Youth Sports - Image fullfillment shops

[Croasdail]

All,

To make a long story short a buddy of mine is reviving a local youth sports league and he has asked me if I would do the kids photos. There will be some 300 plus kids to shoot plus team shots. I need to find a fullfiment house that has good looking templates and can do the printing for me. I will be doing all this while shooting college football and working on material for basketball season - so I don't have tons of time to mess with this. I would really appreciate some direction here. Thanks.

Mark

[transcend]

Can't really help with the fullfillment house...

But why not create a template in PS with a mask, create an action to dump the images into that mask and save out. Then just transmit online to costco (who do REALLY nice wet prints now, including color profiling for your local store's machine).

[liza]

www.mpix.com

[Croasdail]

so will MPIX deliver composites and the sheets with say a 5x7 with wallets? and will they be individually in their own envelopes? It would be cool if they did because they have a decent reputation.

[transcend]

www.mpix.com

Good quality stuff but as an FYI, they are about 2x the price of costco for regular prints. (I have used both in the past to check quality). 52c for a 5x7 at costco, and 99c at Mpix

Edit: Croasdail. They do indeed do composites, baseball cards etc. About $2.50 from what I can remember.

[liza]

Mark,
I saw that they had these while perusing the site and since I shoot sports kept that in the back of my mind should I get a contract to shoot team sports. We don't have Costco around here unfortunately. I never heard of them before I began posting here. :)

[transcend]

Mark,
I saw that they had these while perusing the site and since I shoot sports kept that in the back of my mind should I get a contract to shoot team sports. We don't have Costco around here unfortunately. I never heard of them before I began posting here. :)

Never heard of Costco? Wow, I thought everyone had! I believe they will ship as well, but this probably negates the saved money. It is handy for me as I have 3 of them within 10 mins of me. I can transmit Tuesday night, and pickup Wednesday afternoon.

[liza]

They must be regional. We only have Walmart and Sam's Club.

[Croasdail]

Lisa - in Illinios they have Costco at:

Bedford Park
Bloomingdale
Chicago (Lincoln Park)
Glenview
Lake in the Hills
Lake Zurich
Mount Prospect
Naperville
Niles
Oak Brook
Schaumburg

On another note... I ran around to a bunch of friends houses looking at their kids stuff they have received from other photographers and it ranged from total cra# to some really cool stuff. Now I just need a way to find the sources of the really good ones.

[liza]

Thanks, Mark, but those locations are all about 4 1/2 hours away. I'll stick with Mpix, I guess.

[Todd_K]

www.dpilab.com (http://www.dpilab.com) and http://www.midwestsportslab.com/ both do a nice job and will print what you are looking for. They are both much less then mpix and will individually package.

[MikeMcL]

great sites todd_k! they have nice trader card designs, which i have been looking for. thanks

[Croasdail]

absolutely awsome and just in time. The league has grown to about 400 kids. I contacted mpix and they were not helpful at all.... a little surprising considering their reputation. Looking at this stuff, I feel confident enough to go ahead and accept the deal. Many many thanks.