It's Going to Get Busy

This was the announcement slide that was projected in the lign-up at our church since last Wednesday. The e-mail our pastor put out was titled Pictorial Directory - Not a joke. This was funny as a number of years ago the church accepted an offer by a studio to have a pictorial directory. This became a sales tool for the studio and a bust for the church. When a family had their sitting they were presented with a number of packages order right their. This did not sit well with much of the membership and certainly id not go over with the pastor when he found out there would be no directory form the studio as promised.

Jump forward to present day, the church management software the church uses now has the capability to produce a directory with images. With the ability to produce this document in house, we just needed a photographer. Hmmm... I can do that.

After looking at it more closely, it will be a couple week commitment to get the images captured with my flying schedule and all. It will be a fun time to see as many members come through for photos. In talking with our pastor I proposed what I wanted to do.

It is not about selling prints form this shoot but; I wanted to have a table set up with some simple marketing material displayed so people could ask questions and schedule a session outside of the directory shoot. He had no problem with that so one of the marketing displays I have for this project is shown below.

The idea of this project is to provide jpegs to the church for the directory. They will not be for sale and are not to be distributed for personal use. There are a couple of reasons why we determined this to be the condition.

• To do so would be detrimental to any future income stream.  
• The images will not be retouched as they are not intended to be enlarged but for a photo directory.

The time it would take to retouch to a professional level each of these images would not be a good business decision. When working with families that subsequently employ our services of course we will produce a high level product. Yes we are having special pricing as a promotional during the directory project.

Anyhow it is off and running today. Got to get over to church and set up lighting and such so take care and I'll give an update later in the week.

Cya... Doug