Hello again,
Thank you to those of you that responded to my initial post. And what great responses. I have been so busy planning for this weekends event that I neglected to check back and see what kind of responses I got. Well, I'm glad I did. To fill you in a little, the event is a outrigger paddling race. Thre will be roughly one hundred canoes registered in the event. Each canoe will have six people. The women start at 9:30am and the men at 11:30am. The start/finish is the same and it is convenintly located some twenty yards off the breakwall. I am also considering getting a shot of each canoe's crew as they carry it down to the water. A portrait shot of sorts. I will be shooting with the EF 100-400mm IS L, and may also use my 2X teleconverter. All of this will be mounted on a fluid head tripod. I have taken your advice and brought on a second person to work the computer and make contact with the people. I don't plan to print on site, but rather, wait and print at the award ceremony. The ceremony begins at 1:30pm and will go until 4pm. I will take orders and prepayment at the race, but these packages will be mailed to the customer. I intend to offer the customer several alternatives. They can wait while I print their 8X10, or prepay and have it mailed to them. I have decided to print out oversized thumbnails and tack them up on the wall. The customer will simply have to locate their photo, write out the file number and give this as well as their money to either myself or my assistant. I will not be taking CC, though I am considering accepting instate checks, and cash will be welcome, of course. I have my web guy working on putting together a site at this very moment. By the way, thank you, Peter of Photocrazy, I just may take you up on your offer if my web guy fails me. Lastly, I intend to make use of the 15 TV sets found at the sports bar where the award ceremony will be held. The slide show is only intended to get the people's interest, it is not for preview purposes, which is the purpose of the oversized proof sheets. I'm going to pick up a receit book that contains duplicate sheets. I'll use these to take orders. I plan to stamp my info on their copy of the receit. I'm also considering placing flyers under the windshield wiper of the contestants cars-yes or no? I will have business cards available at the door to catch those people that breeze through without really stopping to look at the thumbnails. I'm hoping that by building in all these redundancies I will catch many customers who might otherwise fall through the cracks. Oh boy, there is a lot to consider in this line of work. If you are not thoroughly bored by this, let me know what you think of these new developments. My biggest concern at this time is how to deal with the sluggish pace of acquiring images from the camera to the laptop. The USB cable method takes approx. 10min per hundred images. Unfortunately, I have only one microdrice card so swapping between cards is not an option. If I fill the microdrive(approx. 800 images), then I'm looking at 100 minutes just to download the images from the camera to the laptop-ouch! Would it be faster to use the CF card adapter and acquire the images this way? Any suggestions would be worth their weight in gold.
Aloha and Mahalo (Hawaiian word for thanks),
Greg
White Balance so easy, even our 5 year old can do it.- Melissa Strickland
Good luck Greg. It sounds as if you thought of many things and made the necessary plans to have success.
I take my hat off to you guys who shoot, process and sell in the field. I have enough just to take the photos. We usually post the following day on the WEB.
I am sitting here in Gilroy, CA (the garlic capital of the World) waiting for the rain to go away and preparing to shoot a biking event with a sold out group of 2,200 participants on Saturday. On Sunday I'll be in San Luis Obispo shooting a Criterium Race of about 500 participants. It would be nice to have some help but so far the only friend that I found has been my trusted Nikon D1 and Digital Wallet.
I would be curious to know how many more sales would be generated by processing and selling in the field. We usually sell to between 10 and 30% of the participants via the WEB.
Is it really worth the investment of portable equipment and extra manpower to do it in the field? We would rather use the extra manpower to cover other events (which we are doing this weekend at the other end of California).
Peter
White Balance so easy, even our 5 year old can do it.- Melissa Strickland
COUTION: The D30 has trouble to focus on fast moving objects. Be aware and if needed prefocus in manual mode on a given spot and when the canoe passes click the shutter. Use a skylight filter to get good colors of the water and sky.
Use CF cards they are safer and you can download every so often and start processing.
Good luck and Aloha.
Norbert
White Balance so easy, even our 5 year old can do it.- Melissa Strickland
I think it depends on the event. For biking events I don't think onsite would work at all. First unless your setting up at a breakpoint, I doubt people will want to stop to buy photos. Unless your at the end of the event, I doubt they would want to try to carry photos with them. And for myself I know when I finish a bike ride the A/C in the car is my first and only priority but that might be because I am out of shape!
We do youth sports and onsite sales are good because of the impulse factor. I know I have sold photos that would not have sold later off the web, parents just want to be able to take something home. Especially in the final rounds of a tournament.
Our after the fact web sales are low, but of course we don't market it as well as you because we want people buying at the event, not later.
Human nature makes it hard for us not to buy a good picture of ourselves and especially our children. It's like throwing away a piece of history and you feel guilty. By being on site it harder for people to "not look" so they won't have to buy.
White Balance so easy, even our 5 year old can do it.- Melissa Strickland
Hi Peter,
I've been digital since fall 97'. I shoot youth sports, soccer, baseball etc. and 90% of the players buy, on prepay basis with delivery on site immediately following the games.
White Balance so easy, even our 5 year old can do it.- Melissa Strickland
I raced a bike for ten years. Now I'm one of the old fat guys still riding on weekends but loving it. When I was racing crits a few event guys would show up and shoot everyone, then mail them a frame of themselves off a contact sheet. I always pitched it. But I know our whole team stuck around to watch the other categories race with other team members still racing. If there had been someone there selling on the spot I know I would have dropped some cash.
Road races can be several laps around a course where the categories go off at intervals. They still stick around after the race. I would think on-site sales would be big. I've been out of it for a while but I'm going to be shooting some this summer we'll find out how the on-site stuff goes.
Good luck, Kirk
White Balance so easy, even our 5 year old can do it.- Melissa Strickland
Can you explain a little more about how you have them prepay for action shots? Are they giving you jersey numbers and your making sure that you get a few shoots of them during the game and then they select the one they want or are you selecting and printing the shot before the game ends?
White Balance so easy, even our 5 year old can do it.- Melissa Strickland
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