Summer has been slow to come in Calgary this year, but I've managed to get some great shooting days for the events I'm covering. July 13th, I shot the Coral Springs Triathlon in Calgary. With that, I'm using my PhotoShelter Personal Archive to sell personal use licensing of those event photos. It's a great self-serve selling system. I'm not a computer or web programming whiz, so I opted to use PhotoShelter for online sales. Once the uploading of images is done, the client is able to purchase the files from the archive, with no further interaction on my part. I also set up PayPal to collect the money. PhotoShelter has very thorough instructions on how to set everything up. Configuration of PhotoShelter and PayPal still took a couple of hours though, mostly because several decisions need to be made during the process, and I was back and forth with the instructions a lot.
On the subject of uploading, even with high-speed Internet, it took a couple of days to upload 300+ jpg format photos ~2MB in size. Of course this wasn't constant uploading, I sent the files in batches of 30 or so, in between the post processing of all the raw files. I realize though, that this is a process that needs streamlining or automating, and next time I have hundreds of files, I need to figure that out better.
As far as the personal use licensing, I'm going this way as the photos are unique to each athlete so the market for the photos is very limited. Plus, none of the photos are model released. I will also sell prints, but in order to do so using PhotoShelter, I would have to use an American supplier and all the pricing would be in $US. My events are all very local to Calgary, and I don't feel right selling in $US. I'll sell prints if people contact me directly, but since most people do their own printing, I'm not counting on that. I'm hoping that eventually, PhotoShelter will partner with a print supplier in Canada so that production and shipping costs will be less, and will also be in $CAD. Maybe Technicare would be interested? They would be a perfect partner, as they have labs from Vancouver to Winnipeg, so could service the country well.
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