Best event Sale

Glort

Did another double event on the weekend, a Jamboree.

Was a damn hot weekend, temps approaching 40oC and most of the time having no choice but to stand in the sun for hours.

In the usual last minute rush, one of our good regulars came over to the computers and was there for over half an hour. I saw him come to the trailer with a Handfull of order forms and started writing them out on a sheet of paper my wife gave him.

The order was for a 10+ image disk and 12 A4 prints, $430 all up.
This breaks our previous single sale record ( to the same guy mind you) by exactly $100.

For some reason, maybe the heat, our printer was producing colours a bit out of wack and because of the location of the rings where his kids were, they appeared worse in the colour balance. My son was rattling off the prints and when I saw them i freaked and was rather annoyed that he would even think of giving the guy pics like that.

The guy came over for his order and I gave him his disk and explained that our printer was a bit off and would it be OK to post him the prints through the week so I had time to make them perfect for him as I didn't want to give him anything that was less than I could make it.
He seemed very thankful in fact and said that would be fine and he appreciated me doing that for him. I was thinking to myself I appreciate you spending so much money with us!!!

The thing that amuses me somewhat is that this guy and I were standing right next to one another shooting pics several times during the weekend and he seems to have quite decent camera gear himself. As wonderful a shooter as I'd like to think i am, reality says our shots can't be that much different!
It's not unusual though for some of my best customers to also have better than average camera's themselves.

Once again we got asked several times about putting the pics on the net because people didn't ahve time to look at them then and there and once again, despite me running round everywhere, I saw nearly all the people asking at teh computers for a good long time looking through the pics.

I also did Video of the Musical rides done on the day and sent order forms around to the team managers. We didn't get any sales which was dissapointing although one team manager asked about sending an order form through by email so I hold some but slim hope this may come off.
We offered the DVDs on a one per team member basis for $20 ea which I thought was more than reasonable. The parents however didn't seem to think that was such a great deal apparently. :dunno
I'll have to promote and test the videos some more and see what happens.

Other than that single order, our sales for the hot and had weekend were very average. I'm not sure what we did all but having a quick look at the recipt book late in the afternoon told me it was a bit on the sissapointing side.

This also seems par for the course. Heat or rain seem to kill our sales.
I have another double this weekend so I'm praying for much Milder weather for the last one for the year.

jbakerphoto

Congrats!
Its always Fun to set new sales records! Unfortunately for me your record is 200 more then mine! Guess I got to get out and try to do some catch up!

I was having that problem with my CIS ALL THE TIME! My first assistant could fix it but once she stopped helping me it was causing too many problems for me so that is why I ditched the CIS and went with epson ink from ebay. Pretty much works perfectly most of the time.

Rocketman766

Very nice to hear you hitting a new single sales record. I just reached mine a few days ago, but it was with an online order and substantially less than yours.

Is the problem with the CIS heat related only? I am in the process of ditching my current (old) printers and going with some inkjets with a CIS. I only shoot indoor events right now so if it is heat related only, I shouldn't have much to worry about (knock on wood...)

Lance.

jbakerphoto

Rocketman, I was using mine inside and it was sorta cold out. It was sitting for a month between uses though. I would suck the air out of it still wasn't right. I would say try it but have a backup for sanity purposes. I have been using an Epson Artisan 50 and it has a CIS available. It will do a 4x6 in 11 sec. : ) I actually bought the CIS for it but I messed up on of the cartridges and decided I should just use ink cartridges.

Glort

In actual fact, I wasn't using the Cis.
I was using some reloaded cartriges with the ink I have been using over 2 years and 3 summers now so I don't think it's the ink itself and certainly not the Cis.
That was at home where I had been printing some promo material.

I was thinking about the problem last night at 3am whilst the steam train I marrried was slugging away up a hill and literally scaring the cat off the bed and I think I may have changed the settinga a week or so back and changed from the manual setting to Auto which seems rubbish on these printers. I havent been out to check yet but I have an idea that could be the prob. We did check the profile but I didn't check the manual over ride.

WE should have changed to the other printer and see how that went but didn't worry about it at the time.

John, I can only say that I think you must have got a dodgy CIS. The only trouble I have had with mine has been through operator error like when my shooter tipped the resivour over ( but still didn't spill a drop of ink) or we let the ink run out.
Other than that it's been trouble free. The only thing with mine is ist's essential not to have it higher than the printer or the ink syphons. They make that very clear in the instructions and having made up a carry tray to sit them in, it's no issue at all.


The one thing we did have a problem with heat was with the laptops.
Many of them started to loose network connection later in the afternoon but others ( mainly the Hp's) were fine. When I started checking it all out and found the network was fine right to the second switch, I also noticed most of the Dells were really hot. I also noticed most of them were missing the little rubber buttons on the bottom and as we have a felt cloth over the tables, it was easy to see they would not be getting any air through the fans.

Luckily I had some adhesive backed foam sealing tape in the trailer so I put a double layer of that under the back of the machines to raise them a few mm off the table. After a bit, they slowly started coming back up again just in time for the late afternoon rush.
I will go over them all this week and make sure they all have a double foam layer on the back and a single at the front to give them some airflow and lift them enough hopefully to be above any spilt drinks.

Speaking of drinks and computers, I knocked a drink into my personal desktop machine this morning and it went out with bit of a fizz although no liquid went near the power supply itself.
The HDD's are Ok so I'm not really worried about the rest. The fact I didn't loose any data is a good enough outcome for a silly mistake and a cheap wakeup call.
Besides, its a perfect excuse to go see my friend and check out what he has in his warehouse atm and pick up a better machine and whatever other goodies he has laying around.
I have a couple of old servers here that work perfectly but the noise would drive me nuts.
A nice little 1 or 2 RU server would be good though! :0)

Glort

Baah!

