So how is the Alpha testing going? We’re furiously working away getting the product ready for the beta launch in mid-late August 2009. This means you will be able to use PhotoMerchant to host your own professional photograph website and sell your photos online, instead of just playing pretend. If you’re new to PhotoMerchant, visit our website and register to receive an invitation to join our beta program.

Customise your website design

You may not know it, but there are plenty of options for you to customise the look and feel of your site in the “Website” navigation tab. For starters, in the “Theme” section there are 5 great colour themes (each with 10 complimentary link colours), there are 8 font options and a selection of 4 layout options for your home page and portfolio section.

You can also add your business logo to your site. If you’ve got Photoshop, create a 300×50 pixel (72dpi) document, design or import your logo and then “Save for Web and Devices” as a transparent PNG, JPG or Gif. You can even upload a Favicon, which is the little graphic that appears in your web browsers’ address bar. For inspiration you can download one here or create your own.

You can also rename every page in your site navigation. Under the “Theme” tab scroll down to “Navigation” and you will have the option to change the name of each page. You can turn individual pages on/off, select which page will be your home page, plus, you can alternate the left/right positioning of text, images and navigation until you get the look you’re looking for. We’ve created a demo website called Million2One which shows how you can customise your site using the basic options that are currently available.

Coming soon, we’ll be offering many, many more layout options, more colours, fonts and customisation options. We’re just scratching the surface with what we plan to offer including, animated galleries, flash galleries, blogs and more…

Preparing your photos for sale

With luck, one of the main reasons you are using PhotoMerchant is because you want to be able to sell photographic prints directly to your customers. With PhotoMerchant you can offer a variety of pricing and printing options to suit your business needs.

To get started, you will need to define the wholesale costs of your “Paper Sizes” and “Paper Types”. Click on “Business” in the navigation and then click through to each section. Add the sizes and wholesale costs from your existing print house, completely make them up (this is just for testing purposes after all) or you can download the price lists from our US partners Burrell Color Imaging or Nulab Professional Imaging in Australia.

Next, go into “Shipping Options” and add some default prices, otherwise you might end up incurring the costs of shipping to your customers. For costs on shipping you should consult your preferred courier company or visit the USPS and Australia Post websites for pricing options.

Once these have been setup, you can then create different “Pricing Models” for different types of photographic service. For example, you might set premium prices for your Wedding photography or more conservative prices for Corporate photography. You can then assign your pricing models per “Gallery” using the edit function.

You can also setup different “Feature Sets” which allow you to determine which “Paper Sizes” and “Paper Types” are available per Gallery. For example, you may only want to offer medium to large print sizes for your wedding clientele and limit their paper stock to Gloss and Metallic. “Feature Sets” are a powerful way for you to control the print options you wish to sell.

PhotoMerchant will be launching with Self-Fulfilment capabilities using PayPal as the merchant gateway. This means that you will be able to manage the printing process with your existing print house, or you by using our print partners Burrell Colour Imaging in the US or Nulab Professional Imaging in Australia.

In the near future we plan on offering Full-Fulfilment printing, meaning PhotoMerchant will automatically send print orders directly to our partner print houses and then drop-ship the finished products to your customers, and will use our own built in merchant facility. But that’s another bigger email for another day…

Embed Twitter, YouTube and Widgets into your Website

There are a wide range of Video, Flash and Social Media widgets that can easily be embedded into your website. As an example, on my LomoVision website I have a video page that contains three Vimeo Videos, my home page has a Twitter Widget (available from Twitstamp) and my blog page uses Widgetbox. You don’t need to have a basic understanding of HTML, but it helps.

To embed these widgets into your website, you will need to use the HTML option in the WYSIWYG editor. Click on “Website” in the main navigation and then choose the page you wish to edit (it may be called something like “Custom Page 1” or whatever you have changed it to). Click on the “HTML button” located in the “Body Text” section. Clicking on the HTML box will open a pop-up window which contains the formatting code for the copy on that page. You can simply copy and paste the code before the top <p> to insert the widget at the top of the page or after the </p> to insert it at the bottom. You can add as many as you like.

You can get widgets from a range of sources including Google widgets, Widgetbox , YouTube, Vimeo and more…

Secure individual Galleries with password protection

PhotoMerchant has the ability to create private galleries so that only specific “Customers”, “Customer Groups” or people who have been given a “Password” can have access. This is particularly useful for wedding, children and corporate photography when the subject matter needs to be protected from the general public.

