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Getting my race photos organized
I hope I'm posting this in the right place. Feel free to move it if it needs to be. I am new at the photography biz and I have shot 2 road races. Thankfully they have both been pretty small races and I could split up the race numbers somewhat easily for people to find themselves (see here: http://tracyendo.smugmug.com/Sports/648803 ). As a runner, I have seen many race photos and you are able to search by your race number to find your pictures. I like that - a LOT! But, I have no clue how to do that on my website. Anyone know how to do that? Do I need to create a database? If so, how? I have a race with over 1000 people coming up in mid May so I need to get something going pretty quickly on my site.
Thanks!
Tracy
Thanks!
Tracy
0
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I would highly recommend that you look at a DAM system for organization of the images. When you are shooting an event with 1000 participants, this is really the only way to manage the number of images you will have. I prefer iMatch - steep learning curve but once you get a handle on it, it's invaluable. There are also smugmug integration scripts for iMatch.
Example workflow:
1. Ingest images into your DAM solution
2. Do initial IPTC metadata insert for all images (copyright, title, default caption, location, etc.)
3. Don't delete anything (If you only have one shot of someone where the bib number is visible, but it's not a good shot so you delete it, you may not be able to properly identify the person in later shots....)
4. Create categories for the participants: bib number, racers name, event name, location, etc.
5. Assign the images to the appropriate categories
6. Rate the images (now that you've categorized the images, you can do this per-competitor by selecting the category).
7. Cull the images based on your rating and your retention strategy
8. Filter on 5-star ratings
9. Caption and keyword the 5-star images
10. Write metadata to xmp
11. Do your post on the 5-star images keeping each post iteration in a sub-directory of the main file location.
12. Delete any post-iterations that do not fit with your retention strategy.
13. Update DAM to include versions - assign categories for versions (e.g. - NEF=original, TIF-16=post1, JPEG8=Smugmug).
14. Synchronize metadata across all retained versions.
15. On Smugmug, create Category for Event type (Marathons)
16. On Smugmug, create Sub-category for Event
17. Upload 5-Star final images to galleries under the sub-category for the event - gallery name matching your DAM categories - Runner bib number in your case. In the situation where you have 1000 participants, you may want to do what you've been doing and group batches of participants together, keeping the number of images per gallery to a reasonable size (less than 50 would be a good area to be in).
Now your customers can access their images via your gallery structure or via search since you properly keyworded the images with their name and the event.
If you are working with the event organizer, try to get the pre-entry list in advance if possible so you can set up most of your DAM categories before you start shooting. If you can't get the pre-entry list, you can at least set-up the categories for the event and the estimated bib numbers. That makes the workflow a good bit faster...
Try out the workflow on the images from a past event to become familiar with what you need to do and get used to your DAM system.
Remember to caption your galleries as well to improve your SEO.
Some additional advice after looking at some of the shots on your site:
• When you are shooting an event with 1000 participants, you need to be much more selective in the shots you take as well as with your in camera culling during the event. Even with good in camera culling it's easy to end up with 5K+ shots that you'll need to cull after the fact. Spending one second per image to cull 5K after the fact will take you about 1.5 hours. That's just culling....
• Rule of thumb - If the composition is bad, OOF, exposure is way off, cull it in camera. You can't spend gobs of time in post when you have this many images to work.
• Only upload 5 star images. Better to have one great image of a participant than 5 mediocre ones. Having OOF and poorly composed images together with good ones is bad for sales.
• Price your images to account for your total cost of business plus your profit. Be honest when determining your COB - cost per shutter release for your bodies; amortization of your bodies, lenses, and other equipment; liability insurance; website and marketing costs; computer equipment; wear/tear on your transportation; travel costs; etc.
• Assume that your customer will only buy your cheapest image offering, so price that image right or you will lose money.
• Don't allow access to original images and move your watermark into the main portion of the image. Making it easy to steal your images decreases your sales prospects.
Hope this helps.
Tom
www.bellafaccie.com
Wow Tom - I think this is a little more than I asked for!
First, what is culling? (Did I mention I was new to this whole biz?)
Second, thanks for the information about the DAM system. I had never heard of this before but I am going to take a look at IMatch and see what it's all about. Right now your description of workflow is like reading a foreign language. Hopefully it will become my native language soon!
I do have a problem pricing my photos. I'm about half the price of my local competitors. It has been hard for me to determine how much it is all worth. And, as a newbie to the biz I'm still a little fearful that my skills aren't worth raising the price. I have learned that people will buy the cheapest print, though. I recently raised the price of my 4x6 closer to my 5x7 price because of that.
BTW, did you find a page where access was available to the original image? I try to "right click" protect all my photos. Good point on the watermark, too.
Thank you so much for the invaluable information.
Tracy
Setting a good pricing model is always a challenge. I suggest you evaluate the cost of business as I mentioned. If you're not currently paying for dedicated studio space, phone line(s), insurance, etc., you should still be calculating based on that since if you plan to run this as a business, those things will become required as your business grows. Further, if you don't price based on that, then when you have gotten to the point where you need to be paying for those things, you'll raise your prices accordingly and your regular clients will probably not be buying from you as much since you already set the expectation of cheap prices. Additionally, pricing at less than your COB results in setting an expectation more generally that photography services have no value, thereby lowering the boat for everyone. Looking at the pricing of others in your area is a good starting point. Also consider getting a copy of fotoquote.
One thing to keep in mind with respect to pricing is what your average purchaser is like (this is something it will take you a little while to figure out). Let's say you have 50 realistic prospects from an event. If all of your buyers tend to only buy the cheapest offering, consider this situation10 of them are only willing to buy your cheapest offering at $8 but the remainder are willing to pay $15,
FWIW, I've stopped offering 4x6 altogether, and I only offer luster and metallic finishes. In many cases, I only offer digital downloads in varying resolutions at prices that reflect the loss of future re-orders since scanning and emailing is pretty prevalent at this point. This also makes fulfillment easier in many cases.
All of your galleries have viewing of images at the original file size enabled. Hover over the image and you will see the size options there. Since most of your images are not tightly framed and the watermark is at the base of the image, your customers can easily grab the temporary file the browser caches on their machine and crop out your watermark and still have a printable image. To avoid this, you need to reduce the viewable screen size and move the watermark so it's in an area that can't be easily cropped out. Take a look at your Google analytics reports to see what screen resolution the majority of your users are viewing your site at, and choose a maximum image size that allows good viewing at that screen resolution.
You should also probably remove the ability to share your images since that amounts to free usage. If you give away the ability to share the images for use on myspace, facebook, etc., it's pretty hard to sell a digital download.
With respect to confidence in your images and their worth, that comes with time as you see your skills improve. There are a lot of things you can do to help improve the quality of what you offer for sale. I would suggest that you take a look at some of johng's recent posts on this forum. There's a lot of great advice there that you would benefit from. I would spend some time researching methods to improve the quality of your post processing (using a high quality monitor that you've properly calibrated and improving your use of Capture NX2/Photoshop/etc.). Those are areas that are very important to quickly improving the quality of your images.
You're off to a good start by asking smart questions.
www.bellafaccie.com