Todays Guest: Frank Harrison of Timepiece Photography in Paduka, Kentucky
Today's Host: John Bentley
November 2007
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Frank Harrison Expert PageANNOUNCER: Welcome to the VTalk Radio's Photographer Spotlight with your host, John Bentley.
ANNOUNCER: This program is sponsored by morephotos.com the online photo sales solution to professional photographers worldwide.
JOHN: Today we are in the Studio with the operations manager for Time Piece Photography, Frank Harrison, of Paducah, Kentucky. Welcome to VTalk Radio's Photographer Spotlight, Frank.
FRANK: Good Morning.
JOHN: Glad you could join us today.
FRANK: It was my pleasure. Thank you.
JOHN: You've got some photography going down there in Kentucky. Why don't you tell us a little bit about your photography business.
FRANK: Well, Time Piece Photography is a sports and special events business that's really geared to youth sports athletics. We also photograph high school, middle school, and some collegiate sports. We photograph the primary sports such as baseball, basketball, football, volleyball, and soccer.
JOHN: Now I see a lot of not only team photos, but also action photos. So you guys are actually going to the games and shooting some of these individuals and then you're offering these products to their parents and what have you?
FRANK: Basically the way it works is in conjunction with doing a traditional team and individual photo shoot, to give us a competitive edge over others, we also offer action photography. And what we'll do is we'll send a photographer to go out and photograph games live in action and we offer those to the parents in a couple different ways. We have a website that we post those to. To where parents can view and purchase those pictures, and we also have the capability to do on site printing, depending on the size of the tournament, the location, and lot of logistical things that have to go into those factors, we may print every single picture on a 4x6 and put them on the table by the end of the game, and then parents are able to walk up and make that instant impulse purchase.
JOHN: Wow, that's a great service. Now when you go to an event like this, are you using more than one photographer?
FRANK: Oh, absolutely. Again, it depends on the criteria and the type of event. Let's take baseball for example. If we're shooting a baseball tournament, usually one photographer covers two fields. So if we're in a complex that has 8 fields then we're using four photographers. If we're doing a band competition, usually we'll use two photographers for that. Soccer primarily the same thing as baseball. One photographer per two fields. So it can vary. We just got through doing an 85 team football tournament in Knoxville, Tennessee, and that was held on 6 different fields so, of course, that required six different photographers. We employee between 12 - 15 photographers year around to handle just about any size event that comes our way. Now you're down there in Paducah, Kentucky. Could you name some of the communities and cities in the area that you cover these events for?
FRANK: Well absolutely. We cover an area of about 500 - 600 mile radius of Paducah. We may be in St. Louis, Nashville, Evansville, Owensborough, Paris to the Sea, of course, our local area here in Paducah, Metropolis, IL. We go as far as Glasgow, KY; Bowling Green; London, KY; Atlanta. Again, it's pretty much a coverage area of about 500 - 600 miles.
JOHN: Wow, that's quite a broad area of coverage. What about some of the teams or schools that you're shooting for.
FRANK: Well a lot of the schools that we photograph are local. We have about 7 high schools here in our immediate back yard to where we don't have to do a lot of extensive traveling. Most of the schools have contracts with photographers and have been locked in with those for many, many years. We personally don't go after the schools. We're more into the sporting events, and the schools that we photograph...we're primarily focusing on the sports aspect of it.
JOHN: And how long have you been in business as a photographer?
FRANK: Well I started this business about 6 years ago out of my home and it got to actually interfere with my day to day operations at a mini-lab that I worked at...we processed soap cameras, but it got to be that my business was going so well that I had to give up my 9 to 5 to pursue my love for sports photography.
JOHN: Now you also have a studio that you work out of too for senior photos?
FRANK: We do a lot of senior photos in studio and out in the field. We have several nice parks here locally that we go to to take the kids to photograph their vehicles. The local park has a nice pond and it has some beautiful settings to be able to provide outdoor pictures without having to have a great big facility of my own. Plus it gives kind of a more personal look to the pictures because it shows the area where they grew up around.
JOHN: And when you have a sitting, what is your most important goal as a photographer?
FRANK: My first important goal as a photographer is to make sure every customer is satisfied and we give them the highest quality and the best service that they could ever expect. We also try to make sure that we build relationships between our customers, and I find that's the key in being able to retain business to see them year after year after year.
JOHN: And you have quite a nice website set up. Why don't you give us your website address and contact information for our listeners today.
FRANK: Sure our website address for our sports photography is www.timepiecephotography.com.
JOHN: Is there a phone number that people can reach you by?
FRANK: Absolutely. That phone number is (270) 443-2151.
JOHN: We are speaking with Frank Harrison, photographer and operations manager of Time Piece Photography. We're going to step aside for these important messages, we'll be right back.
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ANNOUNCER: This VTalk Radio's Photographer Spotlight is sponsored by morephotos.com, the online photo sales solution to professional photographers worldwide.
ANNOUNCER: We now return you to VTalk Radio's Photographer Spotlight with your host, John Bentley.
JOHN: Welcome back to VTalk Radio's Photographer Spotlight. I am your host, John Bentley, Today we are in the studio with Paducah, Kentucky, photographer, Frank Harrison. He's also the operations manager of Time Piece Photography. That's not all you do is it, Frank? You've got another business going on there don't you?
FRANK: Yes, absolutely. Our second company name is Spotlight Photographics. Basically what that is is we provide graphic services for other photography companies across the country.
