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Rudy Pollock Expert PageANNOUNCER: This VTalk Radio Spotlight is brought to you by morephotos.com. The online photo sales solution for professional photographers worldwide. Welcome to the VTalk Radio Photography Spotlight with your host, John Bentley.
JOHN: Today we are in the studio with Vice President of Sales, Rudy Pollack, of Classic Album of Brooklyn, New York, and you're listing to VTalk Radio's Photography Spotlight.
Welcome to the program, Rudy.
RUDY: Thank you very much.
JOHN: Now you guys have quite a service your offering professional photographers. Can you give us a little overview of what you're up to.
RUDY: Ok, well we've been in business for over 50 years. Classic is not new to the wedding market and the professional photographer. We started about 1950, somewhere around that time. It was a mom and pop operation. It had three employees at the time; right now we have almost 70. We offer a lot of value and different types of albums to photographers. We have quite a selection since our product line has been growing for the last 50 years. We have designer series albums, library mounted albums, slip-in albums, little pocket books, we have favoramas, we have coveramas, we have the old fashion post bound and spiral bound albums, we have proof albums, and canvas products, and the new printed book albums that everybody wants.
JOHN: I've been checking out your website and you certainly have a lot of products on there and some very interesting products, just of the top of my head I'm wondering, approximately how many professional photographers does your company service?
RUDY: We service over 200 photographers at the moment. And, you know, it grows, constantly growing. Some people stay in business, some people go out of business, so it's a fluctuating market right now.
JOHN: Let's get to the different types of photo albums that you offer. Let's just start with the classic, what's called the New Designer Series. Tell us a little about that. The New Designer Series; well we were the first album company about ten years ago to come up with a digital album. At that time, there were no album companies around doing that, and what we had at the time was a product where you gave us images, and we dropped them into templates which we had acquired and had designed, and we made the beautiful albums with multi images. It created a great look and it just grew from there and ever since then, everybody else in this industry has just taken off. The Designer series today is a little bit of a different product. We have designers that work for us. Photographers have to upload their images to us, color corrected, and then we design the book. Then they can have an album from 20 sides to 30 sides to 50 sides depending on what their sales objective is.
JOHN: Now when photographers send you photos to put these together, they have options here. They don't necessarily have to have you do the whole thing. You could just do perhaps just bind a product that they've already put together themselves, isn't that true?
RUDY: A lot of photographers like to do their own work so we let them design their own. When we get their product in, they can either give us a design print and bind product, a print and bind, or just a regular bind. We can just take whatever they produce and we'll bind it into any kind of album they like.
JOHN: Now with the new Designer Series, is this a virtual type thing or is that something totally different?
RUDY: You mean for the starters of design? No we ask them to use one of our products that we love that they use is Diji Photo, from Pixelsoft. It's a great designing software, and they do it right in their home, and they can design it custom, they can move images around. It's not a template object where if you did something online and have to drop them into a pre-made template, we don't have that. We basically like them to use a software in Photoshop. Any product that they like to produce an album and they send us the file and then we print it.
JOHN: Now some of the other books and products that you offer are kind of the standard D ring type album.
RUDY: A D ring is a proof album, and the most popular one today, everybody is going into the 4x6 line. When everybody was shooting film, they were doing 5x5, 4x5, those standard sizes. We now have the 4x6 D ring proof book and it comes with 3 on a side, and we're now developing a proof book, a D ring with a 4x6 on the side because so many photographers today are shooting so many images. Years ago, they used to shoot 200-300 images at a wedding. Today they're shooting over 1000 images. So they need books that can hold over 1000 when they present this product.
JOHN: Now we're in the studio with Rudy Pollack. He is Vice President of Sales at the Classic Album Company in Brooklyn, New York. Before we take a break here, Rudy, could you pass on your website information.
RUDY: Our website is www.classicalbum.com and our phone number is (718) 388-2818 or (800) 779-1931.
JOHN: You're listening to VTalk Radio's Photography Spotlight. We're going to step aside for these important messages. Do stay tuned.
ANNOUNCER: This VTalk Radio Spotlight is sponsored by morephotos.com, the online photo sales solution to professional photographers worldwide.
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ANNOUNCER: We now return you to the VTalk Radio's Photography Spotlight with your host, John Bentley.
JOHN: We are in the studio with Rudy Pollack. He is Vice President of Sales at the Classic Album of Brooklyn, New York and you're listening to VTalk Radio's Photography Spotlight. Welcome back to the program, Rudy.
RUDY: Thanks. I'm glad to be back.
JOHN: Now we've been talking about the different kinds of photo albums you offer the professional photographer. I noticed on your website you have what's called Lucite covers. Can you explain that a little bit?