Just got a call from the organiser of this weekends event. It's been cancelled due to the week of rain we have had and the council closing the grounds. There was another Jamboree nearby with another zone and they have had the plaug pulled as well. I don't think there will be anything on this weekend and wiith rain forecast across the state, I'd have to go a long way to find one.
Such is life.

I have a cold at the moment and not feeling at all great so in one way i'm not alltogether sorry but OTOH, I was enjoying the run.
I think I might spend the time to cobble up a last minute Christmas portrait Promo and see if I can pull a few from that over the next month.

I also found that we did better at last weeks event than I realised. Turns out we did a bit over a grand so not too bad although when 40% comes from one client, It's still a lucky save.

jbakerphoto

I had used the CIS for about 4-5 months before it got too out of hand and I decided to go another direction. It was starting to make me look bad at the events so It had to go. I will attribute it to user error for the most part. I just didnt have the patients to deal with it and more importantly train my revolving door of assistants (I have had 8 assistants this year...) to deal with it.

I have a cold at the moment as well and I have a 2 day barrel race this weekend. Should be a lot of new faces so hopefully I make some money. I bought another laptop viewstation earlier this month off ebay and finally got it working so now I am up to 4. !!! Guess I have a ways to go to catch up to you. Congrats on your nice payday last week and hopefully I can come close this weekend to matching you.

Glort

Look at it this way Jon, No matter what $$ you make this weekend, You'll be leaving me for dead! :cry

Are you wanting to put on more Vstations than what you have or just having trouble finding them at the right price?

Used computers here are getting stupid cheap. If your prepared to settle for something 3 yr old, You can get powerful machines for next to nothing. Laptops are more in demand and exy but still plentiful and cheap.

I'm actually thinking i have been pretty lucky right now. I'm very achey, stiff and miserable with this cold and I probably couldn't do an event if I had any, so what better time to get sick than when there is nothing to do anyway? At least I'm not missing out on anything !

Make sure to give us a rundown of how things go for you. I enjoy reading and learning from other peoples experiences. Good luck with it!

jbakerphoto

I think my problem with the viewstations is I dont have the funds to find more at the right price. . My wife has been staying home for four years with my son and hasnt gone back to work yet so I got to pay the bills. I would like to eventually add some more so i can do bigger events but I think I am going to have do it a couple at a time. The one I added off ebay was 50 dollars total. not too bad. I am coughing up a storm right now so it is going to be interesting tonight with my race.

jbakerphoto

AACCKK , got a call from my assistant saying she is throwing up. Luckily I found someone to help. Events are kicking my butt with these assistants... Guess if it was easy everyone would do it.

Glort

Geez mate, Sounds like you are having no luck at all!

Hope it works out for you.

jbakerphoto

Somehow it worked out. I managed to make a little over a grande. Which is fantastic as far as I am concerned. My first assistant was interesting I tried training her to print for me. She printed but I am not sure she did me much justice. . There was a world class barrel racer there that ordered prints and I came by during a drag to check on how things were going. So I had showed her how to sharpen my blurry shots when necessary earlier. So she had sharpened one of the shots so much that it was very pixilated. So I told her to go ahead and do it over so we get it right. I want all my customer to be happy. So the lady comes over before she gets done fixing it and looks at the prints and goes that is so cool. I love it. I then told my assistant that she was off the hook. . So we didnt sell all that many the first night. The replacement assistant had plans for today, so I was hopeing that my first assistant that was sick would be better. no such luck. So the organizer of the event knew a teenager that was willing to help people find there pics and collect money for me. She did an excellent job for me although I am not looking forward to having to print a whole bunch of orders this week and then send them out. That is definitely the plus of doing onsite printing is you are done at the end of the event. I got a lot of complements on my pictures so I must be doing something right.

Glort

Sounds like an excellent result Jon!
A grand is a good weekend to me anytime!
Well done for overcoming all the odds that were against you and making a good success financially out of the event. Just not feeling well maginifys the difficulty by a factor of 4 at least!

Your sharpening experience sounds similar to things I have found. Last event when the printer was off colour and pretty blue to my way of thinking, people were saying how they loved the colours.
Personaly, I have never found blue skin tones all that appealing myself but anyway!


Have you thought of setting up actions in PS for your processing and printing?
If you can find a happy medium average for sharpening, colour balance and density, it should just be a matter of setting it all up and then your assistant of the day ( sorry, couldn't help it!) just has to hit the F key and it's done. No reason you can't then set them up with the same parameters save for resizing for different sizes. You could even put in a stop with the crop selected to the right ratio so the school kid just moves the crop to the right spot ( if Needed) , hit another button and it spits out the printer finished.

If nothing else, you could certainly get a lot better consistancy that way and then if you need to ajust more you can do it in the camera so you know it will transalte to what you want at the other end.
I think this could go a long way to helping with the issues you have with assistants and making their end as no brainer as possible.

There is a lot you can do with actions to save repitition and speed things up. I have all my T&I packages set up this way so Package 1 = F2, Pack 2 =F3 etc. All are auto sharpened, leveled, balanced etc. and all that needs t be done is open the image needed, hit the button of the package required and go to te next order.

I agree with you whole heartedly that being finished at the end of an event and not having to worry about the last event is a BIG plus for me as well. I HATE posting prints, so much stuffing around and no matter what you do to pack them, 10% will be damaged by the post office destruction department.

I once sent a CD to a model 3 times and it arrived broken every occasion. In the end I got annoyed and went up the shed and found 2 perfectly sized 1/8" Steel plates and taped the disk in it's cover between the plates and posted it in an envelope like that. Took the girl 10 min to get the disk out but her father that was a boiler maker apparently laughed his butt off.

They didn't break THAT disk!