—— Any Stage · Bookings ——
Sold-Out Mini Sessions
Plan, price and fill your dates
Who it's for: any photographer who wants a diary that fills itself, for a day or a weekend. Your first paying clients, a full diary in a quiet season, or a low-risk way to test a new location.
And it works whatever you shoot: families, headshots, newborns, couples or products.
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The Problem
There's a right way and a wrong way to run mini sessions.
I did it the wrong way first. When I started out, my minis were £75, available whenever anyone fancied one, and booked by the clients who valued my work the least. I was busy, I was tired, and I was barely earning a thing.
These days my mini sessions sell out to a waitlist, most of them within hours of one email. Minute for minute, they're the most profitable photography I do.
Same photographer. Same park. A completely different model.
What it Is
Eight short self-paced video lessons that hand you that model, step by step. Taught from ten years of running my own.
You'll build your own mini-session event: the date, the place, the format and the limited slots.
You'll set a price that makes minis your most valuable work instead of your cheapest.
You'll build the waitlist and landing page that sell it, and the email launch that fills a diary in a morning. Because here's the finding from my own booking data that changed everything: clients book mini sessions the moment they're announced, a median of 47 days before the shoot. The launch is the marketing event, not the shoot date. This course teaches you to build the launch.
You'll plan the day itself, British weather included. And you'll add the upsell that lifts every single booking after the shoot.
You'll also get my mistakes, so you don't have to make them. The £75 sessions. The 45-minute "minis" that devalued everything. The 15-minute experiment my regular clients hated.
The full launch kit comes with it: the ten email templates (an automated welcome email included), the offer and pricing worksheets, the waitlist sign-up cheat sheet, the booking-day plan, the weather and sickness policy card, and a one-page launch plan to pull it all together. The three AI prompts that interview you and draft your plans and emails in your own words run on Claude's free plan, so there's nothing extra to buy.
8 short video lessons, all under ten minutes
10 email templates, ready to make yours
47 days: the median head start clients give a mini-session launch, from my own booking data
What You Will Walk Away With
A mini-session event that sells out, and a model you can run again every season
Your event planned: the date, the place, the format and the limited slots.
A price that makes minis your most valuable work instead of your cheapest.
The waitlist and landing page that do the selling for you.
The email launch that fills a diary in a morning, with all ten templates included.
A plan for the day itself, British weather included (if your location is outdoors).
The upsell that lifts every single booking after the shoot.
—— How it works ——
Buy the course
Eight lessons plus the full launch kit: the emails, the worksheets, the booking-day plan and the weather card.
Plan your event
The date, the place, the format, the limited slots. And the price, done properly this time.
Build the launch
The waitlist, the landing page and the emails that do the selling before the day arrives.
Run the day and the upsell
A plan for the shoot itself, weather included, and the offer that lifts every booking after it.
—— Before You Ask ——
Great Questions, Honest Answers
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Sold-Out Mini Sessions: Plan, Price and Fill Your Dates is a self-paced online course for photographers who want to plan, price and sell out mini sessions. It's taught by Kirsty Hamilton, a London family photographer who has run seasonal mini sessions for years, and it covers the full system: designing the offer, pricing it for profit, building a waitlist, launching by email, running the day and the upsell afterwards. It costs £49.
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Any photographer who wants mini sessions to be a profitable, repeatable event. If you're newer, it's a route to your first paying clients without discounting your way there. If you're established, it's a system for filling quiet dates or testing a new location with a full day of clients instead of one. It works whatever you shoot: families, headshots, newborns, couples or products.
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Short enough to be honestly mini, long enough that nobody feels rushed. For family sessions, 25 to 30 minutes works well; 45-minute "minis" undercut your main sessions, and 15 minutes tends to leave families feeling hurried. Solo headshot minis can run shorter, around 15 minutes, because you're photographing one adult. The course covers the timing experiments behind these numbers, including the ones that went wrong.
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More than most photographers think. Mini sessions should never be a discounted taster: cheap minis attract bargain-hunters and cannibalise your main sessions. Priced properly, a mini should cost more per minute of shooting than your main session, with a deposit at booking, the balance before the shoot, and an upsell after the gallery. In the course, Kirsty shares her real prices and shows the sum: with the gallery upsell, her mini works out at nearly twice the price of her hour-long session, minute for minute, and still sells out to a waitlist.
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Yes, when they're run as a limited event rather than a standing cheap offer. The profit comes from stacking many short sessions into one day at one location, pricing for profit rather than volume, and an upsell that rides in every gallery email. Run the wrong way, always available and under-priced, minis lose money; that's the mistake the first lesson unpacks.
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By treating the launch, not the shoot date, as the marketing event. Clients book mini sessions the moment dates are announced, so the system is: build an email waitlist first, market for four to six weeks, release booking to the waitlist before the public, and send a short email sequence that leaves nothing to explain by booking morning.
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Fewer than you think, sized from your email list rather than your ambition. Not everyone on a waitlist books, so plan conservatively on around ten percent of your list booking, and if it's your first time, open just one day: a morning block and an afternoon block. Selling out fast is the goal, because you can always add another day, and an added day sells more easily once people can see the demand.
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Pick a season your clients already want photos: autumn and spring for families, January for headshots. Start marketing four to six weeks before your shoot dates, longer if you're building your email list from scratch, and give your waitlist a head start of a day or two before booking opens to everyone.
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Eight short video lessons (all under ten minutes), and a full launch kit: worksheets for your offer and pricing, a waitlist sign-up cheat sheet, ten launch email templates including an automated welcome email, a booking-day plan, a weather and sickness policy card, a gallery email template and a one-page launch plan. There are also three AI prompts that interview you and draft your plans and emails in your own words.
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No. You'll need an email platform to hold your waitlist, and free plans on tools like MailerLite or Mailchimp are enough to start. The AI prompts in the course run on Claude's free plan, so there's nothing extra to buy. Everything else is your camera, a location you know, and a plan.
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Fully self-paced, and deliberately practical: each lesson ends with a worksheet, so by the final lesson your own launch is planned on one page with an announcement date in the diary. If your email list needs building from scratch, a realistic runway from starting the course to your first booking day is about six to eight weeks.
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£49, as a one-off payment, with every template and worksheet included. It's taught by Kirsty Hamilton of Kirsty Hamilton Photography, a working London family and vacation photographer, and everything in it is the system she uses for her own sold-out seasonal minis.