that was offered multiple times.  Creating a basic photo package for $25 and selling it multiple times—instead of an auction— generates more customers for the photographer and more income for the fundraising organization.

One CCS customer in California who described this newest “auction” model to me maintains that she will frequently sell more than 50 sessions at a fundraiser, and that this type of business helps to propel her spring portrait business while putting her business name in front of a larger segment of the community.  Selling fifty sessions at $25 is $1,250 and benefits everyone.  Auctioning one session at $125 is extremely limiting for all parties.

Fundraising events, as described above, are extremely popular at this time of year.  If no one is asking you to participate, perhaps you should be asking them!  Plant the seed and grow your business.

Cover Photos

Probably the biggest design/aesthetic change for your Facebook page is the addition of a cover photo. The photo itself is essentially a giant banner located at the top of your Facebook page like the one below.

It’s really the first branding opportunity you have when someone visits your page plus it’s a great way to make a good first impression. Be sure it accurately expresses the personality of your business, but be aware that there are some conditions when it comes to your cover photo. Your image can’t contain any contact information, prices, calls to action (“like this”) or any arrows directing people to certain parts of your page. Violating any of these terms could get you in hot water if Facebook ever found out.

No Default Landing Tabs

While Facebook hasn’t gotten rid of tabs entirely, they have begun to start shifting the focus of pages away from tabs and more towards an immersive user experience in the brand and its story. Before timeline, businesses could direct people who had not liked their page to a default landing tab filled with some kind of branded content. Now this is no longer the case, at least for people who come to your page organically. If you advertise your page with Facebook ads, you can still direct people who click to certain landing tabs with branded content.

Post Enhancements

While the act of posting hasn’t really changed, Facebook has added some new enhancements to make posting more interesting to someone engaging with your content.

1. Pinning to the top – You now have the option to pin a single post to the top of your Facebook page, where it will remain for seven days no matter how much new content you post. This is great if you’ve got something important to tell your fan base and you don’t want it to get buried underneath future posts.
2. Highlighting Posts – With Timeline, your posts will now appear down your page in two columns instead of just one, alternating from left to right. Instead of having a post appear on just one side of your timeline, you have the option of highlighting it – which makes it stretch out over both columns. This can come in quite handy if you have something important to say that you want to stand out, yet you don’t want to pin it to the top of your page.
3. Milestones – A lot like highlighting posts, Milestones will highlight important events in the history of your company. This is a great engagement tool that can help immerse people in your company’s story and show them where you’ve been and where you’re going!

Timeline is a great new layout for your Facebook page that includes a lot of new and interesting tools to help your business reach and engage with your followers. Use it effectively and watch your presence on Facebook grow! For other information on how to grow your sports photography business, contact our Customer Development Department at 1-800-336-4550.

The photography is relatively easy but requires detailed preparation and back up equipment.  Once graduations start, they rarely stop until all graduates have received their diplomas.

Booking can range from easy to very hard depending on the size of the graduation, the amount of competition, and the school itself.

Why bother with doing this if you are a portrait, school or sports photographer?  Because, minute for minute, you will probably make more money photographing a graduation than any other kind of event.  A 300 student high school graduation can yield sales of up to $6000 with a $3000 to $4000 profit when best practices are followed.  A 300 student college graduation can yield sales of $10,000 dollars with profits upward of $5000.  The actual shoot will require you to be on site two hours early to set up and will require about one to two hours of actual photography.  For the 300 graduates in our example, the post production work will require about 10 hours to identify each graduate, type in names, addresses and emails, merge images with names, send out emails and print and mail paper proofs.

If you want to start small and work your way up, start with a Middle School graduation (also called Bridging Ceremony) or a Vo-tech or Community College.  These are generally easier to book and less stressful to shoot.  The sales from these events are usually somewhere between those of a high school and College.

If you live in an area with a College or University, then the person who is usually in charge is the Registrar.  If it is not the Registrar, then the Registrar should be able to inform you as to who is in charge.  Just because one school or college within a university is being photographed, doesn’t mean that all of the ceremonies are.  You may need to check with each different school to see what the situation is.  If someone is already photographing the university, scout the graduation to see what improvements you could make when you try to book it the next year.

