If motherhood is driving you to the brink of insanity, you are in luck! I’ll be speaking at the Easton Public Library at 7 pm on Monday, May 4th.
Come and join me. You’ll laugh. You might even cry. (I know I will 😉 )
I am totally over the kids’ sports team pictures.
I have never seen a bigger crock of shit than the companies that take these pictures.
The amount of money they charge for their fake and forced photos is obscene.
If you have ever attended a little league picture night, then you know what I am talking about.
That is an hour (or more) of your life you will never get back.
And you have to pay to do it, really.
I have a solution to this problem.
When you run in a big marathon like the Boston or New York City Marathon, there are photographers staked out all over the race course.
And they take a bazillion pictures.
And then a day or two after the race, the photo company sends you the proofs of the pictures that were taken of you during the race.
I got an email from the Boston Marathon the other day containing 36 pictures of me throughout the course.
In a crowd of over 30,000 runners, I received 36 pictures of myself. Within days.
36 really decent pictures of me. And I was running. In the rain.
And then I was given the option to purchase some of them, or all of them.
Not just one copy of them. Basically the rights to them.
Then you can print them out. You can post them on Facebook. You can email them and share them and do whatever the hell you want with them.
And the pictures are cool. Because they are candid photos of me actually running.
I look like a badass in a lot of them.
I also look like I’m about to die in a couple.
But that’s the beauty of it.
You have lots of photos to choose from.
Not just one shitty picture of you sitting in a gym holding a bat and flashing the world’s fakest smile.
Or with your eyes totally closed.
So why can’t we do that for baseball? And soccer? And football? And every other sport?
Why can’t we have some photographers staked out for the afternoon at our games who take photos of our kids in action?
And then post them all online and let us buy the whole fucking lot of them if we want to?
If they can get 30,000 people running the Boston Marathon in the rain, then surely they can get a couple hundred kids playing baseball in an afternoon.
And we can get our money’s worth.
Sounds like a home run to me.
Deanna says
maybe you should to do a little bartering with someone who does photography……
Dyan says
ummmm I own a camera. Let’s do it. Lol
Pam says
I know a photographer who would give parents a really great product, if only he could. A few dirty little secrets about sports photography:
1) The prices charged are obscene….and also a fundraiser for the league. The league gets a cut of all the pictures bought. Yup. They never tell you that.
2) Because leagues hire the companies to photograph, there are more teams to photograph than an independent photographer can handle in a weekend. The bigger companies hire average Joes and give them a day of training on how to click the picture. Many pictures come out terrible, but they ask you to pay for them before you see them. Hmmm ..wonder why? These Joes usually are not really photographers; maybe 1 in 20 is.
3) Even if parents want to hire a photographer for their own pictures they can’t. Photographers must be hired by the league, not parents or coaches, or teams. Right from the Little League website:
“No person or commercial entity is permitted to photograph any league activities for the purpose of retail sale or distribution without the expressed written permission of the local league. In the case of video production, permission must be granted in writing by Little League International. If a league wishes to establish a contractual agreement with a professional photographer to sell team or action photography, it may do so. Public notice of such agreements is required prior to the photographer and/or videographer making any imagery available for purchase.”
4) Photographing children does present more issues than photographing adults. One wrong e-mail address and photos of a child go to the wrong person and all hell breaks loose, so the method used in Boston, as well as it worked for adults, would be risky for children.
While I agree that a new business model is due, and totally get being “over” these awful photography opps, like so many things in this world, it comes down to the almighty dollar. Leagues want more money, they set up rules to get it. Independent photographers can’t make much profit for the time and energy involved, so the big companies streamline the process and sell a cookie cutter product taken by amateurs, and parents are pressured to but a sub-par product for much more money than it’s worth.
Sooo frustrating!
Ashley says
You are preaching to the choir here! Trying to wrangle one kid into a picture is hard enough, let alone 12 or more! The live action pictures are much more rewarding for sure!