Hammy
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 p.1 #7 · Remote Camera Focusing? | |
Focus, good questions...
In gymnastics, most gymnasts make two passes at the vault table. I'm not even sure if the scores are averaged, or the best of the two are taken  I would generally take shots of both passes, but I only showed one in the link(s) above.
If the vault run was a round off back handspring onto the springboard followed by a double back pike and they nailed the landing, saluted and gots hugs from coaches, I would keep the shutter down and get 30+ images of one run. However, if the pass was a simple jump and rotate to landing, fall or just really quick, I may only get 20-ish images of a single pass.
For this setup, I ran a two FireWire cables (6ft + repeater + 33ft) from the camera to our downloader which was in our booth (behind some curtains separating us from the 'gym' floor) I'd peak through the curtains to see when they got to the right spot in the frame, hold the test button down on my PocketWizard and let go accordingly.
With the tether - the images are downloaded to our box instantly (with a few seconds lag for 4Mpix, ISO3200 images.) When all the images were into my downloader box, using our software, I clicked on the gymnast name and clicked on Download. From there, they were all name appended and categorized to our servers which created web sized images for our viewstations in about 35 seconds. No other processing, post chimping or anything was done to them, just dumped to the server and then available to our viewstations (before the next competitor was going.)
THEN - I also ran a slideshow of those images on two 42" plasmas - showing the whole sequence in order (sometimes I ran the slideshow between passes - coaches LOVED this to analyze the routine)
Now, as for what sold...
We only sold THREE (3) prints. One of each:
- 8x10 gymnast saluting
- 12x18 in air: tuck
- 24x36 launching off of springboard
The other 60 or so customers that purchased images - bought EVERY vault shot on disc - along with ALL the other images we took from each event.
My bottom line rule of thumb is that I can't sell what I don't have.
This does NOT mean spray and pray and just shoot gobs of photos no matter what they look like. If I hit over 10% crap pictures, then the sales start to tank - normally I average around 1% OOF pix with my photographers and I can live with that.
For the other events (bars, beam and floor), we were getting about the same number of pix. This gets an even spread and coverage in the mind of the consumer. If I were only to take ONE shot of them up in the air, I would have captured only 33% of what sold in prints. More importantly, parents wouldn't have been able to buy the whole sequence to pick the shots they want for their own collage, slideshow, critique, etc...
Another rule: the eye of the photographer does NOT equal that of a parent. What we think is a blah shot, they may think of as GOLD!
By presenting ALL the photos that we take, we present a much better value - as well as providing something they rarely, if EVER, have seen before (vault and bars almost never get covered) Now, of course, this goes along with our sales model - pushing images on CD. While we'll have no problem printing the 70 prints that sold at 3200ISO - but I'd much rather burn a CD and be done. Less time and higher profit - and our pricing scheme hit that very well - where we made TWICE what I had expected to make.
This model doesn't work for editorial, where one wants one shot - or does post processing to create a montage. And generally anything in volume breaks down without the ability to organize and handle the volume efficiently. For us, its very easy to download a complete set of images: whether one gymnast at a time on vault, 20 gymnasts shot into separate folders of the other events or 40 cheerleaders shot on multiple cameras/cards at a time. With that volume, the consumer wins with so much to obtain - which they could not otherwise get.
Hammy.
Edited on May 08, 2008 at 09:10 PM
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- not that it influenced their scoring, but that they could see it again.)