There are two ways you can make your Gallery’s private: 1) assign a unique password or 2) give access to specific “Customers” or “Customer Groups”.

To create a “Password” for a Gallery, click on the “Edit” button or create a “New Gallery”. Near the bottom of the pop-up window select the “Protected” option. A password box will then enable you to enter a unique password for you to manually forward on to your customer.

To assign the Gallery to a unique “Customer” or “Customer Group” you will need to create a New Customer or “Customer Group” or assign the it to an existing customer. Click “Edit” and then select “Visible only to selected customers and/or groups” in the “Visibility” option. The “Save” button will change to “Set Permissions” which will present you with the ability to choose who can have access. Using this option, the only way your customers will see the gallery is if they “Log In” to your website where it will appear in the “Portfolio” section.

It’s easy to create a “New Customer” (just click “Customers” in the navigation and click the “New Customer” button and then fill out the forms with name, email and password details (they will be then sent an email with their login details).

Note: If you leave the “Visible to all users” but have a selected “Protected”, the gallery “Cover Image” will be visible with a “Padlock Icon” in your portfolio section, meaning the gallery is password protected.

It’s much easier than it sounds. Why not log in to PhotoMerchant and give it a whirl right now?

In the next issue we will highlight the new features available in the beta release.

The workflow, presentation and sales methods and practices are an integral part of any photography business. However, they can also be costly.

In the last post, I raised the issue of the ‘real cost’ of photography.

As a youthful photography enthusiast, I thought professional photography was a pretty lucrative business. My contacts on photography business forums were charging anywhere between $1,000 USD to $15,000 USD for a wedding and I couldn’t believe the mark-up.

Great, I thought! So I just work for 8-12 hours one weekend, polish up the photos in Photoshop, and then sell the prints to my client at a huge profit – maybe 70-90% higher than the price of printing. And I get paid for my weekend work!

This was all true – but after quite a few long nights with Photoshop, I realised that my calculations had neglected one element – I hadn’t counted the cost of my time as well as the learning curve.

WORK = TIME = EXPENSE

Today I want to present a simple example to illustrate the costs associated with doing a single wedding. Weddings are relatively simple from a business and workflow perspective in comparison to other types of photography. They are a little more stressful because if you stuff it up… it’s not good, but generally, they’re straight forward and repetitive. Ask any seasoned professional photographer, traditionally, weddings are the bread and butter of your business, especially when you’re starting out.

Let’s consider the following example:You agree to shoot Bill and Jane’s wedding. You offer them a package which includes your time for 8 hours on the day, a set of printed proofs, 25 5×7″ prints, 8 8×12″ prints and 1 16×20″ print. You also explain that you will place the proofs online for friends and family to view and find the image numbers and email you so the prints can be ordered and shipped. You offer this package for $1,850.

You need to keep track of every hour you spend working on Bill and Jane’s wedding.

In this example, your time was used as follows:

• Driving to wedding (0.5 hours)
• Shooting the wedding (8.0 hours)
• Driving home from wedding (0.5 hours)
• Downloading images to computer (0.25 hours)
• Making duplicates (backups) of original files (0.5 hours)
• Post processing of photos (12.0 hours) – you took around 700 photos and are going to provide Bill and Jane with 150
• Preparing images for web presentation (2.0 hours) – This is basically resizing images to lower resolution
• Uploading images to website & making it look pretty (2.0 hours)
• Sending order for 150 proofs to print house (1.0 hour)
• Speaking with Bill & Jane, managing their order(s) as well as any orders from friends and family (approx 5.0 hours in total)
• Managing the shipping and billing of all orders (3.0 hours)
• Misc (5.0 hours)

Total time spent: 39.75 hours

The cost of printing and shipping the 150 proofs to Bill and Jane is $0.90 per print (you are using a reputable professional print house, printing on archival paper on commercial grade Lambda or similar printers). $0.90 x 150 + $12.00 (shipping) = $147.00.

