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A learning experience that I wish I didn't have to learn.
Zerodog
Registered Users Posts: 1,480 Major grins
This year has been an interesting one. I think it has been about 1 year since my first paying photo gig. It is a tough way to make money! And I am glad I have a regular job too. Most of my paying shoots have revolved around Mixed Martial Arts in one way or another. Those guys are cheap as hell. But at least it is fun and I have learned a lot. It is different than anything I have ever done before and a huge challenge. What is funny is all of that violence led into me shooting dance. It is sort of the same thing. Fast movement and horrible light. On the surface the pay seems better too.
This past winter I shot a few dance recitals and competitions for a photography studio. They do the studio shots but have no clue about action or low light. The first round was shooting 2 recitals. She had me and my wife there shooting. The pay was good for the shooting terrible for the processing. We took too many photos and made them too nice. I just thought I was faster than I really am at LR. Then in the end, the lady that hired me undercut me a bit on final pay. She said she just did not make any money on it at all and it was sort of a try out for my wife. She said she didn't like my wifes images as much as mine either. But she did use a few of them on her advertising posters? Go figure. She said next time it would be better and pay will not be an issue. I could buy that. Wife didn't care and I didn't either I figured we could try. It was OK money for the time we spent on it so I wasn't really pissed about the whole deal.
2 weeks ago studio lady lined up a shoot at a dance competition. She wanted me there for 10 hrs on friday and 15 on saturday. :wow I gave her a quote before we started for a price I felt good about. Again I under cut myself for PP and I knew it. I figured it was motivation to shoot less pictures and focus on getting my crops right while shooting. The pay for the shooting was really pretty good. I figured it balanced out ok.
In the end I shot 10 hrs friday and 8 on sat. I got 22,000 photos. That is a lot of pictures. After much sorting yielded 6,500 good ones.
From the start she was pushing for tighter deadlines. The story kept changing, it shifted from CD sales which were less of a rush to "Online sales" that had to be right away and right away wasn't happening with 22,000 photos. Then she wanted me to upload photos to a server. So I uploaded the first days photos when I was done with them. The rest she wanted on a hard drive because her download was too slow and unreliable to use the ones I uploaded.
So finally after 2 weeks of processing my ass off I am 100% done. I had the photos on a hard drive sorted into folders by dance and files renamed by studio. I did not sign up for renaming and I did add more money on for this on the final invoice. She wanted me to bring the drive down for her and sounded very excited about it. Until I ask, "do you have a check for me?" She says, "Uhh, I wanted to talk about that". She then starts trying to undercut the price again. Saying the other guys there did it for less and even though my photos are better, she doesn't see the importance of more quality for this shoot. In the beginning it seemed quality was paramount for her. (Issue with wife photos). If she said that in the beginning I could have shot JPEG and done zero post and given them to her right after the shoot.
So in the end I put my foot down and said no. I need the amount that was on the estimate. When I get it, she gets the other half of the images. She was pissed off and surprised at this. Even though that was the agreement. I would be paid when she received the images. We are at a stalemate. She has sold CDs of the dances I have. So she needs the images. I need my money. I know that if I give her the images her pay will get lower and lower and drag out further and further. The images are my only collateral in this deal. I feel like I need to hold my ground with this.
I gave every opportunity for her to back out up front. I sent her an estimate a week before the shoot. I even asked a few times if there was enough money in the event to support the cost of me shooting it. And she reassured me there would be and I would get paid no matter what. My gut told me this could happen the whole time. But I kept thinking to myself that this could be a good thing if it works out. Last week she was even trying to talk me into doing another competition the coming weekend. How could she do that if she couldn't pay for the first event?
Anyway, she is supposed to be meeting with me tomorrow to give me money and get the drive. I will go with the flow on this and hope it works out. In the end it might. But, if she pulls any crap, no drive for her. If she uses my images that I loaded on her server what can I do? In the end they are mine until she pays right? Could I file a copyright and file a claim against her?
I could also be a real dick and upload the photos to my website and contact the dance comp company and the studios and let them know where the images are and try to recover some money. Hopefully it doesn't come to any of this.
