Gearing up!
Zerodog
Registered Users Posts: 1,480 Major grins
So after some preparation we are gearing up for shooting the event photos for the WidowMaker Hill Climb in UT next week. I am going for it this time. We are converting our 14' enclosed motorcycle trailer/ camper to our mobile photo station. I got a generator for our power. For a viewing station we are bringing a computer hooked to a 36" flatscreen that will be in the back of the trailer and taking orders off of that. The wife is running the trailer, I will be up on the hill along with 2 or 3 other photographers. We considered printing on site but I think, I am getting cold feet on that idea. But, it is still something I am thinking about. I am worried about dust and my printer. But at night, it shouldn't be too bad. For the photographers I am giving them a large percentage of the photos they sell/ take. We will use custom file names to track this.
Final stuff is finalizing pricing and loading the trailer. I am testing the generator right now, basically running our living room off of it with TV and sound with lots of mobile crap and my laptop hooked up. It is just purring away outside.
Final stuff is finalizing pricing and loading the trailer. I am testing the generator right now, basically running our living room off of it with TV and sound with lots of mobile crap and my laptop hooked up. It is just purring away outside.
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The golden rule of onsite is you can never have too many Vstations.
I would be putting on all you can lay your hands too because if they have to wait, they will ask for a card to see them online and walk off. Your percentage of online sales will be crap and pointless you doing onsite in the first place.
If you are going to generate 3 photographers worth of Images, I would be making sure you are not relying on just one output to sell them.
For this reason I thing it is a big mistake on your part to only have 1 or 3 vstations. I understand you are only starting into this but you are clearly making a commitment to it with the amount of shooters you are bringing to bear, I am just trying to give you the heads up to avoid dissapointment in the results through not being able to have the same efficency in selling the pics as you have capturing them.
When I did an event last year of 1500 competitors, I went to a charity place that gets old ex-goverment computers and refurbishes and sells them. they get machines and screens in by the pallet load literally.
I hired 30 machines off them for a week so I could just set them all up and test them and took them back the next week. If you could find a place that does the used machines in bulk, and there should be heaps of them, I couldn't suggest strongly enough you do this.
I bought a heap of machines off these people for $30 for a Small form factor box, I think a P4 1.7/512/20gb for $30 ea and 15" screens for $25. The power of the box dosen't matter, all you need to do is run XP so if they do that, good to go.
Laptops have also become cheap so if you are going to comit to doing this sort of work, I would be going that way. I can buy them for under $100 ea here so i'm sure you could do the same or a lot better there.
If you are running a machine as a server, 8 network connections seems to be about the limit for Xp. I haven't tried win 7, I bought a proper Muther of a server running 2003 and haven't looked back.
If you can get a small 2RU server which are available cheap in older configs, that would be the way to go with that as well. don't worry too much about HDD size, you only really need it to hold 1 or 2 events worth of pics and then you can move them off to another machine.
I haven't done waht youare doing but every other thing including motor sports has the competitors all coming in a bunch at the end of the day/ competition. If you are only dealing with one person at a time, i believe you will loose 5 times as many people as you are able to get orders from.
-IF- you can bring a decent enough amount of vstations to bear ( and 10 wouldn't be near enough, think 20 MIN ) then I would NOT offer an online gallery. The minute you do they will all say they will look on line and I believe anyone that has done onsite and Online will tell you that the fall off rate of online is very high compared to getting the orders on the day.
I would not suggest you print first time out but depends on how you plan to shoot and again your setup. Just getting the orders, IE getting the sales is the important part, the delivery of those orders is not. People will be happy to wait but get the order on the day.
I have found a successful strategy ( depending on the setup of the event itself ) is to just shoot on the first day and cover everybody. On the second day, shoot by request only. Wheter they are riding in practice or the final is of no consequence to the shots. The competitors will want you to cover everything but that has litte effect on actual sales.
If you have spare manpower on the second day, put it towards selling and serving customers and maybe, printing.
At very least, I wouldn't bother shooting after lunchtime on the final day or have one shooter covering the final comp only. Again, concerntrate on selling what you have not trying to get more that people won't order till they see which will co-incide witht he time you need to get them up and the time they want to leave.
Learning to say no is a valuable skill and once you say it a few times and see how the people suddenly do an about face on the imperitave they just told you, it gets easier.
This event is unique with the way the competitors compete. They have to wait their turn, much like drag racing. So hopefully people will trickle in all day waiting and watching. At this point I am going for it with the 2 stations. I can't get any more ready in time and don't want to get too much new stuff going. Smooth is better than not really working. I am grappling with Jalbum and LR3 deciding which web generator will make the most painless gallery to view. Right now LR has a slight edge, but I am finding a problem with it in the way it updates, or doesn't update a page.
Just passing on what others taught me and subsequent experience has proved to be exactly right.
The events I do are the same as well. I can have 1, generaly 2-3 or a max of 4 competitors at a time doing their runs and they all have a time or order but they all come in the last 90 min of the day to see the pics.
My competitors can be finished for the day by 10am but I still don't see them till 4 pm. This is the absoloute norm, not the exception.
I would try to allow for that possibility. If your mrs gets busy, leave teh photographing to the others and go help her sell what you already have.
