Off-line photo sharing
I was at the birthday party for an eleven-year-old neighbor today, and I saw a problem begging for a solution. There were three or four people taking pictures during all the key moments: presents, cake, games. Now of course this isn’t the first time I’ve witnessed this–it’s a pretty frequent occurrence at childrens’ parties especially. So there they were, all vying for a decent angle on the activities, with one uncle taking advantage of a nearby staircase to get aerial shots. So whats the problem with lots of people taking pictures at an event, you might be asking? Well, I see two.
First is the fact that the father, two grandmas and an uncle all felt the need to take pictures. With digital cameras and the super low cost of sharing pictures (can you say ‘Free’?), why have more than one person document the event? My first guess is that although it’s cheap to share pictures, unless a family (or other event) is highly organized and makes public use of a sharing site like Flickr, sharing pictures doesn’t happen all that often. Of course there may be other reasons, but given what I’ve seen in my family (all quite technically literate, yet we still don’t have a family Flickr group or anything similar) I think the reality is that people grab their own camera because they aren’t sure they’ll ever see the pictures taken by others at an event.
There is a possible technology solution for this problem, and its as simple as a PC. OK, I know they aren’t that simple to many people, but within 10 minutes a single photographer could easily download pictures off the camera and burn 4-5 CDs–one for each family unit. Years ago I did just that for at least one birthday party for my daughter. In fact, I did that for the Mentos fountains at the party today.
I’d like to think there is an opportunity for a smallish dedicated device for just such a situation. It would be about the size of a CD/DVD drive, with multiple card readers, an input USB jack, a small LCD screen with a few buttons and about 10 GB of internal memory. Then toward the end of an event, you get the memory cards from each photographer and pop them into the device. As each card is put in the device, the LCD would prompt for a label of some sort, then start copying pictures to its internal memory. Once everything is loaded, you would push the ‘burn’ button and start creating CDs or DVDs to hand out.
Yeah, I know. If I think people can’t be bothered to share the photos on-line, why would I think they would spend money on this device to share them off-line? I don’t really. But I can dream, can’t I?
On to the second problem. Perhaps not everyone is like me, but when I take pictures at a family event, I tend to be thinking more about photography than family. Sure, the family is the primary subject, but when I’m staring through the lens of a camera, I’m only partly engaged in the family part. For example, when I’m shooting my kids’ sporting events, I don’t really catch the whole game because I’m focused on the details that I’m shooting. And someone who’s shooting an event isn’t really engaged in conversation with a camera pressed against their nose (or held at arms length, as the case may be)–shooting takes concentration. So, in this particular case, rather than really enjoying the moment when an 11-year-old boy reveals that coveted Lego Star Wars logo, we had three or four people engaged with their technology trying to capture the moment that they were only vicariously experiencing through their 2 inch LCD.
As far as I can tell, the only way to minimize the second problem is to designate one person as the family photographer. That’s happened to me on occasion, and I’m terribly flattered. But then of course, we run smack dab into problem number one.
The solution to both problems is to hire a competent photographer for the event. This could mean that everyone would get a CD or DVD of good photos, and that they could focus on having fun together. One resource suggests that free-lance photographers should charge no less than $400 per day (and advises no half days). This guy (randomly chosen thanks to a Google search) charges $150 per hour, with a $200 minimum. For most of the people I know, these rates are simply out of reach for family and other informal events. Maybe there’s a market here for an amateur looking to practice skills and augment his camera bag. 