What I found out for sure is this. As usual I need to listen to my gut. It told me the first time I talked to her she was full of shit. So I proceeded cautiously. But my gut was still screaming to me that i would get hosed. I went forward with it, and I think I got hosed............
Sorry for the long rambling post. I had to vent I guess.
This past winter I shot a few dance recitals and competitions for a photography studio. They do the studio shots but have no clue about action or low light. The first round was shooting 2 recitals. She had me and my wife there shooting. The pay was good for the shooting terrible for the processing. We took too many photos and made them too nice. I just thought I was faster than I really am at LR. Then in the end, the lady that hired me undercut me a bit on final pay. She said she just did not make any money on it at all and it was sort of a try out for my wife. She said she didn't like my wifes images as much as mine either. But she did use a few of them on her advertising posters? Go figure. She said next time it would be better and pay will not be an issue. I could buy that. Wife didn't care and I didn't either I figured we could try. It was OK money for the time we spent on it so I wasn't really pissed about the whole deal.
2 weeks ago studio lady lined up a shoot at a dance competition. She wanted me there for 10 hrs on friday and 15 on saturday. :wow I gave her a quote before we started for a price I felt good about. Again I under cut myself for PP and I knew it. I figured it was motivation to shoot less pictures and focus on getting my crops right while shooting. The pay for the shooting was really pretty good. I figured it balanced out ok.
In the end I shot 10 hrs friday and 8 on sat. I got 22,000 photos. That is a lot of pictures. After much sorting yielded 6,500 good ones.
From the start she was pushing for tighter deadlines. The story kept changing, it shifted from CD sales which were less of a rush to "Online sales" that had to be right away and right away wasn't happening with 22,000 photos. Then she wanted me to upload photos to a server. So I uploaded the first days photos when I was done with them. The rest she wanted on a hard drive because her download was too slow and unreliable to use the ones I uploaded.
So finally after 2 weeks of processing my ass off I am 100% done. I had the photos on a hard drive sorted into folders by dance and files renamed by studio. I did not sign up for renaming and I did add more money on for this on the final invoice. She wanted me to bring the drive down for her and sounded very excited about it. Until I ask, "do you have a check for me?" She says, "Uhh, I wanted to talk about that". She then starts trying to undercut the price again. Saying the other guys there did it for less and even though my photos are better, she doesn't see the importance of more quality for this shoot. In the beginning it seemed quality was paramount for her. (Issue with wife photos). If she said that in the beginning I could have shot JPEG and done zero post and given them to her right after the shoot.
So in the end I put my foot down and said no. I need the amount that was on the estimate. When I get it, she gets the other half of the images. She was pissed off and surprised at this. Even though that was the agreement. I would be paid when she received the images. We are at a stalemate. She has sold CDs of the dances I have. So she needs the images. I need my money. I know that if I give her the images her pay will get lower and lower and drag out further and further. The images are my only collateral in this deal. I feel like I need to hold my ground with this.
I gave every opportunity for her to back out up front. I sent her an estimate a week before the shoot. I even asked a few times if there was enough money in the event to support the cost of me shooting it. And she reassured me there would be and I would get paid no matter what. My gut told me this could happen the whole time. But I kept thinking to myself that this could be a good thing if it works out. Last week she was even trying to talk me into doing another competition the coming weekend. How could she do that if she couldn't pay for the first event?
Anyway, she is supposed to be meeting with me tomorrow to give me money and get the drive. I will go with the flow on this and hope it works out. In the end it might. But, if she pulls any crap, no drive for her. If she uses my images that I loaded on her server what can I do? In the end they are mine until she pays right? Could I file a copyright and file a claim against her?
I could also be a real dick and upload the photos to my website and contact the dance comp company and the studios and let them know where the images are and try to recover some money. Hopefully it doesn't come to any of this.
What I found out for sure is this. As usual I need to listen to my gut. It told me the first time I talked to her she was full of shit. So I proceeded cautiously. But my gut was still screaming to me that i would get hosed. I went forward with it, and I think I got hosed............