RUDY: Our Lucite covers are our newest and hottest product. It's a beautiful 1/8" design...1/8" to a 1/4" glass which is beveled. It has a beautiful bevel and it can be put on any album that we produce. It can be made for any album. What we do is take a file from the photographer and it has to, you know, be a really nice beautiful shot that we recommend that they give us. From there, we make a metallic print. A metallic print is then bound or heat bound right to the glass. So it's permanently in the glass and then we mount the glass the glass to the album.
JOHN: They look absolutely beautiful.
RUDY: Yeah, it's one of our best products. It's really beautiful.
JOHN: Let's talk about virtual albums. This seems to be kind of a cutting edge idea too. You have a few different series; the Euro, the Flush, Reversible. Can you tell our listening audience about these products?
RUDY: The Euro is our 10x15 matted album, and what we mean by matted is we actually have a photo sent to us by the photographer just like the old fashion reversible library album, but this is a 10x15 with really contemporary designs. What it does is it offers the bride an album that looks very contemporary, but also has the look of the old mounted albums. Many of the brides, I'll say 50%, like the standard albums, but they want them to look a little funkier. They want them to look a little bit like a designer series book, a digital book, but they don't really want a designer series book. So we made this album in the 10x15, all the mattes are very special, they're very different, and it looks almost like a digital album, but it isn't.
JOHN: And what about the Reversible?
RUDY: The reversible is the same as the Euro except that's where we originally were while we were making reversible books. The book that we'd been making for the last 50 years. It's a mounted album for a bride who wants very traditional looking book, doesn't want the designer series, but wants a matted album. We have many, many mattes available that they can place the images on.
JOHN: Now you also have a product I thought was kind of neat; pocket books. Something that you can put in your purse perhaps or...
RUDY: Yeah, we have two different versions of the Pocket Book. Actually, we now have 3 different versions, but Pocket Book originally was a Favorama and it was a 12 image book that looks like a little child's book, you know, like you get in a book store with the thick covers and we can mount 10 images on there 10 - 12 images, and it comes in different sizes from 4x6 to 5x5 to 4x5 and it's a great little item that a bride or a mother of a bride or a mother of a bride can carry in her pocket book and carry it to show other people the wedding. The Pocket Book itself is a self stick book. It holds 10 images and the photographer can place 10 images in the pocket book and present it to the bride and the other new product we have is part of our Classic Edition Books. It's a printed book. It's a full color press book, looks like a little magazine and it comes in 4x6 to 5x5 to 4x5. Also it's an addition to the Designer Series so if a photographer has a Designer Series album, what they can do is take that book, send us the files, and we can make a full color printed book so that the bride can take it along with her everywhere. It's another very good hot product.
JOHN: Now the Spiral Bound books you also have they have what's called a post and spiral bound, and you have the Royal Supreme, the Royal Spiral and the Royal Flush. What makes these books different from the other ones?
RUDY: The post and spiral books are for photographers that don't want to spend a lot of money on an album. They want to have just basic real simple albums, don't want to increase their prices, but want to keep the prices at a level that's more economical for some brides. So they'll by you the royal supreme, the Royal Spiral, the Royal Flush, and they'll also use the post bound books. Basically they're all post bound books, but they have different finishes. The spiral is basically a spiral where the books are mounted on a spiral ring and they spin on that. The other book looks like a library bound, but it has a post bound, the edges are all guilded so it can be guilded in either gold or silver and it has the look of a more expensive mounted album, but really is a post bound book, and it's a slip in page.
JOHN: Now you also mentioned earlier when we started the interview that you also do canvas prints for the professional photographer. Is that something that a lot of photographers are getting into now days?
RUDY: Yeah, we've always had what we call the Coverama. The Coverama is a canvas mounted photograph which replaces the leather on an album. So what we do is we print an image on the cover using canvas. We'll print it on canvas and we'll wrap it around the entire book so they'll have a photograph on the front and the back. It's also quite a unique product,and we also have what we call a Front Panel Canvas. A Front Panel Canvas is a front panel image of canvas, but it only takes up the front part of the book. The rest of the album has leather and it has a two tone spine and it looks absolutely amazing. It's a beautiful product.
JOHN: Well you certainly have a lot to offer the professional photographer, Rudy, and I want to thank you for joining us today on VTalk Radio's Photography Spotlight.
RUDY: My pleasure speaking with you.
JOHN: We've been in the studio with Rudy Pollack. He is Vice President of Sales at the Classic Album of Brooklyn, New York, and you've been listening to VTalk Radio's Photography Spotlight. I am your host, John Bentley, and sound engineer, Damien Allen, hanging out with us today. Have a great afternoon. Thanks for joining us.
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