Santa's grotto at school xmas fair - do you take photos of the kids/santa, if so how?

[sandyballs]

We're looking into this as an option, but does it make it too expensive. How do you do it/manage it? Digital/polaroid??

Is the extra profit worth the extra hassle involved?

you could charge say £1 to have your photo taken with santa, then send it via email, That way not a lot of hassle and no costs!

I did it last year with a DSLR, but no reason why not a compact. I then uploaded all the pics to my computer, tweaked them a bit (again not necessary) uploaded them to Bonusprint for 10p a print.

Tips:

Make sure the other pta helpers are charging enough to make it worth your while - ours weren't!

Get some way of getting the prints to the right families. I left them with the office as I didn't know what class all the children were in and was plagued for ages by the few parents that didn't get theirs for some reason.

We are doing photos and printing them straight away on a photo printer. We will take 5, then swap memory cards, then print the 5, swap back etc. I am hoping this is going to work out! We didn't want to just print everyones in case people didn't want to buy them and we ended up out of pocket!

It is cheaper to get prints done online usually. I think once you factor in paper and ink it can be around 30p a print as opposed to 5 to 10p, though there is also postage and more hassle.

Thanks for replies. Will have a think about all this and see if it is worth it.

I think last time we did it, we charged about £1, and got them developed after.

We had them book a slot before, so we sent home a slip, then gave them a timeslot (IYSWIM) - cut down on waiting in line. and it actually worked really well.

I think a combination of the booking slip/ prepaid timeslot/ printing on a photoprinter would work very well indeed - you could tell them to go off and spend some money, then have the photos done in half an hour.

I think you can buy those cardboard frame thingy's too.

we are just telling parents they can bring their own camera and take a pic if they want to.