Sorry for the long rambling post. I had to vent I guess.
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The upside is that you haven't been put out of pocket as in spending money on materials you have to pay for or similar. Sure your time is valueable but it's not a debt you have to clear.
I'm not sure what it is that make us susceptible as newbs to get sucked in is the enthuasiam and desire to take on any work you can get. As you get older and more experienced and jaded, it seems that the vibes a person gives off are different and the users know who the easy targets are and whom are not.
I have to say, the amount of images you shot and edited is just unimagineable to me. My best so far is to shoot about 15K images in a long day and i threw out about 2K of them due to focus issues with teh camera and marker shots etc.
The remaining 13K were offered to teh clients as is.
It's just beyond my comprehension how you could sit around for 2 weeks even if it were just part time editing 6500 shots. there is no way I could do that. It wouldn't even drive me nuts, I just couldn't do it long enough to get that far.
As much as it will undoubtedly upset some of the purists and those that don't make a living from photography who know better, I think you really made a huge mistake with all that editing.
IMHO you should have shot .jpg and been done with it.
there is no way that you could run a business spending that much time on that type of work and stay viable.
If you can't sell what you shoot from the camera and only do minor retouching on the prints that are ordered, then you are loosing money and would render a business a bankruptcy waiting to happen.
I shoot events and I have NEVER edited the shots I put on disks and NEVER had a complaint about them yet the same clients come back to me time and time again and i am getting invited to cover 2-3 events from every job I do lately.
While again many will argue bitterly, you should be able to shoot a high enough quality of pic to be satisfy the less than purist quality standards of the clients. They don't look at the shots like shooters and they don't anylise them to the same degree either. And before anyone jumps in with the predicatable comments, No, you shouldn't be content with sub standard work but you also shouldn't have to rely or need to touch up every image to bring it up to a standard that meets teh clients expectations.
With a lot of editing, I really doubt if the clients appreciate it. If the images are well lit, in sharp focus and framed well in the camera, what's to edit? Unless the colours are really off, clients don't stress over perfect colour balance they are interested in content over technical perfection.
In any case, 2 weeks editing is just not practical. You admitted you were undercutting your price and that can only go on for so long before you go belly up in the real world.
You need to put profit before quality while still maintaining a standard that surpasses the clients expectations and at the same time earning enough per hour to earn a living.
As far as the ownership of the images, It would depend on teh laws in your area but here in Oz, the person that commissioned you to do the shoot owns the shots and their copyright REGARDLESS if they have paid you or not.
If you have an agreement on your rate of pay, then I would just stick to that and be civil without trying to hold a gun to her head with the pics ( (which could possibly be seen as a form of extortion or collousion) and avoid ANY other argument other than the fact you have done the work as contracted and she need to now hold up her end of the bargain.
Wether or not the job is profitable for her ( which seems questionable to me) is not relevant to her paying you. You would not be entitled to more money if her profit exceeded expectations and she is not entitled to pay you less if she got her numbers wrong. That's business and it's up to her to meet her obligations she makes in it.
Anyway, hope it pans out for you. Unfortunately it probably won't be the only time you get caught out which is a bummer but it's something everyone goes through and i guess the price of admission we have to pay to ride the learning curve.
And you didn't follow your gut....we've all been there, so very many times.
Man, I hate it for you, just for that reason, because satisfying your gut after not listening to it is futile.
Good Luck to you on this!
I think that THIS is the kind of situation that calls for contracts. (Technically they all do but hey, we're all at different stages in this learning experience... That's not a very good excuse lol)
Hi! I'm Wally: website | blog | facebook | IG | scotchNsniff
Nikon addict. D610, Tok 11-16, Sig 24-35, Nik 24-70/70-200vr
First, there is no business future with this gal, so don't be chasing that carrot.
22,000 photos!!! Are you crazy? That works out to 20 photos per minute for 18 hours straight without any breaks! That would be about 80 8 gig cards for my camera in RAW.
Souinds like you don't have a workable business / work flow yet for these types of events. It also doesn't sound like this person is going to work with you to develop one.
