My watermarked pics found on instagram
Zerodog
Registered Users Posts: 1,480 Major grins
What to do? Pictures from a race event we shot last weekend have surfaced on instagram with my Logo right across the middle of them. Blatant screen grab. It is 4 photos. What should I do? Make them take it down, or just look at it as free advertising for my web address. What a fricken douche!
:wxwax
:wxwax
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A former sports shooter
Follow me at: https://www.flickr.com/photos/bjurasz/
My Etsy store: https://www.etsy.com/shop/mercphoto?ref=hdr_shop_menu
Back in 2006 I had a young kart racer come up to me and tell me how much he loved the pictures I had been getting of him that season and asked how to get them w/o the watermark. I mentioned he could click "buy" on the website and he just stared at me, then walked away.
A former sports shooter
Follow me at: https://www.flickr.com/photos/bjurasz/
My Etsy store: https://www.etsy.com/shop/mercphoto?ref=hdr_shop_menu
A former sports shooter
Follow me at: https://www.flickr.com/photos/bjurasz/
My Etsy store: https://www.etsy.com/shop/mercphoto?ref=hdr_shop_menu
http://joves.smugmug.com/
If you are talking onsite sales, I have to disagree.
I did it for years with my wife and kids aged then 12 and 13. We did events up to 5000 on one and used 30 Vstations.
Yeah, it was a shipload of work setting them up and tearing them down but I made more that long day than ever before in my life. You don't get paid for sitting on your butt watching TV.
Events are hard, no 2 ways about it but events relying on online sales IMHO are just a wast of time even considering doing let alone anything beyond getting out of bed to actually shoot.
The thing of Vstations being to hard, costly, time consuming whatever is a cop out. You may as well say that Buying a DSLR with a high quality lens is too expensive, heavy to carry .. whatever and take your pics with a P&S camera. It's exactly the same thing of taking the easy way out rather than getting the best from the given opportunity.
Funny enough Zero, I was thinking of you last weekend. Someone I met from another state was talking to me about shooting triathalons and road races and was asking me what I thought. I remembered your posts and stories here from a while back when you got started in this and was wondering how you have been going with it?
IF you are doing any good, It may pay you to at least test the water with V stations.
Despite what people who have probably never used them will tell you, Pretty much any used P4 machine will handle what you need of them. I ended up with a whole bunch of P4, 512, 20G 1.8hz Laptops and ran Jalbum and the things were fast as you could spin the thumb wheel on the mouse.
I stuck them all on a used 48 port Switch and a basic server and it all ran Fine. Before the lappys I had even lower spec desktops and had no trouble with them being slow either.
With Vstations the sales are not only far higher but all the images out there are bought and paid for and the worry of them being circulated is greatly reduced.
You're free to disagree. I don't have a wife and kids to drag to events so I would have to pay someone. I would also have to pay for (and maintain) an on-site setup. I'm also not selling to a crowd of anywhere near 1000. So for me, the investment just isn't worth it.
What we have found is different places have different buying trends. Onsite sales are very important to us. And the more the better. Online sales are a huge part of what we do. I look at online photos like money seeds. I just sold $200 worth of pics from an event 2 years ago. You can not discount online sales. My website has smaller pics. But not too small. I watermark with a big crappy one right in the middle. It is obvious stuff is for sale too. No matter what you do, if you put your pics online, people are gonna steal your photos one way or another. Screen captures are bad. But I have had cell phone pics of a screen show up on facebook more than once.
I assume they just sit down at the computer, scroll through the pictures until hey find their own and the software lets them make selections and it saves what print sizes they want of each one? and then they come to you and make a payment? How do you know what they ordered? do you just bring up their page on a master computer or something?
The place I bought them from who does refurb Computer gear also threw in the 48 Port switch and a big ass server as well which was very handy.
The laptops are all low spec P4's but as they only run IE in Kiosk mode, there was no speed issues at all.
The tables were all elevated so the people could stand and look at a comfortable height and also put them above the height of pesky little kids who stand there all day scrolling and hammering buttons while the parents are doing what ever the hell they do other than know where their u5 kids are.
I simply got some steel tube and inserted it into the legs of the tables and welded a bar along the bottom to add stability and stop the tables sinking into the soft ground they were usually placed on.
Never had seats, that just encourages people to stay too long and tie up stations.
The images were catergorised as much as possible. Usually this was the event, say Hackiing, the age group, level, and sometimes time frame, ie 9am-10am.
They found their event and went through to see their pics. They wrote the image numbers down on paper forms that were at each V station along with the secured pen and then brought their order to the trailer that was right at the end of the tent for payment and fulfilment.
