What's your setup for on-site printing?
jmphotocraft
Registered Users Posts: 2,987 Major grins
I've been asked to shoot a soccer tournament next fall, and they asked about on-site sales. I have a Canon inkjet photo printer, but it takes about a minute to print a 5x7. I can't imagine that will be fast enough. What's your printer?
Also, is there good view-station/order-taking software out there? I wish there was an offline version of smugmug that I could install on my laptop.
Does anybody rent full setups?
Thanks.
Also, is there good view-station/order-taking software out there? I wish there was an offline version of smugmug that I could install on my laptop.
Does anybody rent full setups?
Thanks.
-Jack
An "accurate" reproduction of a scene and a good photograph are often two different things.
An "accurate" reproduction of a scene and a good photograph are often two different things.
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Lakewood, Colorado, USA
My Pictures | My blog
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An "accurate" reproduction of a scene and a good photograph are often two different things.
Lakewood, Colorado, USA
My Pictures | My blog
Facebook | Twitter
I don't know of anyone who rents full set up systems, but you can rent the photo parata software for a week.
Hope this helps.
Lance.
Oh ohh.... Does this mean I'm becoming boring? :cry
I didn't realize you were running so many Vstations Rocket. Excellent!
I run Canon Inkjets as well.
Recently went from all in ones ( MP630's) after wearing them out to printers only ( Ip4700) Not sure what the 5x7 print time is, I only do A4's and they come out in about a minute.
Any of the late models Canon ( or epsom I suppose ) inkers will be fast and cheap enough.
I always run at least 2 machines of the same model and have them printer pooled. on a run this basically halves the print time. If you have an order of say 4 prints it takes 2 min instead of 4 which can be significant when people want to wait or your getting slammed at the end of the day.
Printers are soooo cheap these days there is no need to run old slow ones.
I'll probably roll mine over every 12 months or so now just to avoid problems. If you doing anything right you pay for the things 10 times over on one job which really puts into perspective how cheap they are.
The last ones I bought cost less than the set of ink they came with !!!
If your going to do this more often or just have a real big event to cover, it would probably also pay you to look into a Continuous Ink system. This will slash your printing cost incredibly.
There are a few as mentioned. Can't remember the names now but easy to find in a Google search. I did use the EOS template but found it too finicky and it really stuffed me up on a couple of jobs so I 86'ed it. If you are REAL computer savvy it would probably be OK if you knew how to set it up perfectly.
Personally I use Jalbum (Which is free) atm and have been real happy with it for the last 18 months. This creates the gallerys and then I have paper order forms. For some totally inexplicable reason, my clients had great difficulty figuring out what to put in the " name" field of the shopping cart I used before but have no trouble with the exact same information table on a printed slip.
I do believe there is a shopping cart plug in for jalbum now but I haven't tried it.
Your setup will depend a lot on your customer flow.
You need to look at how many fields you will have going at a time and remember that you will then have 30 people minimum coming to look at the shots all in one hit. And that's from one field. If you have 5 or 10 fields in the one place and they all start and finish at the same time.....
The GOLDEN rule with this is you can NEVER have enough Vstations.
Never
Ever.
DId I make that clear?
You will need a Minimum of 20 just to scrape through trust me. If people can't walk up to a free station the majority of them will walk off.
Last year I did a big event and put up 30 Vstations. 50 would have been better.
I have been buying some gear off a Charity that recycles Ex government Donated computers and doing some pro bono work for them and I just borrowed the machines and ancillary's off them in exchange for a donation.
Because Jalbum runs off internet explorer in Kiosk Mode, all I had to do was network all the machines and give them a number on the network and that was it.
When I was done I cleaned all the machines, LCD's and keyboards and took them back .
If you can get some machines like this off someone that has a stack of preferably the same units to make things easier, it may be an alternative if you can't rent them.
Not boring... just looking forward to your posts, always looking to learn from others and how to improve my own process, and offer some help when I can....
However, you said two magic words that would make me run away: soccer tournament.
The absolutely biggest thing that affects the profitability of event photography and onsite sales can be summed up in five little letters.
E X I T S
You want as few of those as possible. In fact, you want only ONE exit from the facility. And you want to be BY that exit. You can have the greatest shots in the world, but if the parents don't even walk by the viewstations, they'll never know. Oh, sure, you can paper the place in pamphlets letting them know where the viewstations are setup. But at the end of the game, all everybody wants to do is LEAVE. They have other things to do. They WILL NOT seek out your viewstations. So, the next best thing is to ensure that they MUST walk by your viewstations to leave. Then, the curiosity factor kicks in and they stop by. Then, you MUST have the photos easily arranged. If they can't find their child within 30 seconds, they're moving on to the car.
Most soccer tournaments I've been to had a large area for parking and lots of fields, and the exit was simply "north" or "west". No fenced in areas, just wide open from the fields to the parking. If you shoot at a place like that, all you will do is lose money.
Now, there is a way to do a soccer tournament properly and profitably. But onsite printing isn't the way.
John
Canon shooter
An "accurate" reproduction of a scene and a good photograph are often two different things.
I don't do anything that this would be an issue with but just the same I have written that down in my event photography notebook where I have the rules and factors of good practices and what to look for!
I also agree with John about the sales and delivery.
Onsite selling , IE Viewstations kinch on LINE sales butt. no comparison on the return you will get.
This is distinctly different to onsite DELIVERY, IE, Printing.
You must first sell in order to deliver so that auomaticly puts things into priority
For me the onsite printing is no hassel at all and never was however I have enough experienced staff now and I also had experince with onsite printing with other people before I started my own event work so there is probably things in it that were a bit second nature that I don't even think of but to someone getting into it could add an extra level of complication they could do without.
John's excellent point of exits alsoe raises another thought in my mind of "Where are you going to set up?"
The point of exits aside which doent apply to the work I do, what is your location within the event?
If say you want to setup in a clubhouse or place thats out of the people traffic flow and no one has reason to go there, not at all good.
I try to put myself as near the office, canteen, toilets and other vendors if any as possible. If there is a presentation area that they may only go to at the end, thats a good spot for me to.
One venue I go to regularly is set up so i'm literally within 30 ft of the office, canteen, presentation area and a bit too close for comfort to the toilets. I ALWAYS do well at that venue and if I were designing the layout, I'd push the toilets back 25 ft and call it perfect.
Now even if you are just going to run 12 stations like I normally do, where are you going to put them? If you are outside, you will want a tent or a wide verandah for weather and glare reasons. If you are inside, you will want to be where the people have to pass or come to for other things or be real near an exit as john says.
are you going to have room for the amount of vstations you want to run?
I put my 12 in a 6x3M marquee and that is about the ideal limit.
If I did more stations, I'd add a 2nd marquee which would look mighty impressive then!
You will also want plenty of sanwhich boards around the grounds letting people know you are there and you will also want good prominent signage and banners to let people know who, what and where you are even if they do have to walk past you on the way out.