Tight deadline are not out of the ordinary for this type of event.
Make sure you put together a good receipt (document product and use) for payment. Have her sign it. That way if say the check bounces you have some evidence that she does not receive any rights to the images not paid for.
Good luck!!
Sam
You guys are all right. Yep, I should have had a contract. Yep 22,000 photos is ridiculous for one person to deal with. I will find out this afternoon if this works out. I am meeting with her to hopefully get a check. This is the last time I do work with her. She is a flake.
On the amount of photos Sam, I think I had 240gb of compressed RAW files out of the 2 days from my D3s. Luckily it is only 12mp! And lucky I didn't opt for the screamer little 128GB solid state hard drive in my laptop! The finished amount in JPEG is 34GB? Tons. The processing needed wasn't much. Color was spot on. I just needed to adjust for light fall off on different areas of the stage. In hindsight maybe doing this as I shot would have been better, but maybe not either. It is not so easy to do when things are on the move. Maybe I shouldn't have messed with them at all. I did do a bit of cropping though. Just balancing things out. This probably was not important. The exposure adjustments were pretty fast, I did them mass groups. Basically I had 4 levels that I tagged as I flagged photos. Syncing in LR is an awesome tool.
I would say I am fast at LR. But you start dividing this stuff up by seconds and time starts getting insane. If you spend 2 seconds per photo deciding good or bad that is 12.2 hrs non stop.
6,500 good photos given 20seconds each is 36.1 hours. That is completely apeshit! I have done big events before with 4,000-10,000 photos but that in comparison seems more reasonable. You can only concentrate on that stuff for so long. In the end I am proud of the way the photos turned out. They are an awesome example of what not to do. But they are also a great example of my work. I don't think I will ever do a dance competition again. There are just too many kids and too much time. The ones here are 3 solid days long. On Saturday alone there were 1500 kids on deck.
The amount of kids/ parents was the lure to this event. I kept thinking, maybe there was money here. And maybe I just didn't get it. But, I did get it. Events are tough. You gotta market like a Mofo to get sales and there can not be so many layers of cost eating up the profit. She had many photographers there. But from the equipment I saw and questions asked, me and only one other guy knew what we were doing and had the right camera bodies to get a shot. There were 3 people sitting on their butts at a table doing "sales" and the woman I was working for was no where to be found. Classic! These people "selling" should have been processing at the event all day long.
Between me and my wife, I think we could do well at recitals. I could take photos and she could pass out coupons for online sales and sign people up on the spot. These are 3 hrs at the most and manageable in scale. With this there are no real layers of cost involved. Just our time. And no one else to pay out. I might give it a go. Hell I have enough photos to wall paper a gymnasium with! No problem on examples here!
I'm with Wally on this. Of course, hindsiight is 20/20, but I would never have entered into a project like this without a WRITTEN contract.
My thought is that if you & your wife enjoy these types of shoots, and the $$ is good, YOU should be lining up the jobs instead of Studio Lady. My guess is that you are probably not the only one who she has treated badly. The folks behind the dance recitals and competitions may be ready for a change. You already have samples to show them. You may be able to lock up that business for yourself. (And wave bye-bye to Studio Lady in your rearview as she stands choking in your dust.)
Don't worry. I can fix you in photoshop.
Can I get a link to these photos??
Sam
I haven't posted them anywhere yet Sam. I need to put a few up on Dgrin to see what you guys think. I have been too busy shlogging along processing to really think about it.
To me that's a great potential market and has significant potential sales/ ROI value. yeah, I have shot 1500 kids in a day and in the event I did, most of them came on the dance floor at least twice and some 6 times so I know the effort involved. You should be able to pull enough $$ out of the event to put on the people you need to cover it and it should be scaleable to any size based on that.
You also need to think outside the box with these and look at more profitable models than online sales.
I think you really hung yourself on all the editing so if you could get that under control, I think the whole thing would start looking different. You have to give the idea of processing images away to make this viable. at most it should be done in camera and everything that gets loaded off the cards are keepers and that's it.
