Our first big gig

[OviV]

My wife and I have been shooting Little League baseball for a few months now. We primarily did action stuff at the games. We have now officially gotten the contract to do the team photos for the league. We are dealling with about 123 teams and 1700 players. We will be doing team photos as well as individual photos as requested by parents for different products that we plan to offer.

We would like advice as how to best organize ourselves in order to not lose track of players and teams. Have any of you done this type of photography before? How do you keep track of which picture belongs to what kid? Do you write the file number on the envelope? In this case I imagine we should have our cameras setup to shoot continuous numbering.

Any help and advice is appreciated. BTW: We are probably going to go with Sports-America.com for the products we will be offering. If you guys know of a better source, please let us know.

Best Regards,
Ovi and Rosy Verona

[chucksberg]

The league should be able to give you a roster of players, parents, jersey numbers, ect... from there, whatever works best for you.

[BeautyEyes]

If there number is on the back of there shirt I know with soccer teams they turn them around ( wear them backwards) to keep track during individual photos. Hope that help a little. BE

[RickHulshof]

I have put alot of thought into this as my wife and I were pricing to to approach the local soccer league. What I thought of was printing out number cards 1-1 , 1-16 for the first team of the day 2-1 etc for the second team and so on. Teams in this area use standard numbering so we would match the second number with theirs. For each shot personal and team we would first have them hold the number then take the cards away and do t5he proper posed shot. On the order envelopes make sure they include their number (which you need anyway if you plan on doing trader cards).

A couple other things we looked at was buying a second camera and having 2 assistants so that my wife and I could both shoot pics while have the assistants collect orders and cash. Our league is about 1000 almost all weekday evenings so in order to get all the pics done before vacation season hits mainstream we would have to do it this way. As well the time would be needed to put the orders together because of the sheer volume. We could do it with the 2 of us but it would be tight - and if its a rainy season .............

Speaking of rain we also looked at buying 2 portable canopies to set up one for ordering table and another to cover the tripod and equipment so with a light drizzle pics could still be done. This happened to my daughters team last year (when another photographer was covering the season) and the pics came back with water marks from the lens. Luckily for the parents I did the shots separately (alot missed the shoot because of vacations) and gave them to the parents on final day so they still ended up with a good photo.

Hope that gives you a few things to think about - we in the end decided against it - I enjoy the action photos more and didn't want to lose all my free time on posed photos (my wife an I both have day jobs) when I can catch them on the field and sell the shots I enjoy taking.

[Avalonthas]

Wowzers, 123 teams is alot compared to the leagues in Canada. The Canadian little league equivalent in my area has like 15 teams max lol. Well I would go with Bloo Dog's way of organizing the shots. I have done the same in the past and it is much easier this way. Get a couple cheap packs of business card stock (700 per pack for 8 bucks here) then get the Data sheets from the league, enter them into a spreadsheet and then print out small business cards with everyones names/numbers and additional info. Then seperate them into teams and let the league distribute them to the coaches who will bring them on the day of the photo shoot. This is much more cost effective as for 20 bucks worth of business cards and maybe 5-10 bucks of ink, it sure beats paying an assitant to help u out and saves time with the paper work.

If you want to go the easy (and lazy route), have the kids pay for there extra pics on the spot (im assuming the league pitches for one individual/team photo a player) and then just give all the pics/memrobilia such as Cards to the team coach and let him distribute them to the proper players as he knows what they all look like and there names and stuff. Very easy because u only have to right the team name and/or color/division with the coaches name. Easy. But Lazy. lol

[Tom W]

I may be way off on this but it seems to me that it would be cost effective for you to have each player fill out a small card with his name, address,phone number and player number and then photograph the card right before you photograph the player.

I can see how it could be inconvenient at first, especially if your camera is on a tripod, but I think that you could work out a system. This has GOT to be more cost effective than hiring more people to double check paper work. It isn't as if you're shooting film.

That's what I'd do. FWIW

You could have them hold the card low in the frame, and crop it out later.