On Sunday, March 24th 2024, June Bug Photography held a day of FREE Photos with the Easter Bunny! Obviously, offering FREE photos isn’t a sustainable business model…but I decided to do it anyway. I wanted to have a low stress, quick, fun way to meet families in my community, and offer some beautiful photos with the Easter Bunny. Idid a lot of planning and scheming in advance to work smarter and not harder, so this would be a positive and low stress event for both myself any all the families that joined me.
Some of the ways I streamlined the process before even picking up the camera on the day of the Easter Bunny Photos:
To start, I set up my calendar with an online booking link. This link would collect emails from clients, and start a workflow that would automatically send out a session reminder, a map/directions to the studio, etc. This way, I could post a quick announcement for the FREE Photos, and clients could book following the link posted. I had to do absolutely ZERO communication with the many clients once they booked, but they were automatically provided with EVERYTHING they needed to prepare for a successful photo session. I was shocked that the 10 sessions I had available booked within SECONDS of me announcing them. I had a sweet friend offer to take a shift as the Easter Bunny, so I opened up another 10 spots in the afternoon. (I learned that the Easter Bunny gets VERY warm in the studio, so my first Easter Bunny could only handle about 1.5 hours of shooting time). The backend setup did take some time, including setting the times I would be available, setting up the workflow with information for clients, etc. BUT! I only had to set it up once and then I could “set it and forget it”. I use 17hats.com as my client management program and it is amazing. It saves me so much time on admin work!
My next step, I am SUPER proud of and love this idea. Because I didn’t want to have to set up a separate gallery for each family that comes in during the day, I let clients know all images would be in ONE gallery and they could download the images of their family from there. This was a HUGE time saver, as setting up and separating images by family takes time, and with so many families participating in our Easter Bunny Photos, this would have added hours to my workflow. Having ONE gallery for the event was so easy, and I set up the gallery weeks in advance. Then, I created a free QR code for the gallery link and printed a super cute business card that included the QR code for the gallery. Each family that participated got a cute little business card (hello, marketing!) that had a QR code that would lead them to the final gallery and the card indicated the date images would be ready. This way, clients can access their photos/gallery without me having to import emails, or do any communication/email at all! Easy peasy. Their gallery allows them to download their images for FREE, and is all automated and is zero work for me once I set up the gallery.
Finally, I intentionally used the same lighting setup for the entire day. The light stayed put, my camera setting stayed the same, which made batch editing SO EASY. All images had the same white balance, the same exposure, and the same settings. I was VERY intentional to make sure my straight out of camera images were as close to “perfect” as possible, and edits were a breeze. I did quick tweaks in Adobe Camera raw all batched with the same settings. From there I did do final finishing in photoshop, because I’m a perfectionist…but this wasn’t really even necessary. Photoshop polishing was also batched, and I was able to edit the entire day of images (about 100 final images) in just a few hours. I definitely overdelivered, but I was so happy to do so. This was such a joyful day, and I loved how stress free and celebratory it was.
Once I finished editing, I uploaded all 100 images to the preset photo gallery (I use Shootproof.com as my gallery host) and the gallery was ready for clients to check and download their images at their convenience.
Finally, because my booking program (through 17hats) collects and saves the email from my bookings, all of my new families are now a part of my email news blast so they can keep up with all of my future events. They are now part of my June Bug Photography family, and I am so happy to have met them! Following the Easter Bunny Photo event, I sent out an email newsletter to ALL of my VIP newsletter list with some fun photos from the Easter Bunny event, and a little bit of information about my Monochromatic Milestone Sessions, which are held monthly.
Whew. That’s all!