For me, editing was about 2 hours because it was simply a yes/ no decision and many of those took less than a second to decide.
It shouldn't have been that long but my relief shooter had camera problems and I was shooting two floors with as little as 12 sec between routines so there was no time even to chimp.
The guy who as far as I know does the biggest events of this type in the world, stressed to me that you set up to cater to the biggest events going and then you are able to handle those and anything else below it.
This guy shoots events of 15,000 kids over 3 days and delivers the pics onsite. His shooters edit in camera in the 30 sec between dances and he does no further editing from there. He carries his gear around in large trucks and last year did his first international event.
There are lots of other guys that are smaller than him that wouldn't bother with events of 1500 people as not being worth their time so there are different ways of looking at it.
In any case, I agree with surf, this maket is probably pretty open right now. I'd be going head on with this woman and promoting to the groups she's targeting and I agree that they would have probably had a less that sterling experience from her in the past but maybe don't know of anyone else they can use so you would find at least some quite ready to give you a go.
The big dance event just sort of scares the crap out of me. The small recitals seem as viable to me for a lot of reasons. There are still 300 kids at them. But for the competitions there are sooo many more. So the potential is great. Maybe onsite printing is the way. Get people paying right there. Then if they want bigger prints just sign them up for the files they want. The way to go might be to find some guys with laptops who sort on the fly and get images printing. The problem I see is letting people view them. How do you get so many people looking at photos? Print big contact sheets with file #s? I need to think about this part. It is probably the key to success for this. Or maybe there is a way to do some sort of Automated Kiosk type thing? Maybe just use a computer station and Smugmug? Upload the photos as I go into manageable size galleries and they search and purchase right onsite? Is that even possible? Maybe it would be too slow to upload? I would need internet connections too.
Firstly, Forget about the onsite printing till you have the onsite viewing nailed. I do viewing and printing but as my mentor drummed into me, You need to concerntrate on people seeing the pics so you can sell them before you worry about delivering them which comes after you have already sold them.
I had a couple of events lately and due to some stuff ups on my part, after 2 years we couldn't print on site.
Difference to sales? Zero.
Even the regulars that have been buying off me for 2 years barely raised an eyebrow and were perfectly contented to have the shots sent to them.
I do prefer onsite printing because we can alwasy seem to do it at the time without trouble but it seems a drag doing it when we get home even during the week. I also prefer to come home and have teh job done rather than have to finish it off and to me, Mailing stuff out is a real PITA!
by all means take your printer and for those early sales when your not busy and the mrs has time, print them out. when you get busy, concerntrate on the uploading and selling not the delivery. you might be able to hire a second kid to do the printing if your wife can't keep up with it all. My 15 yo son does all the computer work including printing for most things but we drop the printing with the real big events when hes got to download cards that rain down on him.
I have also set up a computer on the dance floor and networked that to the workstation with some software that automatically downloaded the card to a folder as soon as it was put in which worked well.
Once the pics have been sold, by all means go ahead and tweak them up to make them what you want them to be. You will have plenty of time because you are only doing a hundred if that as compared to thousands. My son does them on the fly and we have some aqctions set up in PS for all the mundane stuff so for the majority of images he opens them, hits a button, all the levels, resizing etc is done, the action stops for him to centre or crop the image, he hits another button and the thing spits out the printer.
People say printing is hard and time consuming, i don't think it is if you set up for it in teh first place BUT>>> it is NOT a priority with event work.
If the clients bought the image straight out of the camera and the print they get is cropped tighter, the levels and sharpness is tweaked etc then they are really stoked and thats where editing is worthwhile. We don't edit the images on Disks though unless specially requested and then we usually charge extra.
Everyone I have spoken to or read about agrees that onsite viewing kicks the hell out of online. It's the impulse buy when the excitement level is at it's highest that goes in your favour.
You can set up viewstations Cheap as chips despite the forum folk lore I often read. I use second hand Small form factor Desktops with 15" monitors i bought for $65 per station with KB & Mouse and XP pro from places that resell ex government equipment. The machines I have are P4 1.7 or 2.0 with 512 ram and 20 G hdd's. I ran a more powerful couple of desktops as the downloading stations and to create the galleries, burn CD's and do the printing which also ran XP pro that came with the machines.