Once the entire package is delivered printing and shipping costs are:

Proofs as above = $147.00
$1.35 x 25 (5×7″ prints) = $33.75
$3.50 x 8 (8×12″ prints) = $28.00
$7.00 x 1 (16×20″ print) = $7.00
Shipping = $12.00
Total for prints: $218.25

You can’t forget the costs of your equipment, fuel for the car, paying an assistant, and general business operating costs:

Fuel = $15.00
Wear and Tear on equipment (depreciation) = $50.00
Assistant = $120 ($15/hr)
Business Insurance = $35 – this is based on a $2000/yr cost
Equipment Insurance = $20 – this is based on a $1040/yr cost
Marketing material = $5 – this is a very small marketing budget approx $260/yr
Misc = $35 – there’s lots of expenses we haven’t covered here
Total operating costs: $280.00

Now we take the package price of $1,850, subtract the print and materials cost of $218.25 and the operating cost of $280.00 and then divide the result by the number of hours worked (39.75):

1,850 – 218.25 – 280.00 / 39.75 = $34.00 per hour. This equates approximately $70,720.00 per annum. Now this isn’t really your salary, you have to put some money back into the business. Let’s say you put $10,000 per annum back into the business. your hourly rate drops to $29.20 and your take home salary would be $60,720.00 per annum. It gets worse. From the salary you need to deduct tax and money for your retirement plan. That will leave you with much less in reality.

The above example is just that. An example. All calculations are based on doing 1 wedding such as the one above each week for 52 weeks. A photographer just starting out isn’t going to have this much business and an established photographer is likely to have much more business than this but also higher expenses.

So,

How can you increase your photography income?

You should always be endeavoring to improve your photography and editing skills. This boosts the “quality” of your product which as was discussed in my last post, will generate more business and therefore more income.

Streamline your workflow. In the example above you spent 12 hours on post processing. More experienced digital photographers might spend less time as well as achieve better results. This comes with learning and experience as well as trial and error.

Raise your prices. This is always an option. Especially if your work is good.

It’s my belief however, that skill alone will not solve these problems entirely.

I believe that in this era of digital photography, we need to rethink the way we deal with photographs. We’re still struggling because we’re still working from the mindset of traditional photography. My feeling is that we need to start using digital technology not only to shoot and edit – we need to start using digital technology along the whole workflow.

Sure, in the end, customers are always going to want a picture they can hang on their wall. But there’s a lot more we can do with digital technology from shooting to printing that will help us take better photos and produce more efficient, valuable images.

I have much more to say on the topic of streamlining your workflow and the use of digital technology, especially when it comes to using the Internet to your advantage. Stay tuned over the coming weeks.

So let’s hear it… how can we start using digital technology more to improve our efficiency? Any ideas? Anything you’ve tried?

Leave me a comment – I’m looking forward to hearing your ideas.

Welcome to the first post of the PhotoMerchant Blog.

PhotoMerchant’s first appearance online is not quite the beginning, for me – it’s… well, somewhere in the middle. I’ve been working on Project PhotoMerchant for a while now, and getting the blog online is an exciting step, but there’s more to come. Let me give you a brief profile of PhotoMerchant…

Who we are

I’m Derek and PhotoMerchant is my brain-child. I’m a software developer with a keen interest in photography. Through my own experiences and my involvement with the photographic community, I’ve recognised that photographers today also need to know a lot about computing and digital technology to be able to work efficiently and produce high-quality images. But no-one wants the technology getting in the way of what you can do – it needs to be transparent and easy, and it needs to add something that wasn’t available before.

My specialty is the development of web applications. After spending a lot of time participating in online forums, talking with other photographers, and working through my own challenges, I’m keen to contribute to the photographic community by helping other photographers to take advantage of the opportunities that web technologies offer.

PhotoMerchant is more than just me. I work with a very talented team and hopefully through this blog, you’ll get to meet some of the other developers and designers working on the project with me.

What’s the project?

PhotoMerchant’s first foray into the web is via this blog. This blog will be a discussion of the ways photography, the web, and software intersect. Some of the topics I’m planning to look at in the first few weeks include:

• Workflow challenges - the challenges are many, but there are ways technology can help photographers.
• Sales – generating income from your work – how do you get customers to purchase? How do you make buying and selling easy (for you and the customer)?
• Presentation – using the web to showcase and sell your images.
• Time management – improving the way you work with customers and suppliers (print houses, couriers, etc.)
• Web – you’ve probably heard the term Web 2.0? There are some interesting developments here that may be useful to photographers.

But, as I said, the blog is ’somewhere in the middle’. I’ve got a lot to say about these topics, but I’ve also been working on developing some solutions to these problems. I’m not going to say much about that now, but will be revealing more in the weeks ahead.

I’d also be interested to get your thoughts on a number of different topics. I’ve placed a poll to the right of the page. Don’t hesitate to answer it, it takes 2 seconds!

I’m planning to post about three times a week. I hope you’ll stick with me – I’m really excited about what I’ve got to offer in the way of advice and solutions and I hope you find it valuable. To make sure you don’t miss a post, subscribe via the RSS feed and your comments are welcome.