JOHN: What kind of services are you talking about?
FRANK: What we provide for other professional photographers is a means for them to send us images to make custom sports posters. There's a lot of companies out there that have what they call templates where they drop in a picture that has nice graphics around it to build montages of multiple images. We've taken it to another level to where we cut the players or the children or athletes if you will out of the photograph and we put new backgrounds in behind that and layered in such a way that the images are very dimensional and very colorful because we see the color backgrounds through the uniforms and we personalize that with any custom data that they would want to have. There's a lot of places you can send images off to get a tshirt or a coffee mug or a backpack made, but there's just hardly no place other photographers can send their images to have custom sports montages or sports posters made and these are the kind of posters that you would only see in the NFL or Major League Baseball, you know, something on the very high end professional level.
JOHN: Now what kind of paper would you be using for such a poster?
FRANK: I'm glad you asked that? There's a paper called Kodak Enduram Metallic Paper. We use that exclusively for our posters simply because the color that's produced on this type of paper really has an extra pop to it. If you can imagine what a piece of tin foil looks like and having a print put on the back, that's the kind of color and the kind of pop that you would get with that metallic layer in behind the emulsion. And whenever it's printed on that it truly just gives it a sizzle that most people have never seen through photographic paper.
JOHN: So a professional photographer can send an image to you via the web, I'm assuming?
FRANK: We have a website that's set up to where the photographers would actually upload the images to us and provide all the data that is required for us to customize and build the poster, and then what we do is we perform the work and then we print it and then we drop ship it the customer or we send it back to the photographer. It just depends on what their wishes are.
JOHN: That's great that you drop ship directly to the customer. That saves some extra time for the professional photographer. What other graphics do you guys do for these kinds of photos?
FRANK: The thing with the posters is we have expanded beyond sports. We're doing car shows, equestrian events, swimming. We've even done surfing. We've had boxing sent our way. Last weekend our company photographed a Corvette show and made some custom posters for Corvette so it's not limited to just the sports arena. These posters can be made for just about anything that you can conceive from weddings to senior portraits. It really doesn't matter. We like the challenge of being able to produce something that we've never had before.
JOHN: What size dimensions are you talking about in posters? What's the...maybe the smallest poster you can order...and the largest poster?
FRANK: The smallest size that we offer is a 12 x 18. We do everything in full frame because whenever you build these posters and you want to enlarge those, you don't run into format issues so we offer the 12 x 18's, 20 x 30's, 24 x 36, and we can go as large as 30 x 45.
JOHN: That's a pretty big poster!
FRANK: For anything larger than that, we use an Epson 9800 to produce prints that actually measure 4' x 6' in size.
JOHN: Wow! Now I see these new posters that the NFL is offering on TV. Have you seen those?
FRANK: Ah yes.
JOHN: Is that something you guys can do?
FRANK: It is. When you're talking about the commercials that you've seen in the posters would it by any chance be what they call a Fat Head?
JOHN: Yeah.
FRANK: Yeah, the Fat Heads is a licensed product that's offered through the NFL. We do have the capabilities and services to where we can take a little league player and produce exactly the same type of product, but of course, you don't have the licensing issues, because we're not dealing with professional athletes, and these are made in full size. So we photograph a child and mother sees or dad sees the picture of their son or daughter that they would like to have made into one of these wall clings, otherwise know...we call them a sports pose, and we do have a website for that which is www.sportspose.com. People would be able to upload their images and give us the height of the child. So if the child is 6' tall, then they get a 6' tall wall cling or sports pose to be able to put on to the wall. And the neat thing about this product is they're moveable. We see a lot of people will have those in their homes or on their bedroom walls and then on the weekends when they get ready to go to an event, they actually peel it off the wall and stick it on the back of their car.
JOHN: So it's magnetic?
FRANK: It's not magnetic. It has a type of adhesive on the back that is reusable and it doesn't leave any residue, and it's completely removable and it will restick hundreds and hundreds of times without it ever failing.
JOHN: Wow. That's an interesting product. I certainly have been fascinated by seeing that kind of a product on TV. How do you market your business to professional photographers?
FRANK: There's a lot of different ways. The best way that we have found is word by mouth. We have found that we get a better response and more interesting clients when one photographer shares with another who we are and what we do. I do speaking for PMA which is the photographic marketing association. Me and a panel of other people go around and we help push the educational side of the photography industry, and of course, in doing that, they see what we do and how we're doing it and that has been a very good way of marketing and letting other people know about what we do. And, of course, other than that, you have you're standard search of the internet and just making one on one contacts with other companies.
JOHN: We are speaking with Paducah, Kentucky, operations manager, Frank Harrison, of not only Time Piece Photography, but also Spotlight Photographics. They offer a great service to professional photographers. These posters are pretty amazing as I can see on your website. Speaking of website, why don't give your website and contact information for Spotlight Photographics, Frank.
FRANK: The website for Spotlight Photographics is www.spotlightphotographics.com and we can be reached by telephone at (270) 443-2151.
JOHN: I want to thank you for joining us today on VTalk Radio's Photographer Spotlight today, Frank.
FRANK: Thank you. I appreciate your call.
JOHN: You have been listening to VTalk Radio's Photographer Spotlight. I am your host, John Bentley. I want to thank you for joining us today. Everyone have a great afternoon.
ANNOUNCER: You have been listening to the VTalk Radio's Photographer Spotlight; only on www.vtalkradio.com. Radio for the 21st Century.
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