cestmoi wrote:

Finisherpix must not want people to buy their photos - - - all my photos taken at the last race have a giant watermark on them such that you can't see the photo in any detail to know if the shot is worth buying or not. whoever may see this from Finisherpix - you really need to fix this.

Do you have an example of how bad it is? This is de facto SOP for any photo service where you buy them. Be it sports photos or school kids photos. Otherwise folks just save the low res version and print themselves to cheat the system.

I pulled a random IM event from 2021 and guessed a bib number of someone to see what you mean, and it looks fine to me. You could buy based on what you see.

Maybe yours has a bad background lighting that clashes with the watermark logo making it tougher to see. But the random example I found looked perfectly acceptable.

Thanks for being conscientious enough to want to actually pay for them.

If they don’t do this folks steal them and crop the watermark out

I’ve never been one to buy photos but the few times I have I’ve been able to see which ones were better even with a large watermark

The real issue is the price. I would tend to think they’d get more volume if they lowered the price a bit. But they’ve been in business as long as I’ve been doing tris so they know their market

Agreed. Particularly on the pricing.

I've been pretty good with it. And to be honest, they run sales from time to time. I completely forgot to use the Black Friday code which was 30% off for my IMAZ Photos.

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Washed up footy player turned Triathlete.

Yes, I'll buy if I know the photo I'm getting is decent. I have a photographer friend that makes so little money taking photos, so I support them for good shots. Finisherpix used to just have print running across the photos so you could generally see what the photo is, but the more recent photos have a watermark that basically blocks out 60% of the photo you can't see hardly anything. Huge turnoff - I won't buy photo if I'm gambling on what it actually looks like.

Can you link your photos? Interested to see what it looks like

It's a numbers game. If you look at how many events they cover then they aren't going to do anything other than an automatic watermark on each image. They simply can't afford to look at each image and make sure the watermark works and do something different if it doesn't.

Some people will be disappointed with whatever they do or the less they do more people will just take them as they are. If they've done something different in the past and now this then they've probably got enough data to assume they get more sales this way.

What maybe someone should be doing is applying some image detection, it's probably fairly commoditised to detect faces and therefore the regions to avoid and maybe apply a watermark immediately below the face. But even then if their preferred tool links in well with their system (ecommerce, whatever) even a 100% reliable but protective watermark isn't worth it if it adds steps to the upload process.

I've bought images of an event before and ended up using the more subtly watermarked ones anyway because it wasn't obtrusive and I liked the way it looked - they used the event name. So nothing would be perfect.

I'm sure any business is happy to get feedback, so tell them directly. But I'm sure they know it will happen in some cases and it's the balance they've chosen for the least loss of sales to work (cost) ratio.

Same here. These days a race photographer has to beat the SO with a cell phone. Which is nontrivial with the quality of phone cameras these days.

I'll pay a ton for a good picture, like a great one at a MTB race I was recently in. The photographer set up a great remote flash of riders catching some air with a brilliantly captured mountain/wildflower landscape in the background. Something that takes a pro to set up.

But most race photography companies don't beat the SO with a cell phone, unfortunately.

my qualm with finisherpix is the actual quality of the photos. they typically look like they are shot with cell phones, not DSLRs. i dont plaster my pics all over socials to tout my personal achievements, but ill happily pay a little for a nice pic of myself so one day i can look back and see what i did. im not gonna pay for something that looks like something my 3rd grader could do with her ipad though.

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80/20 Endurance Ambassador

ChrisM wrote:

Can you link your photos? Interested to see what it looks like

look at the most recent Indian Wells 70.3 photos of No. 1, mr. sanders himself. All Lionel's finish line photos have giant watermarks on them...you cannot see much detail with the watermark

https://http://www.finisherpix.com/en/photos/4261/1


Compare this to how MarathonFoto does their displays - small watermarks - where you can see detail enough to buy if photo looks decent:

https://www.marathonfoto.com/Proofs (PS - photos are not me, I didn't run NYC Marathon - just typed in a random bib number)

This. There is a photo company around here where they don’t have the shutter speed right on the camera and the bike pictures are blurry. Every year… Then you have the let’s take a picture 50 feet out of transition while you’re trying to get your feet in your shoes. My gosh were in Colorado you have amazing backdrops and there is zero effort. Then you get all that for the low low price of $40 a picture. It’s a little ridiculous.

NY photos not loading but I don’t have any issues with the finisher pix photos. I would be able to pick out the good ones

I'm missing something, but those finish line photos with the watermark are perfect. As in you can see the composition, expression and confirm the exposure isn't way off - in some by looking at the skin tone away from the face outside the watermark.

I rarely buy the photos now, especially as I don't have facebook to force images of me in sweaty lycra when they are least expecting it. But I did buy some a couple of years ago, and they were mixed - some really good, some out of focus and underexposed. But I was happy to pay what they were asking for the good ones, and the rest were kinda 'bonus' shot to nothing.

The cost of race photos has been long debated. Back to when it was physical photos you bought, not emailed digital. What most people didn't appreciate was the costs involved. And I'll admit now, I have done some race photography, not for Marathon Photos, and I was fortunate to be in a position where I could blend 2 hobbies and do this for charity and not personal payment.

