Hi Gary,

David is right on the money. Initially what I did (starting at portrait events) was offer pre-paid discounts on packages as well as prints. This increased my sales significantly while letting us avoid on-site proofing at busy portrait events.

These were orders placed without seeing proofs at all and people went for it with no issues. We've only been asked twice now "What if I don't like the proofs?"

For events in places like "the cave", I really didn't want to go that route since the results were less predictable. However, when I offered only online sales after the event sales were pretty blah.

So, my first step was to have my wife and lovely assistant man a laptop and show proofs while taking orders. Sales immediately went up, in some cases WAY up. For folks who didn't have time to select prints, but had time to stop by and at least see that there were enough good ones to choose from, we offered print credits. That way they could get the 10% on-site discount, but still pick their images later.

The next step (starting this weekend after my test run with another photographer a couple weeks ago) is to have prints up to 8x10 available on-site. To do this we need a heavy duty printer that will stand up to being lugged around as well as a fast printer with good quality.

We decided on a Shinko S1245 which cranks out an 8x10 in under 30 seconds with a per-print cost less than using WHCC or any of the other online labs, plus shipping charges go away. The really cool thing is that the printer can turn out prints that range from really glossy to really matte with no change in media.

We've found that with only one computer for folks to view, we have a constant line 3-4 people deep so we'll be adding a couple more soon. For now, we're taking two laptops, but one of them will have to be used to run the printer so it won't be available full time for proofing. Eventually, I'd like one computer for us and four for the clients.

The final solution (at least as I foresee now) will be to have four viewing stations with proofing systems installed that are intuitive enough that we don't have to hand-hold p people through the process. No keyboard access for customers, only mouse clicks. We're looking at two different software packages to get it done. EOS run offline and a gallery template from Lightroom also run off line. If I can ever get EOS set up, I think it will be better in the long run, but man what a pain to get up and running . . .

What system are you putting in place?