If you are in a town with one or more high schools, then you definitely need to make an effort to book the graduations.  Many are not being photographed at all or the photographer is only photographing those students who opt for the service in advance.

The program CCS recommends  photographs every student at least twice (two different poses), sends the graduate and /or  parents an email link to the proofs, and follows that up with a paper proof mailed to the graduate’s home.  There is no charge to the school or university for the photography.  The students/parents order only what they want in the privacy of their homes, after looking at proofs online or paper proofs sent to the home.

A wide variety of products and packages are offered which cover a broad price range.  There is something for everyone.  Pictures ordered online through CCS are mailed directly to the graduate’s home within a few days of ordering (usually within 3 or 4 days).

Candid Color has webinars available on all aspects of booking and shooting graduations.  Also, our Customer Development Staff stands ready to help answer all your questions and to mentor you through the entire process.

We have 40 years of experience in this market and process half of all the graduates’ pictures at the high school and college level in the U.S.   If you already have contacts in your local high schools or colleges, leverage those contacts to assist you in booking the graduation.  You will be happy you did.

Resources Available from CCS for Graduations

• -  CCS Green Screen Best Practices Guide and CCS Graduation Best Practices Guide posted on Candidnet.candid.com under the “Best Practices” section
• -  CCS Webinars (7 scheduled in the next two months)
• -  Grad Events-April 10^th, 3:30 P.M.  See schedule at Candidnet.candid.com (need user name and password for your account). Schedule is also posted in Developments and Snapshots.
• -  Webinar schedule also listed on Candid.com
• -  Past Seminar and Workshop Presentations on Graduations posted on Candidnet.candid.com.

For assistance, call your Customer Development Representative who can guide you through the materials and mentor you through your first booking and shooting of a graduation.

Non-mounted items requiring artwork, such as Attitude Panos, Level Two prints, and Virtual Groups, typically take three to five business days before they are able to be printed. This timeframe may vary slightly depending on the amount of orders waiting for completion in the lab, retouching and other factors. Once artwork is ready, the printing process should be complete within two to three additional business days.

Turnaround rates apply only to the amount of time an item is in the lab being produced. Production times may be elongated especially during peak times. From May 15 until about the third week of July, customers should expect orders to take an extra three to five business days for completion. Please keep in mind that shipping times will vary depending on the order’s final destination.

Should you find the need to expedite an order, rush services are available at the following rates beginning Monday, March 19, 2012:

• 1 Day rush – 25% of total lab print cost of the order, with $5 minimum
• 2 Day rush – 15% of total lab print cost of the order, with $5 minimum

For more information regarding turnaround times and rush options, please call Customer Support at 800-750-0494.

The time frame to book school portraits and graduations is generally February through early May. Visits can be made to the school throughout the year and they can be very successful, but keep in mind that if your target school already has a photographer, you are more likely to get a contract signed during this time period. That is generally when the decision is made.

Start your meeting with the principal when doing sales for schools and graduations. If they are not the decision maker, they will know who to direct you to. It is best to do a little research to find out who the principal or yearbook advisor is prior to your visit. Having the name of the decision maker will help you get past the gatekeepers.

Once you are face to face with the decision maker, it is important to provide them with the information that they are looking for:

• - High Quality Samples
• - Bid/ Pricing sheets for end customer
• - Rebates back to the school
• - Administrative products that you offer
• - Duration of shoot/ How many photographers will you bring
• - Information on your photography company
• - Recommendations from current schools
• - Cost to the school (if any)

You can also discuss things that you are going to need from them such as:

• - Names list of students (for marketing or sequencing)
• - Hanging posters or pre-marketing materials that you provide
• - Proofing of names on group images

It is best to discuss all of these details up front so that the administration is not surprised by your plan or needs later. When discussing the details of your shoot, be sure to only promise what you can deliver. This will help you keep the new business and keep your administration happy for the long term!