Picture this, a frustrated parent stands at a foam board lined with dozens of beautiful color photos of a musical, dance recital, etc. They are trying to decipher the secret code of numbers and letters to present an accurate order form so that they end up with Susie's solo instead Jim Bob hamming it up, sound familiar? Add to that the fact that the end result will be almost no net gain to anyone, including the photographer.
Once you add up the cost of processing, printing and cataloguing all those prints, forgeddaboutit! The profit margin is so small that any benefit to your theatre will be minuscule!
Now imagine this: parents stop by a desk, plop down their $25 -$30 pick up a CD which has over 200 beautiful images, ready to be printed by the nearest Walmart or Walgreens, (for about 20 cents to a buck a piece depending on size) and you pocket all but about 30 cents of that! That's right, they get Susie and Jim Bob and your theatre funds tuition assistance, buys new lighting, sends a director to a new festival, whatever!
A few months back my wife decided it was time for us to upgrade our digital photo capabilities. Instead of settling for a measly 4 or 5 megapixel snapshot model we purchased a Canon EOS Rebel XT digital SLR. That may be Greek to you, here's what it means: it shoots like an Instamatic film camera (no delay) and captures images at 8.1 megapixels (more than twice what most good consumer cameras are making now) that blow up to billboard size and are so beautiful they will make you cry!
Now add to this the option of making DVDs (even from 1 unmoving camera during dress rehearsal) with a simple title slide and some credits with the blackouts cut out, and you have people paying you to promote your programs!
Kids will show your videos to anyone who will sit still and proud parents and grandparents can afford to give away pictures of your event to the mailman!
The only downside to this way of doing things is that we don't get to spend as much time with the mom who used to come and do our photos. But the camera has already earned its $600 price tag back twice over in just six short months. I was also able to get the local paper to run one of our own photos! Our medium size studio (50-75 students with about six academy shows a year) will make between 5 and $7,000 next year for making the kind of digital archives we needed anyway!
You do the math 1 good digital camera (which some parent probably owns and might be willing to donate their time to use) + a little computer expertise (again a volunteer) = big profits for you! With our setup we got a 2 gig card that pops right into the computer, less than an hour of editing nets me about 225 pics out of a possible 500+ so even getting the right shot is easy just keep shooting, it's digital and costs you nothing!
