What's your opinion?

[staceylynn]

Back in June I went to a vineyard for their 2 year anniversary and had a great time. It was a bit of a travel as I live in NC and it was in Virginia, but my boyfriend's mother invited us and we were happy to go. Had an amazing time, bought some amazing wine and jam and took some snapshots while I was there.

Even though they're only 2 years old, it seems they're doing amazingly well. I had read online that if you blog about a wedding, be sure to link the vendors and florists and so on on your page to give them credit and soon, someone will catch onto your name at one of those places and perhaps even recommend you, not to mention bringing traffic to your site from search engines. They also suggested sending the images that you took of those vendors/florists/what have you to those places just so they can see how amazing your work is and be happy they have photos of what they've done.

So I sent a few small images that I took at the anniversary get together up there to the vineyard and the manager wrote back right away and said they were great and he may want to use a couple for promotional use. I am going to talk to my business manager about this (boyfriend's mother) to see what she thinks, but what are your thoughts? I have a few ideas in mind...

Either he can purchase them to use, or (since I had a lot of fun photographing them), I can offer to come up and shoot more and he can use them in exchange for me putting some prints of them in their shop to sell. They have a lot of customers and do great business and I really do love their products - so perhaps I can ask for exposure and a few free products in exchange for shooting a few photos for them to use as promotional use?

What are your opinions on this? Are there other options perhaps I'm not seeing, since I'm pretty excited about the email at the moment?

Thanks in advance! To see some of the images, you can check them out on my blog here. The last one was shot at home and I'd love to shoot more like that for them to use/sell prints of.

 

[dan1son]

You're going to be better at judging the worth of your photographs than I will be. However, the current pictures seem VERY geared towards that specific winery and will make great promotional shots for them. As a business I'd imagine they'll understand the worth of your images and be more than happy to pay for their use. You should be able to come up with a worthwhile price depending on what exactly they plan on doing with them.

If you're going to go the other route and place photographs for sale you'll definitely want to shoot less branded shots. I wouldn't buy a print with blatantly obvious brand recognition, but I would buy wine related prints if generic enough. There is nothing wrong with bartering your services for their products/services if you still get a good end of the deal. That usually works out quite well since the wine is worth far less to them directly than it is if you buy it outright.

 

[staceylynn]

You're going to be better at judging the worth of your photographs than I will be. However, the current pictures seem VERY geared towards that specific winery and will make great promotional shots for them. As a business I'd imagine they'll understand the worth of your images and be more than happy to pay for their use. You should be able to come up with a worthwhile price depending on what exactly they plan on doing with them.

If you're going to go the other route and place photographs for sale you'll definitely want to shoot less branded shots. I wouldn't buy a print with blatantly obvious brand recognition, but I would buy wine related prints if generic enough. There is nothing wrong with bartering your services for their products/services if you still get a good end of the deal. That usually works out quite well since the wine is worth far less to them directly than it is if you buy it outright.

Thanks for your input.

I'm just excited because I've never had someone ask me for this type of service before - so I want to see if there are options besides the ones I have thought of that I have to consider.

 

[ShaunK]

Both of your ideas sound good. Go with what you're happy with, although if they agree to the 2nd, it might have longer lasting implications/associations than an outright sale. Might lead to more opportunities in the future.