They often say that no matter how much you plan something out, you can never be fully prepared for what you are going to encounter … and after our first onsite printing expedition, I can believe that completely!
Loretta and I arrived at the Minisink High School just before 8AM yesterday with a ton of equipment from our new Schinko printer to a desktop computer to all of our lighting and camera gear. We setup everything across three tables and got ready to start shooting the matches and printing the images!
The rest of the crew arrived just prior to 9AM so we had a little time to brief them on any changes. Sean, my brother, headed up the computer while Jenny and Amanda setup their cameras and chose a mat. Jenny’s sister, Kim, came out to provide us an extra set of hands at the table and a runner for the memory cards as we shot the matches. We were set and ready for the wrestling to begin!
Since one of the teams dropped out of the tournament, all of the one-on-one matches had to be reconfigured and caused the event to start a bit later than everyone thought. Right around 10AM though, everything got under way and we began shooting away!
What I didn’t plan for was exactly how many shots we would all be taking! The majority of the matches were so good that neither Jenny, Amanda or myself could put down the camera as we’d wind up missing something! This is where our bottleneck started …
As Kim kept rotating the cards to keep up with the matches, Sean would download each of the cards to the PC so we could print contact sheets to display on the table. It was just about this time that Amanda’s camera (a Canon 20D) decided that it wanted to ignore the continuous numbering setting and would reset its numbering scheme back to img_001 each time we inserted a new card. This created problem for Sean as he needed to rename each image from Amanda’s camera each time a card came in. Thankfully, Sean is quick on his feet and created a simple way to avoid any duplicate image problems for us later in the day.
As the day went on, our proof sheet printer became tired and started running slower and slower … Our photo printer lost its color calibration somewhere along the way and a bunch of prints had to be thrown away as we readjusted everything … And the matches started getting longer and longer as the wrestlers were more evenly matched.
By the time the day finally came to an end, it was almost 9PM and we had a bunch of orders (including custom posters) and we were all a bit tired. We took the last little bit of energy that we had, cleaned up our equipment and called it a day!
After everything that happened during the day that made our first shot at OnSite Printing a bit of a crazy one, I do have to say that everyone did an absolutely amazing job. While we were dealing with the problems we encountered, not a single one of our customers knew anything was wrong or not going the way we had intended it to. So while things were a bit crazy, I have to say that it was a job well done. Now it’s time to make our adjustments and head out to the next event twice as strong!
Here are a couple shots from the day!