This worked fine till we started getting hammered on events when trying to run 10 Vstations and then the network would fall over due to teh limitations of XP. I have run up to 30 stations and now have a muther of a server ( which weighs as much as my wife) running Server 2003 and that sis going great guns.
The software i use for the galleries is Jalbum which is free and it's been 100% reliable and does everything I want and more.
I run internet explorer on the Vstations in kiosk mode and have them pointed at the server so the updated galleries can be accessed straight away.
Because I want to go to about 16 stations on a regular basis, I am now looking at some laptops to make the amount of gear and weight we have to carry particularly to the expanding area we are getting asked to cover less and a little easier to set up.
With viewstations the golden rule is you can't have too many. Ever.
Under any circumstances.
If you think you have enough, you dont.
Hope I got that point across!
All the time I see people say "I'll just start with 2 or 3 and go from there."
Don't bother. Start with 10. At least. For 300 people, 20 would be better still although 40 would be perfect.
You can buy laptops that will do the Job for $100 ea here so I imagine in the states you could get used units cheaper still. All they need to be able to do is run XP pro and they are entirely suitable for the job. Jalbum makes HTML files and even on 5000 pic galleries at full screen res the file size will be lucky to be 500Mb.
Buy a Small " Pizza Box" server run 2003 or 2008 on it, get a used 24 or 16 port switch and your in business for well under a grand. If you can't get that back on your first event of 300 competitors, your doing something Very wrong.
Put a new DVD burner in your workstation and offer CD's onsite and get some empty DVD covers, print the slicks with a nice generic cover image and your company name etc and on the back put your advertising blurb. Print the disks with a generic label and contact info and have them at teh ready so when you get an order, you take a preprinted blank disk out of the premade cover, burn it and hand it to the client all done.
Fast, easy, Impressive.
If your wife is the computer jockey, hire a 15 yo kid to look after the Vstations and help the parents ( the kids will be fine) with finding their pics and using the system etc. You will need another preson doing that when it gets busy and they can be a runner for you with card and drinks etc in between.
As a safe option, i'd say put the pics online as well as the onsite BUT. i would push the onsite and play down the onlie. To this end, have an incentive for people to order on teh day like free postage or something and charge for it with teh online.
the problem with doing online and onsite is some people will use the online as an excuse not to buy on the day and never will. My online sales have been non existant so i'm going back to onsite only but I seem to be a huge exception to teh norm for some reason so I suggest you at least start with both.
the beauty of Jalbum is that the gallery you create onsite for the Vstation can just be uploaded when you get home without having to do anything else.
I think you have to take the bull by the horns and have a leap of faith and decide to do this properly from teh start and look like a business that means business rather than a part timer. First impressions are everything.
Also, Get plenty of signage made up in teh form of banners and sandwich boards to put around the venues. I also have fluro saftey vests for all my shooters with the company name on teh back and that's the best promo tool of all.
Hope this helps and inspires.
Don't worry. I can fix you in photoshop.
I had been reading about event work for years before I got into it. back in 2002 when it was big in the states I was interested but the cost of computers then was just out of my price range. After having a hiatus from photography for a couple of years, in 2009 I decided i wanted to do something new and looked at the events again.
I got talking to an aquaitence that was into dog shows and trials and decided there was an opening there I could get into.
I knew used computers were plentiful and cheap by then and was fortunate in being able to get some bulk deals with some people that had got a load of old stuff they were trying to flog.
I got the gear and had worked out a plan and gave myself a month to set it up and figure out the networking, software, workflow etc. I had it about 3 days and had been playing for a few hours when a mate dropped by early in the week and said how's it all going?
I said OK, I got a few things worked out already I might be set up sooner than I thought.
He said " I bloody hope so, I have talked you up and put you in for a Big Pony club event my daughters are riding in this weekend so pull your finger out because they are expecting you. And BTW, I need your price list because they have been asking how much they need to bring to buy a pic. "
YA!
