When I started my sports photography business back in 2011 I
knew I needed to have an e-commerce website where parents could buy pictures of
their kids. Parents are busy people, especially parents of student athletes.
These parents are driving their kids to practice at least a couple of times a
week, probably do some volunteer work for their kids team, and attend the games
and sometimes practices too. Not to mention they are most likely employed and
may have other kids who need their attention as well. If the parent is a single
parent, then the burden of all this responsibility falls on them.
I knew that my website had to be easy to use. Just posting
several dozen photos of a football game, for example, and requiring the
visitors to my site to page through all the photos to find their kids was
unacceptable. My site needed to provide an easy way for parents to easily and
quickly locate all the photos of their athlete. This would be of benefit to
them, of course, but would also benefit me, as parents would be more likely to
visit my site and therefore, hopefully, buy more photos.
In order to achieve this goal I tag all photos with the
names of all the players in the photo. This takes a lot of time but in my
opinion it’s worth it. Early in the season it can be a slow process, as I don’t
know the players very well. I need to learn the players by jersey number,
especially for sports like football and lacrosse where masks cover their faces.
As the season goes on I get to the point where I have all the jersey numbers
memorized and can quickly add the player’s name to a photo.
 | |
| Each of the four players in this photo should be identified by keywords. |
I do all this work in Lightroom, adding the names as keywords. I enter both the first and last name within double quotes, creating a single keyword made up of two words. I then upload all the photos to my website. Further, each athlete has his/her own gallery on my site, which contains only his or her pictures. This gallery can be bookmarked so parents can easily return to it. These galleries also have an RSS feed to which parents can subscribe. This allows them to get notified by email when new photos of their child are added. This approach saves visitors to my site lots of time.
Besides saving parents lots of time on my site, tagging all
photos with player’s names provides another benefit. It allows out-of-town
parents to find photos of their athlete that they normally wouldn’t find. I advertise
my work locally by handing out business cards to fans at games I attend. But
there are plenty of parents and other relatives who live out of town and don’t know anything about
me. These include parents of college athletes who are playing away from home, divorced parents of local athletes who may not live in my area, and grandparents and other members of the athlete's extended family. I have
had a few sales to these out-of-town customers who found my photos simply by doing a web search on their kid’s name. If I hadn’t taken the time to
tag all the photos these parents would never have found
my photos and I would have missed out on a sale.
In order to tag the photos with the player’s name you need
to know who the players are. The best way to do this is to obtain a team
roster. These are usually available online on the team’s website. But I often
find that these rosters are inaccurate. They are usually made once before the
season starts and are not updated as the season progresses. But players often
leave or join the team or change jersey numbers during the season. Some players
even wear different numbers for their home and away uniforms. So I find the
best thing to do is try to obtain a roster at the game. Often there is a team
manager (usually a student) or coach who can provide this. If the team is
playing in a stadium with a PA announcer calling the game, he usually has an
accurate roster that he uses to call out the player’s names. I try to get this
roster after the game. Although I try not to interact too much with player’s on
the sidelines during a game, sometimes I will ask one of them to help me
identify another team member.
Photography is a retail business; it is also a service
business. The more service I can provide to my customers the more likely they
will purchase from me and the more likely they will return to my site in the
future. Tagging photos with the player’s names is definitely a time consuming
task. But it provides benefits to both me and my customers.
KSean Sports Photography
No comments:
Post a Comment