Beginner’s Guide to High-Volume School & Event Photography.

This guide covers pre-shoot prep, shooting techniques, and efficient post-production.

Whether you’re being hired to shoot school portraits, local sports teams, or an important event, there’s one thing you need to master (besides your camera) for any high-volume photography assignment: your workflow. This means creating an efficient system for capturing, storing, editing, and delivering files.

High-volume photography involves dealing with a large number of images, so having an efficient system from start to finish will save you a ton of time and effort in the long run. This will result in a happier client, a better pay rate, and less headache for you. The following beginner’s guide offers an outline for developing an efficient system to offer bulk photo services to all kinds of clients.

It’s all about having a plan.

Think about the project in three stages, similar to making a movie: pre-production, production, and post production. Pre-production for high-volume photography includes anything that happens before the shoot, like emails, phone calls, research, and planning. Production is the shoot itself, using your camera equipment to create the images. Post-production is everything that happens after the shoot, including image selection, color correction, retouching, and delivery to the clients.

The best advice for photographers of all levels—but especially beginners offering bulk photo services for the first time—is that the amount of time you put into pre-production will pay off exponentially in the production and post-production phases. Skimping on prep can result in chaos on the shoot day, lots of wasted time during editing, and a confused client.

Pre-production - Before you ever pick up a camera for your shoot, you’ll want to have these items buttoned down:

• Discuss logistics and expectations with the client and event organizers to make sure you have a clear understanding of what the shoot day will entail and when they expect delivery of the images. Ask as many questions as you need to make sure everyone is on the same page.
• Write out a schedule, locations, subjects, and a list of must-capture shots, including specific portraits, moments, or group shots. Plan to print this out or to have quick access to a digital copy on the shoot day.
• Think through and document a post-production workflow that has a detailed list of steps on how you will handle the files as soon as the shoot is over. Files will need to be transferred to an external hard drive, backed up to secondary data storage, organized, batch edited with specialized software, then delivered to the clients.
• If appropriate, come up with a few different photo package options for clients to purchase images from you, which could include a combination of digital downloads, specialty prints, and albums. Make it easy and straightforward for the clients, and they’ll be more likely to purchase these extras from you.

Production - Here’s where the rubber meets the road. On the day of your shoot, be sure you’re on top of the following:

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• Know your equipment. You should be able to change aperture, ISO, and shutter speed for correct exposure in your sleep, with a clear understanding of how each adjustment will affect the image. E.g., a fast aperture like f/2.8 will result in a more blurred background; cranking up the ISO will create more noise (e.g. 800 and above); and a fast shutter speed (1/500 and higher) is best to capture action shots.
• Shoot tethered if you can. This only works for high-volume projects like school photography where you will shoot all the images in one location and the subjects are not moving around. Your camera will be on a tripod and tethered to your computer via a cord. Depending on the software you use, you will be able to control the camera from your computer, and the files will upload automatically to your hard drive, which saves a lot of time.
• Have extra batteries and memory cards on hand—more than you think you need! Nothing is worse than getting in the flow of a shoot and having your battery die or seeing “memory card full” pop up on the screen. Cloud storage is a cheap, secure and easy way to back-up your images as you go. For event photography and high-volume assignments, that’s an inevitability, so be prepared for it!
• Refer back to the schedule you created during pre-production to make sure everything is on track during the shoot day. Check off locations, subjects, and shots as you get them, and make notes of anything important to know for post-production or to pass onto the client.
• Connect with subjects by staying relaxed, being friendly, and engaging them in appropriate conversation. The more at ease your subjects feel, the better the images will come out–and since you did all that prep work, you’ll be even more at ease!

Post-production - After what is sure to be a flurry of activity on shoot day, here are some things to keep in mind after the fact:

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• Upload your files to an external hard drive and back them up somewhere else immediately. This creates redundancy that can save you if anything happens to the original files. Better safe than sorry!
• Organize the files based on whatever system makes the most sense for the event, whether it’s date, location, event, or subject.
• Import the images to your chosen editing software. There are many options out there, but Lightroom is the most popular and offers tons of useful functions for creators who offer bulk photo services. With Lightroom, you can upload, back up, add keywords, make selects, color correct, and export images all in one place.
• Batch edit the images by applying the same color corrections across any number of files. In Lightroom, you can make changes to one image, copy those alterations, then paste them to as many of the files as you want. Take a look at all the files to make sure the color corrections are appropriate, and tweak individual photos as necessary.
• Export the images to a small file size that will make data transfer fast for both you and the client. Once they’ve made selects or purchased a print or photo product, you can go back to Lightroom and export a higher resolution file if needed.

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While high-volume photography might sound intimidating, if you put effort into planning and developing an efficient workflow, you’ll be able to offer bulk photo services with a level of confidence that comes with knowing exactly what you’re doing. Producing and executing successful school photography and event photography shoots means happy clients, and happy clients will tell their friends and family about the incredible job you did, leading to more paid work for you. Win-win-win!