That was a week I put in some hours!
I took 4 Vstations, 2 printers and 2 workstations to the event as that was all I could fit in the car with the family and camera gear and we drove a couple of hours up the mountains to the event.
We had some minor hiccups on the first event but we sold and delivered on the day and I came away with 3 more bookings for other events and haven't looked back.
I bought a trailer, did and event with it, Happened across a bigger trailer a fortnight later so I bought that too and have been through a few expanded setups with it already and am looking to go bigger again.... and get a bigger trailer still.
If you can find the laptops in time, all you need is a switch , some cables, download the Jalbum software and there is no reason you can't be doing onsite viewing in a couple of weeks.
The Networking isn't difficult at all. If your doing it all in XP you run a wizzard and it takes care of itself. When I got my server a while back, that was a whole new ball game. I thought I was well out of my leauge on that and would have to get an IT guy in but with a little time on the greatest knowledge resource the world has, the net, it didn't take long to find out what to do and plodding through it, it soon became easy and no problem at all.
Your idea with displaying pics on the monitor is spot on. My mentor has a bunch of 40" plasma TV's he uses in a 3x3 configuration to make a video wall and that creates a lot of interest for him.
We have the Vstation screen savers pointing to a folder on the server so they scroll through the pics that have been taken that day.
What i would reccomend you do is run a slideshow with music and have at least a Subwoofer to amp up the music. the trick is to have the bass loud enough to carry but the music low enough so your sales people don't have to scream over it.
have a banner or sign over your stand or table and hit it with an economical 1000Watts of flood light so you stand out. The music and the bright light attracts people like moths to a flame.
If the event has people from different clubs or schools, have some info ready to hand out and take your diary with you to book in other events. I'm averaging about 3 requests from every job I do lately but usually there are several all on the same day so you end up knocking 2 back a lot of times. Of course the other days there is nothing at all on within 3 hours drive so you sit at home frustrated your not out there.
My wife wants a new TV for the bedroom. So, this might be a good excuse to get a nice smaller LCD to use for the bedroom and events:) I just had a wild thought too. At my work we have a really cool curved display wall we use for trade shows. I think it is about 8'x10'. We have graphics and all, but we also have some nice black carpet walls that are made for velcro. Maybe I need to "borrow" it to use at this one. I could set the table up front and plaster it with prints. It has lights and everything.
This time holding my ground paid off big time. I have a feeling the way stuff dragged out, if I gave up the images, I would have been paid much less and much later. I would have been hunting for half the money a month from now.
Next time I work for someone I need a signed estimate or contract for the work.
Jalbum makes Image gallerys in HTML format. You can upload that to the net or just point your browser to it either locally or on your server.
To put IE into Kiosk mode you go to Run> iexplore -k and then tell the machine where to find the gallery you have created such as
"c:\my documents\example.htm".
So the command line would look like:
iexplore -k "c:\my documents\example.htm"
OR if you were runing it off a server it would be something like:
iexplore -k \\photoserver\event name\Index.htm
You can tell Jalbum to put the gallery wherever you want it and from there you add images as you go and it updates teh gallery which is automatically updated on the Vstations.
If you were just to run the browser in normal mode, You would simply type something into the address bar like :
C:/Statedressage/jalbum/album/index.html
With Kiosk mode you lock the computer into the address you point it to and take away the adress bars etc so the little spawns of satins have to at least be a bit more cluey than the average deviot to start roaming the system. You can also remove the keyboards which we have done at certain events where there seemed to be an abundance of deliquents trying to prove how clever they were.
Showed them how and why old age and trechery always wins out in the end.
Earlier this year when I had a still unknown problem with my network, I created the gallerys on the workstation then put them on a USB drive and manually downloaded them to the Vstations and ran the gallery locally.
As we had one group of Vstations that were seeing each other, we just downloaded the gallery onto one of them and pointed the other 3 machines to that. Ran well despite the low power of the Vstations and getting hit by 3 other machines.
