When I talk about Shooting Santa in the run up to Christmas other portrait photographers often look at me baffled and ask ‘Why do you bother? You can’t make much money doing that.’

In a way that might be true but short term financial gain isn’t what I do it for. My real reason for shooting Santa……. Data collection and promotion.

Last year I had a Santa set-up at a Christmas market which cost me nothing as I agreed to take a handful of ‘promotional’ shots for the event organisers. I wasn’t by any means the official photographer for the event but as they had paid for the Santa they just wanted some images of him walking around a bit. For the sake of a few happy snaps I’d saved myself a nice bundle for the pitch rent and my model fees.

I had done similar shoots in the past and experimented with selling and printing onsite. This always proved to be a logistical nightmare and the weather always threw it’s spanner into the works.

Last year I changed tactics and rather than worrying about making a little extra pocket money I concentrated on getting the numbers in and capturing data.

The set-up was simple enough….. Santa sitting on a chair….. Put child on Santa and shoot.

Instead of putting images online or previewing the shots on a laptop I simply showed the the back of my camera and offered the parents the digital image for a small sum (about £5). I then got the parents details and emailed them the image the very next day. Read More→

Michael Shilling

Michael has been working as a photographer for the last ten years. In that time he has shot over 100,000 peoples’ portraits and worked in four different continents. In 2001 Michael graduated with a degree in photography from Manchester Metropolitan University.

www.memorygate.co.uk