As some of you may know, I am a passionate photographer and in the last few months I covered a few festivals and milongas (you can see the results on my website under EVENTS). I have a 9-5 job, as a computer programmer but I'm getting to a point where I'd like to stop doing that. As such, I put some thought into becoming a full time photographer. Part of that research was to see if one can combine tango with photography and try to make some money (not necessarily make a living just by covering tango events).
So for a few of the festivals I covered, I offered prints for sale, at what I thought would be a reasonable cost ($3.75 per 4x6 print). Alternatively, I also offered the full resolution files for a similar cost. While I was not expecting much, I was quite surprised to see that among the three festivals I covered (Alternative in Providence, Yale in spring and Boston in June), only ONE person purchased 3 prints. That's it. I was wondering if anyone cared to comment on that. Is this what you would've guessed? I know I would certainly pay to have some good shots of myself. One reason I can think of is that people could see (and download) a decent size picture from the web for free and apparently that is good enough for most people. To try to clarify what kind of future a professional "Tango photographer" and/or "Tango/videographer" might have, I have a few questions I would like to ask the community. 1) If a screen resolution picture of you dancing is free to download, would you have any interest in a 4x6 paper print at $3.75? How about in having the full resolution file for $3.75 2) If a screen resolution picture of you dancing is NOT available to download (but rather just a tiny thumbnail size one or a screen size image with watermarking covering most of the surface), would you have any interest in a 4x6 paper print at $3.75? How about in having the full resolution file for $3.75 3) I was thinking about offering (at festivals and/or milongas) a service to record video of the patrons dancing (on demand). It would work like this, the interested party would come see me, pay a fee (per song), and we'd agree on timing. Then I would record them dance with their favorite partner (using a device that allows me to film from a height of 12-15feet, which would allow me to track them at all times). They would then get a DVD at the end of the evening with a high quality recoding. The price I have in mind right now would be $10 per DVD + $10 for each song recorded. So to have a full 3 song tanda recorded, the fee would be $40. If one more DVD (with the same content) is needed, for the other partner, it would be $10 extra. Is this something you would be interested in? Do you find the price: too high, low, about right? An example of a recording I made is here : http://youtube.com/watch?v=tATLum7aDCc . Obviously the quality the youtube video is abysmal compared with the original file which the customer would get. I would appreciate any thoughts you might have on this issue. Cheers Sorin my photography site: http://www.bostonphotographs.com my milonga review site: http://www.milongareview.com blog: http://sorinsblog.blogspot.com _______________________________________________ Tango-L mailing list [email protected] http://mailman.mit.edu/mailman/listinfo/tango-l