So here's the run down for a sprint race. Get up at 5am. Drive 1 hour to race registration/transition. Get course maps, and head out to see where a good spot will be to be able to have a decent background. Set up flashes and get cameras out. Now here is where things may get lost in translation, but I was using 2xukp400 flashes, a remote fire kit that was another ukp200. One sports telephoto lens that cost UKP2300, and another that was Ukp1500, and two camera bodies that cost ukp1500 each. Add in the memory cards, a couple of cheap tripods for the flashes, and a few other bits and bobs and the basic requirements to be a marathon photos photographer was in the region of ukp8k. So then I'd sit in the rain for 4 hours (from first wave to last person on the course) taking about 1500 shots a day. Then drive an hour home (so ukp30 fuel) and spend 3 hours processing the photos, and uploading. And this is for a sprint.... My point being that there is a lot of cost if you are to offer this as a professional service. And of course now you are right, with everyone having a phone they can take a shot as good as a pro. Where the difference is (IMHO) is that the 'pro' will be taking 2000+ shots and of that 98% will be in focus, properly exposed and composed. The SO / clubmate will take 5 shots of you as you run up to them and 1 or 2 will be good. That's fine, but if you've not got someone with you taking photos then the Marathon Photos etc is there for you.

For Ironman they needed to employ runners to move memory cards between the photographers and the caravan as across the course of a day then you'd fill 20 memory cards of shots (we wouldn't use mega capacity cards as they cost a fortune and also if something went awry you'd lose the whole day, not just an hour). And from memory the one Ironman I was working at (not photography, another role) but was chatting to them, they had 15 photographers out on the course. And of course for a 17 hour race, even with 2 shifts, that's also meaning accommodation for the night before for the early shift, night after for the late shift. Oh and the photographer gets a flat daily rate, they don't get paid per shot sold - at least that was the case in late 2000s when I was talking to MaraPhotos - and that rate would not have been enough to put food on table/roof on head if it was a 'job' given the costs involved (as above).


There's a few local races now that bundle the photos into the cost of the race - I've done the shots for this model, again converting my 'fee' to a charitable donation. I personally think this is a good model for all concerned - but there will be others that of course advocate the no tee/no medal model to keep costs down and this takes away choice.

I did not buy the last couple of times because there was no picture at 90° from the side. I think such a picture should at least be included. As a matter of fact, if there were to be only ONE picture, it should be the one 90° from the side, the standard picture everyone posts when comments on aero-position are asked for.

Sure there are costs involved, but the prices charged are insane. Instead of charging so much and only having say 5% of entrants buy a pic they should be charging a reasonable price and aiming to have 60% of competitors buy a pic.

They aren't selling Picassos...

Those watermarks don't stop you from knowing what you are getting. You sound like you are just unhappy you can't steal a pic..

100%

These are perfectly clear.

Are you trying to see your photos on an old CRT television in a wooden cabinet at grandma’s house? They are almost uninhibited in any way

That's a failed reference; should've gone with Ansel Adams or Dorothea Lange. Then again, Adams did landscapes, and Lange was a photojournalist

How about Avedon? He did portraits

Or Robert Mapplethorpe? Diane Arbus? Herb Ritts?

I'd go with Andy Warhol, Annie Leibovitz, Bob Gruen, Mick Rock, Ricky Powell, like that

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"What's your claim?" - Ben Gravy
"Your best work is the work you're excited about" - Rick Rubin

I guess I’m a sucker for a good pic of myself racing because I have almost 20 years of them. Here’s my question: what do people do with them?

Race pictures from Mapplethorpe would certainly be interesting

What a couple of more 'progressive thinking' tri organisers in the UK have been doing (obvs not MDot as that would be an oxymoron !) is pay the photography company for turning up and snapping away, then putting all the photos up free-issue after the event.
So that way EVERYONE wins - the photographer gets a guaranteed income for turning up (akin to what they'd have got anyway from the 5% or whatever percentage of the field would buy photos), everyone get photos, the cost is spread over the entire field so is hardly felt by anyone entering, nobody steals photos, and both the organisers and photographers get their names spread WAAAAY wider than would otherwise be the case. And nobody gets the hump about price gouging or a Triathlon Tariff jacking costs up for anything and everything within a 10 mile radius.

That's a great idea. Heck I'd happily pay another $10-$20 to get pics. Surely if every competitor paid say $20 it would be better financially for the photogs than the current approach.

See my earlier comment on this, it's fine (and not $20 per head) but there are some that want the cheapest possible races and so are pushing for no race tee, no medals, etc to get the cost down. Adding an extra $5 a head is still $5 for something that they will say they don't need/want.

My point being here that being a race director is a no win role. No matter what you do there will be some people that demand things done differently.

Geez if $5 is to much they should just get their garmin out and go do their own event for free.

The cost of an IM type race is already excessive, but if I'm committed and entered another $5 doesn't mean squat really in the scheme of things if it gives you a lasting memory.