Sold-Out Mini Sessions

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 £39.

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. And it works in a studio or on location, indoors or out.

Both. The course is about the mini session as an offer: how it's defined, priced, launched and followed up, and none of that changes with the setting. My own minis run outdoors in a London park, so the weather planning in Lesson 7 is written for outdoor shoots; if you shoot in a studio, you skip the rain radar and keep everything else. Family, headshot, newborn, couples or product minis all run on the same four tests.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Yes. Nothing in the system depends on where you are. You'll set your own price in your own currency using the per-minute test, size your offer from your own email list, and pick the season your clients already want photos. My examples are British, and the weather section assumes British weather, but the model has no postcode.

Eight short video lessons (all under ten minutes), and a full launch kit: worksheets for your offer and pricing, the Four Tests card, 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.

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.

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.

For as long as the course is live, with every update included. I don't promise lifetime access on anything, because I've been promised it myself and watched courses vanish, and because marketing changes fast enough that a course frozen in time isn't worth much. I'd rather keep this one current and give you the updated version each time.

£39, 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.