When I first started in the Disc Dog sport there was a professional photography outfit providing onsite printing. Granted, it was only 1 competition a year and the largest locally. Over the years, they’ve stopped coming. I wonder why????
I’ve been putting together some event photography gigs over the next couple of months for some of the premier Disc Dog competitions. Just finished the first one and I’ve got to say, I learned a lot!
Event photography is a tough business! It’s all about low overhead.
Onsite printing, while provides an excellent customer experience, it comes at a price. You’ve got to have at least 2 high quality, durable printers on hand. If done right, that right there adds several thousand to your overhead. Don’t forget ink, paper, keeping it calibrated and all the prints you end up tossing because the paper stuck just a bit in the feeder…Bad horror movies are made from experiences like this.
Solution: Digital copies! Yes, digital copies. All in all, I think it’s a better value for the customer. They can then decide what size to print (if they print at all) and can print as many as they’d want. They also get an instant ‘backup’ copy of the images. Yes, you still have to have the computers onsite, but use CD burners or other digital options, not printers. Last time I checked CD’s were still less expensive than USB drives, even in bulk and less expensive than prints.
The next step to low overhead is labor costs. One person cannot be Butcher, Baker and Candlestick maker for event photography. You need help and more than you think. So being new to the event world, I begged my friends to help! I also contacted 2 outside photographers for assistance. My plan for paying staff was ‘profit sharing’. Once expenses were covered, profit would be split amongst all the staff. I really expected not even to cover costs and warned everyone. They still decided to help me! They ROCK! If you’re planning on paying day rates, your expenses will be higher.
I had 5 photographers including myself and 2 assistants. I had 3 computers, one for editing/web server assistant and 2 for customer viewing. I used laptops for everything. The editing computer is a very basic MacBook running Adobe Lightroom and MAMP for web services.The viewing laptops were PC’s attached to monitors with a mouse. Everything was networked via a basic linksys router. I used Adobe Lightroom to edit and publish to the server for viewing via the LR web module. All in all the theory was good. I don’t count the computer equipment in overhead because it’s either my personal gear or borrowed.
Problem 1: Too many photographers and not enough editing power. I used one assistant to run CF cards back and forth pretty often, but every 3 or 4 rounds of these events can still yield several hundred shots. Multiply that by 5 shooters and you’re getting backed up in a hurry, and we did!
Solutions 1: Less photographers – I was overstaffed. More assistants – I was understaffed. I should probably have another editing person (add a computer too).
Problem 2: Communication! I took for granted my understanding of the sport. I did not communicate well with my staff. To a certain degree, I wasn’t sure exactly what to say! At one point, I ended up with 4 of shooters on one field, shooting one team, all on the same side of the field. While this produced a ton of images, they weren’t different enough from one another. It really just produced noise for the assistant as well as the customer viewing the gallery. Now I know I need to tell my crew that if you see another shooter on the field, don’t shoot.
Problem 3: Organization! In this sport there are several divisions(Novice, Intermediate, Open etc). The Open division is the only one with two events. The others just do the Toss & Catch event. I wanted viewing galleries by division with Open having 2 event galleries. The competition has two fields, one runs Toss & Catch for Novice/Intermediate and the other has the Open events. I assigned 2 guys per field and thought I was covered. Wrong! I forgot a simple step like telling my guys to switch cards when a division changes or an event changes! We ended up with a bunch of mixed cards and that pretty much killed a bunch of the galleries. Don’t forget, you may offend an Intermediate customer that find themselves in the Novice gallery 
Solution 3: This can be a tough problem to deal with. There are many ways to handle it, but what ever way you decide, it needs to be ultra efficient. You want to have photos available for people to view by the time they get their dog squared away, grab a drink, rest up and can walk over to the photo tent. I think I’m going to make several series of index cards on a ring. 100 Cards total, sequential numbers on each side. Give these to all the shooters along with a copy of the competition running order. Before each round have the tog snap of picture of the index card indicating the competitor’s number. After that competitor round, start a fresh CF card. Photographers may end up using more CF cards, but you’re going to end up with an easier time on the back-end. Have your runners gather cards every 2 rounds at least. I hope that this makes things easy enough to create viewing galleries based on competitor number! That would provide an awesome customer experience! Click on your number and wham! Photos of you! The editor should be able to see that index card shot and dump the CF card to the correct gallery. We’ll see how that works!
Another small issue I had, one of my shooters ‘forgot’ to format his card before we started. We dumped everything from his card into our library which included a lingerie fashion shoot he had recently done I had the luck of finding it while showing a customer some shots. As well, I know we’re all apt to snap a shot when we see one. Why not? We’re photographers right? I noticed one shooter would randomly find a girl in the audience and snap 10-20 shots of her. Resist the urge! Post process at these events can be nothing more than a ‘Yes/No’ question and really should be ‘what you shoot is what the customer views’. Offer color correction, cropping etc as a post sale feature. Having 10 random shots of some girl for customers to view is noise and sends a poor business message. Keep your gun on the fields!
The good thing is, we did ended up covering costs plus a small profit. Nothing to write home about, but some weekend pocket change. I think had the post process not have been such a bottleneck, we would have done better. Getting ready for the next one in September. It will be in Chicago, so being a traveling event things could be much different! After that maybe I’ll write about Event Photography 201!
What does a photographer do on a day off?
Why take photos of course!
So I found myself with a day to do whatever I desired. Granted I did attend a dog competition, but I decided not to play. It’s been a busy few weeks for the dogs and I so a break was needed. The competition was part of a 2 day event called The Summerset Festival in Littleton CO. I really wanted to shoot the Hot Air Balloon Glow, but alas a paying client takes priority! So on Sunday I decided to enjoy the festival a little.
I noticed there was a skateboarding competition going on at the park’s skateboard park. I love shooting sports events and had not shot any skateboarding. Honestly, the last time I even thought about a skateboard was when I was a kid myself. Things have changed a little since the late 80’s! I grabbed my camera with my trusty 70-200 and walked over to see what I could so.
Again, I was reminded how important it is for a sports photographer to really understand the sport they’re covering. I had no idea what was going on! After watching for a while and talking with some skater friends I figured out it’s a ‘jam’ format. They break skaters into heats, each heat gets a certain amount of time in the ’street course’ and they’re are several skaters out at a time. The judges watch and score based on the tricks each skater does successfully. Having figured that out, I tried to find a nice safe vantage point to start shooting.
Catching some air out of the bowl
The shot above was taken during the warm ups prior to the start of the competition. I decided to take the approach of always shooting with the sun at my back to avoid harsh shadows. It always seemed that I was on the wrong side of the ‘trick’.
The day was fairly nice to start, but became increasingly cloudy and windy. When it was sunny, I though the sun at my back was still the best approach. I moved around as the morning progressed and tried to balance position with shadows. I do my best not to use any kind of flash for outdoor sports and didn’t want to upset anyone as I was not there in an official capacity.
Flyin high with no limits
The other aspect of skateboarding I found interesting, and I didn’t notice it until post, was perspective. With the shot above, yes I was able to catch him amidst a cool trick, but how it’s framed doesn’t tell much about it. There is no foreground frame of reference. Did he do this straight off the ground? Catching air off a jump? It’s really hard to tell and almost looks like he’s floating.
Skater jumps a trash can using the bowl to jump
The shot above has a better foreground, you can see ‘how’ he’s jumping the trash can. This to me gives a much better feel for the difficulty of the trick. I really enjoyed shooting the skaters, I will try to study a little bit on what’s good and not so good. Honestly I have nothing to compare to, so I may need to do a google search on great skateboarding photos!