I also put one machine outside the Stables which was a bit away from our trailer and ran the gallery locally there and had a sign of where our trailer was for people to go and order. It worked pretty well.
On that event we only had to do 2 updates all day so it wasn't a big hassel but on a lot of jobs we can have 4 shooters sending cards every 15 Min.
We try to keep the updates frequent and not too large as it makes for smoother workflow.
As for running off the net, it would depend a lot on how quick you could upload 150-500Mb and then you would have X amount of machines all trying to download it again. At best it would be pretty slow I reckon and you would be far better off running it locally at the event even if you wnet home and placed the orders into snugbub yourself.
I have never looked at that so I don't know the reasons that you would want to but that would be better.
We just use Paper order forms as my clients ( well the over 30's anyway) seemed to have a lot of trouble with the most basic of shopping carts but fill in the exact same info on paper without a problem ever.
People like Hammy that do 15K competitor events use a totally custom written system to handle the hundreds of orders they get a day but as I'm only dealing with 30-50 and delivering on site, simple paper slips work fine for us and the clients.
When you get home, you just get the Jalbum files you ran on the Vstations and upload it to your site.
Whether you run the gallery locally, off a servfer or off the net it's all the same thing, just a matter of telling the browser where to find the gallery.
Good to hear you got your money.
I think you handeled the situation exactly right.
I also think that with someone like that, a contract would make little difference. That only has any vlaue once you get to legal action and you want to avoid that at all cost.
And speaking of cost, I don't lnow what things are like where you are but unless you were chasing $5k or more, here it wouldn't even be worth taking someone to court. Unfortunately, a lot of people rely on that now to get out of their obligations.
I would suggest in the future you don't even rely on contracts. Do as you did here.
Get them to pay in advance or hand you a bank cheque when they get the pics is the only sure way to know you are going to get your $$.
If possible, don't deposit that check in your bank. Instead, take it directly to the bank upon which it is drawn, and cash it. Then deposit the cash in your account. This prevents her from stopping payment on the check now that she's got her images.
I have a feeling Zerodog will befriend his gut again!
Sage advice!
Went to her bank to cash it last night. They wouldn't do it because it was to my business. That sucks...... But they did verify funds for me and all was good. So I went and stuck it in my bank.
I will look at Jalbum again to see what I did wrong. I could use LR to show slide shows but I think it is a memory hog. It seems to run for a few laps then freeze. So something very streamlined like an HTML gallery would be great.
Again I thank all of you guys for your advise and support on this
Not sure that is legal, but be aware that just because the funds are there does not prevent her from stopping payment. Also you could have converted the check to a cashiers check.
Also not sure how, after she received a quote and an invoice, she shows up with less money?
While taking the money offered and never working with her again seems to be the easiest path, I would have had to say "OK we went through this the last time. If you want the images you need to rewrite the check." Then watch her squirm for awhile. But that's just me.
Sam
PS: Where can I see the images?
I'm in the same position as "Studio Lady" in that I hire photographers to shoot for me at events. Last event was 6 photographers, 56,000 photos over two days. Light shooting, I know.
However, the photographers don't do anything but shoot (and supposedly chimp out the bad shots, but they rarely do that). I take the cards as they shoot, upload to the server, and have on the display systems within a few minutes. I handle all orders. I do all post-processing. My photographers do nothing but shoot and then collect their check at the end of the event.
John
Canon shooter
Had a look at your site. Nice work but one major issue. When you click on a section (e.g. "about" or "products") there is no way to navigate to another section without going 'back' to the main page. That's a pita for encouraging people to browse.
http://www.imagesbyceci.com
http://www.facebook.com/ImagesByCeci
Picadilly, NB, Canada
I do this all the time.....if I feel squirmy about a check and never has a bank told me they would not cash a check drawn on them unless the check would overdraft their client......as far as their refusal being legal...I have no idea.....but if she decides to stop payment do not hesitate to take her to court.....I hope you kept copies of the pics and kept some sort of time sheets on the processing.......she sounds shady enough to stop payment and maybe even try to sue because she all of a sudden feels she was taken advantage of......Just cover all of your bases and assets....