[fullofpaint]

Mod's feel free to delete if this isn't appropriate here.

So summer's quickly approaching and I'm looking for something to do. Would anyone be interested in a photo/video pack at events in NE? Don't have a price fixed yet but I'd try to keep it reasonable. The idea here at the end of the day we'd have a personalized package for your team of photos and video from the event, rather than just a bunch of photos from someone, that you find like two photos of yourself. We might even do end delivery for DVD, with custom labels and such, but obviously that's an extra cost. Depending on how successful this is I'd love to be able to offer actual team photos as well, to give yourself that real pro look for your website or whatever.

Along the same lines if a field is looking for great professional photos for their website we can provide that as well. We'd work with you to determine the type of clientele you want to draw and work from there. We may also be able to offer a service to produce commercials for your field, depening on availability of a crew for myself.

Right now I'm thinking this would probably be for any field in Western MA, Fox 4, Friendly Fire, and maybe like Northern CT? any farther than that for me, I'd have to up my price to cover gas.

For all you gear snobs who wanna know what I'd be using:
5dMk2, might have a 7D by the time this rolls around
70-200L f2.8 IS USM, 24-105 f4 IS USM, 16-35 f2.8 IS USM
580 EXII Flash, hopefully upgrading to either some more speedlites, or some studio lighting as well

XH-A1 for video or the 5D, haven't tried shooting any paintball with it yet, but I imagine it'd be too hard to hold focus.

My cred:
Award-winning Media Comm major, been doing photography for a paper or some other media outlet since high school, knowledgeable with many major cinema cameras including RED One, DSLR's, F35, EX3/1, PMW-350, etc. I've produced and directed shorts, corporate videos, music videos and live TV. Playing paintball for ten years now.


Some random samples of my work:
Video:
This is just a mix of footage I shot last year at Camelot Paintball's for the first (and only) Hurricane event.
Hurricanes Tournament Series


Photos:
Just FYI all of this was shot with my old gear, much softer lenses, and the camera (40D) is nowhere close to the 5D.

This post has been edited by fullofpaint: 11 April 2011 - 01:12 AM

[mike7822]

If you want to get your name out go to Matt's Outback Paintball in Conventry, CT. A lot of teams play there every Sunday, unless there's an event.

[Tommikka]

If US players are anything like UK players for liking pretty pictures of ourselves then you should get a good response.

In the UK Andy & Kat Newberry are esssentialy the official photographers of UK scenario paintball.

They began with Andy asking event organisers if he could attend and take photos to enable him to get to maore games.

The service they now offer is to attend as many events as possible, aim to photograph everyone who attends, individual and team photos etc and provide the results as either individual pictures, downloadable photosets, DVD photosets.

They manage to do this without getting in the way of players - and very importantly they manage to capture the moment of the ghillie / sneaky guy who gets behind enemy lines without drawing attention.



Branewbs phtography

Branewbs flickr

[fullofpaint]

The biggest reason I wouldn't just show up to an event to shoot is paintball players are cheap. I've shot a few Fox 4 events, the Hurricane event last year, and a few scenarios and have yet to sell a single photo. Not a matter of people not viewing either, I can track my stats and I get a ton of hita form the vents but nobody is willing to sheel out for photos, hence my reluctance to just shoot events, especially when their over two hours away.

[Tommikka]

fullofpaint, on 11 April 2011 - 10:29 PM, said:

The biggest reason I wouldn't just show up to an event to shoot is paintball players are cheap. I've shot a few Fox 4 events, the Hurricane event last year, and a few scenarios and have yet to sell a single photo. Not a matter of people not viewing either, I can track my stats and I get a ton of hita form the vents but nobody is willing to sheel out for photos, hence my reluctance to just shoot events, especially when their over two hours away.

Hear what you are saying - In Andys case I beieve it was a saving in the cost of paying entry fees so he was not making money out of it. So for Branewbs they were attending where they wanted to go anyway.

He was probably doing this for nearly a year before he realy came to my attention.
Later on when they got 'big' they still were probably still not paying their costs.

Make sure people are not taking your pictures for free - waternark them, but as you say it may be harder to make people reach into their opckets.

The plan you have shown does look good - getting a nieche and giving a service.

[fullofpaint]

Yea, everything's watermarked and you can only grab the smallest res file form my website which won't print out to anything usable. We'll see how it goes

[Private Silver]

If the watermark you're using is the one that's in a few of the above photos, it honestly wouldn't be that hard to get rid of and make it almost unnoticeable to an untrained eye, especially if someone has decent skills with something such as photoshop. However it also depends upon the background behind the watermark as well.

For instance the bottom-most one would be a fair bit harder to remove than say...the one right above it.

Besides that, not bad at all, fairly good idea. One piece of advice that I would give would be to try and find teams that want their name put out there, be it on youtube or in pictures on their own site, not teams that are already known. I was actually just playing with a group of guys yesterday that would possibly be interested in someone who could shoot good gameplay video and pictures. I know they have teams, or more exactly, groups, up and down the east coast, from I think northern New York to below Pennsylvania, perhaps even over a bit too, but I'm not sure how much they would actually be willing to SPEND on getting known.