In your case I would encourage the trickle as much as possible.
I have no idea of the setup but if you had some way of distrubiting flyers or something to the riders at the completion of their run or even have some strategic sandwich boards around, push that as hard as you can.
You can do sandwich boards from 20x30" prints and knock up a cheap wooden frame out of some 2x 1/2" timber with a couple of hinges at the top.
Signage is important.
Also get teh event announcer to make very regular reminders about your presence and for competitors to come see the pics. I would try for every 30 min.
If you have a choice of where you set up, put yourself near the toilets, canteen, registration office or right in the middle of all of them is better still. You don't want to be anywhere they don't fall over you.
Sound is a great idea. have something bassy so it carries but you can turn down low enough so your Mrs can talk to teh competitors. the music draws them in.
I have never sold to spectators and don't know if there is a following but if you can knock up even some basic flyers and grab a couple of kids to pass them out for you in exchange for a feed at teh burger stand or whatever, that might be worht a go. Just run off some basic flyers however cheaply you can.
I fly against the grain but I would not be offering any smaller than A4 size prints and if you must, 5x7 absoloute minimum. 6x4's are an insult to your work and the profession as far as I'm concerned. Nuff said.
I would also offer variations on the prints, Commemorative borders, mag covers, inserts ( one main image and a cameo) these sell great for me.
I also do images on disk which again are great sellers.
My best advertising at events is fluro safety vests with stick on letters with the company name we ALL wear, even my trailer Jockey. Better would be to have something like your name and "Photos available here today" on the back. People see this and will go looking for you. If this is the type of event that I suspect. it's important to dicern yourself from people thinking you are media.
At motorsport events they like you wearing these and generally give them out but we have our own.
Get some signs for the trailer so people know what your about. May sound obvious but they are going to see a chick standing with a flatscreen TV in a trailer and not know if it's a promo for oil, tyres, sprockets and chains or what. Clear up any ambiguity for them.
I see a problem with having your wife uploading and selling if the riders are trickling in. my thoughts are still that you won't see any till after lunch but if you are going to encourage them, better work out the uploading/ serving clients thing. the ones that you do get coming over early are usually the ones that finished their ride 10 min ago. Ideally you want a 30 min max upload for your model.
For mine, these days I don't even bother with anything before lunch and can therefore put everyone on taking pics early and selling them later.
Don't underestimate the need to market this. You need to push hard to get them over to your trailer because thats where the money is made or lost and everything else is irrelevant unless they do.
Now if -I- were doing this and camping overnight, what I would be doing would be in the evening offering ider and bike portraits. you could shoot on a backdrop against your trailer ( large painters dropsheet would be fine for this subject matter or trying to find an area in a garage if they have them.
Do a bit of PS work to funky the shots up and you'd have a winner.
Probably too much for you to take on first time out I know but just throwing the idea out there for you to think about for next time.
Pitty your not here, I'd love to be able to just go work one of these setups and events where I could work on it rather than in it and be able to stand back and see the big picture.
So much easier than doing it the other way which well all have to deal with!
Glort, again thank you very much.
I have done onsite sales only due to complications with equipment particularly at one big event and just like everyybody told me, it made not one scrap of difference to teh orders.
That said, sending stuff out gives me the irrits as well. The extra work involved the time it takes and the added cost just makes handing the product over at the time sooo much easier and prefrable for me.
If you are using a Dye sub printer you may have concerns about the dust. If you are using an inker ( collective gasp and shok horror) you won't have a problem at all.
I have used mine where the dust was so thick it took me an entire day to strip the trailer bare, wipe down every surface, empty every draw and clean everything in all of them and clean the computers and monitors and we did not have one single issue with marks on the prints even though the printers themselves were also full of dust.
One thing I would suggest if you are printing onsite is to get some cheap A4 frames. When you get a good, dramatic shot of someone falling off, have your Mrs or trailer Jockey print and frame it and put it on display. the people that see it will quickly pass the word around about this great shot you have of XXX coming off and people, including the crash test dummy, will come to see it in droves.
Cannot tell you how well that has worked for me and how many people it has brought to my tent in a rush to see the pic.
Hope it's a great success for you and look forward to a full report and some pics of your setup on Monday!
Networking has been one of my biggest bugbears with events. Earlier this year I did a big show and had problems with some machines not connecting.
As it was a 2 day my son and I worked till about 9:30 Pm till we got everything perfect. tested it, spot on. Came back the next morning without having touched a thing and nothing worked and we spent half the day on it and it still didn't work.
Took it all home, plugged it in, perfect again. "nuff to make you cry.
Few things i'm interested in, ....
Why were the laptops no good?
Did you get a stead trickley of people all day or just a big rush at the end?
How did you find selling from just one station?
You had the exact same thing I do with them wanting to see all the pics and not buying till the end. This is why I try to shoot one day only. If you get them in a couple of comps or races, that is more than enough shots for a disk and if you haven't got something they like then you never will.
The disks are good sellers for me and bump the returns up for any event. I dsell mine for $100 for 10+ images so your pricing was more than reasonable.
When is your next one?
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This week has been rough getting my site fully up with the searching. Today it is up 100% and we are emailing the entire competitor list tonight that they are up there and ready to be searched.