hi Guys

in a few days, i will be spending $1100 on a single shoot, for model fees, wardrobe, props, locations and transport. this will be the most expensive microstock shoot for me ever. i'm curious what's the most amount of money you would spend on a single shoot?

wish me luck 

cheers.

I don't spend much at all.  The biggest expense would be fuel and I don't think that's ever be more than about $40.  Most of my objects that I've photographed have been from the boot sale.  I sometimes splash out �1 but it's usually 50 pence  Occasionally I've gone crazy and spent �5.  Never paid model fees because I don't use them for microstock.

c�5, which might not count as I ate the prop afterwards.

Certainly not more than 100,- .If I spend more I don't put it on microstock but even for macro I would be very cautious to spend a 4-digit-sum. I hope and I'm pretty sure it doesn't work out for you some people need to learn it the hard way!

500 hundred bucks is the biggest amount I ever spent on a shoot with models... In my case, I recover that within 3-4 months, depending on how well the series sell. But the funny thing is most my bestsellers costed me nothing, just my time:)

c�5, which might not count as I ate the prop afterwards.

LOL... same here.  And annual vacation pictures are charged to entertainment.

A group of 5 microstockers spent 700 EUR each for a 2 day shoot last year. The top dog of the group that I talked to approximately half a year later, told me he got that back with 3 images. He's a 100k+ exclusive at IS

Oh!  1100  bucks, peanuts!  I dont even want to tell you what I paid Cindy Crawford, to stand model inside an oil-refinery. Big bucks my friednd, big bucks.

cindy crawford for microstock? 

this is an interesting topic. I've wondered this myself at times. if you count travel, I spent close to 3,500 CAD  to go to London. but I've almost made it back in sales on the shots, not to mention the education I received while there. I guess that would be my single most expensive shoot. however I have spent close to $500 on a shoot for authentic costumes, paying models and peripherals. i don't do that frequently of course.

I believe that authenticity pays off. I know it does pay off sometimes for colleagues who also invest in their shoots to make them extraordinary. And then sometimes it doesn't and you're left with expensive props laying around. I keep a table of expenses for each shoot and I tally sales against the expenditures.

sometimes something had to be done. Even and also at microstockbusiness.
Some Illustrations of me will never pay out, not in hundred years....
But they have to be done.

My best sellers only costed me my time (a few landscape and industrial pictures).

Doing model shoots I didn't spend more than 200 Eur so far per one single photo shoot (the session cost did go above a few times, but in these cases it was split with the other photographer(s)).

I certainly would have spent more if I was doing it as a real part-time or full-time job, but not while it remains a hobby.

Quote from: SNP on February 29, 2012, 14:26

I keep a table of expenses for each shoot and I tally sales against the expenditures.

That's a really smart idea.  Ashamed to say I don't do that.  I know for a fact that some of my more successful series are paying the bills for the less successful ones, regardless of cost. 

Yep.

Quote from: SNP on February 29, 2012, 14:26

I keep a table of expenses for each shoot and I tally sales against the expenditures.

as an independent contributor, i found it really hard and time consuming to keep sales of each files. so my lazy way is to use SS catalog manager to put each shoot as a set to track performance. i have done just over 85 shoots (proper shoots with models not just snap here and there), on average cost $300 each, the catalog manager tells me that i have made profit from each every shoot from SS alone, and SS is only about 38% of my total microstock income.

I think it would be much tougher as an independent. as an exclusive, I use DeepMeta. I have my own keywords for my series. I search on the keywords for a set of images, and DM tallies totals for the selected images automatically. so it isn't much work. again, it's mostly out of curiosity. like I said, I have bestsellers that cost almost nothing to produce, so it's not always relevant