We printed and/or burned disks on the spot. That was the best part. When you were done, you were done. No more orders to stuff around with, people not getting images because they went astray in the post, no wrong images. Came home , money in pocket, ready for the next one.... which could easily be the next day.
I tried shopping carts and they were a miserable failure. People would come up and ask literally what they put where it said "Name". Never had any trouble at all with the paper forms which had the EXACT same fields and layout as did the shopping cart.
How large were the pictures you were showing? Were they the original res or sized down for viewing purposes?
The paper makes sense, I should have thought of that first.
Do you remember the specs of the laptops? Im just curious, I know it doesnt really matter.
I -think- we put the res at around 800x600, whatever best filled the screen and still had room. Really, it's irrelevant. As long as the people can see the pics, who cares? I did them as big as possible. Jalbum also has an auto size option that I used to fit within the window and then you can click and zoom in for better detail.
The lappys were P4, 1.8 to 2.0, 512mb, 20G.
Some had Wi-fi and I used those at different locations like placing them near the kiosk or office if it were in range. At the old equestrian Olympic venue we did several times. I would put a couple of V stations in the huge stables where a lot of riders spent a lot of time. Usually I pre- loaded these machines with the pics from the Day before and updated them with that days morning and afternoon pics as we went.
The laptops were not expensive to start with. There isn't that much call for low end machines so I didn't haggle at all the place has always been way more than fair with me so I just go tell them what I want and the price they come back with is always less than I guessed even they would ask.
They get the machines in literally by the thousand and pallet loads at a time. Not so much with laptops but I have still seen pallet fulls of the machines and a separate pallet of bags, power supply's etc to go with them.
If place get them like that here, there must be 100 places getting even more in the US.
When I was in the process of setting this all up, people on forums told me I needed these powerful, expensive machines to be fast enough which was a total load of rot and misinformation.
Jalbum makes HTML galleries so several thousand pics from one event are lucky to run 400 MB for the gallery in total. The origanals are on the server and the clients can't get to them because the Vstations are locked in Kiosk mode and we had the server password protected from the vstations. We could get to anything at all on the server if we wanted but the clients couldn't .
Each image is like 100KB so nearly any computer made can run the gallerys. The first outing I did I used P3 Desktops So get the cheapest P4's you can find and you'll be sweet as. I even ran the vstations on the wifi for a while but that did slow down with a dozen people all scrolling madly so I went back to the wired system although sometimes I did run half on Wi-fi which was fast enough.
I also used an old behemoth of a Server for about 12 months, but that thing had some incredible specs. IF I remember right, it had 32 of RAM. ( Yes, RAM!) across 8 channels but under 100Gb of HDD over the 12 Scsi 10K drives. The thing weighed 80 KG (160lbs) and at full tilt needed 2 separate power circuits to supply it's electrical thirst. I fiddled with it and got the electrical demands down which was a big problem given we could be hooked into a circuit with the ice cream and coffee guy BUT, the thing was blazingly fast for us especially with the 6 Gigabit network ports. I was pathetically slow driving the printers being only USB1 and non upgradeable r so I had another couple of work stations Networked through a Gigabit switch to pull the images from the server, edit and print them or burn disks.
The server too was given to me by the refurb crowd simply because there was no market for it. Old servers are a liability to most businesses and a lot of them with data backup coverage/ insurance are required to update every 4 years. Plus having a machine that size with so little capacity would be useless to a lot of people that needed a server in the first place. Pretty much they are Just E waste.
I looked the thing up, the list price 8 years previous was A$34,000!!
The 48 port switch was also a freebie. It was a 1gb in, but only 100mb out so was old tech. Didn't matter to me, none of the machines I had were gigabit capable or needed it.
I bought another one on ebay for backup the next week for $10. The guy that gave it to me said he remembered when they put it in 4-5 years before and the thing cost over $4K. I had that running 30 machines at a couple of events we did but it wasn't great logistically. 30 machines need to be spread out a bit which means long cables. A better solution was to use 8 or 12 port switches and just daisy chain them to one another with a single cable and have them located a lot closer to a group of machines.
Better to have single long cable which is easier to tape over a door way or put one of those trip covers over when on the floor than a bunch of cables as thick as your arm.
I did use the 48 port in the tent and as can be seen in the pick, got some cheap plastic hose and slit it to put the network cables in ( with a spare) so it was just one single cable in effect. That looked seriously hard and was a lot easier to route and keep neat. The 48 port switch with its noticeable fan whine sounded serious and looked good as well.
Normally I ran 12-15 Vstations but On a couple of larger events I used the old Desktop setups I built into stands with removable legs and the laptops as well giving us a total of 24 Terminals.