[Tango-L] Professional video & photography services at milongas/festivals

[Ed Doyle]

Hi Sorin,

Hopefully, in light of your business hopes for the future, my view is a very
tiny minority view, but since you did ask for opinions, I will offer mine.

For me, tango is a very personal thing.  A moment in time and space with one
partner, one tanda, one set of other couples sharing the music and the
moment.  It is not something I want to or even can revisit.  With no
refection on your photography skills, I don't ever want to look at pictures
of past moments. I guess I want to go out and search for and catch the next
perfect wave, but the past wave is gone.  A picture is not the same.

I have personally always found the presence of photography at milongas
distracting. Sometimes my partner might want to be in the photograph in a
particular pose and choreographing my dance so that she is in the right
spot, facing the right direction, in the right pose, for me highly detracts
from the dance.  Sometimes I have a partner that does NOT want to be
photographed.  Again, choreographing our dance so that we are not in the
pictures distracts and detracts from the dance for me.

Having said that, I can imagine some folks might like to purchase a
movie/dvd of their dancing perhaps for the purpose of learning or correcting
posture issues.  For me, this would be best done at a practica, not a
milonga.  Even if you do get a particular couples permission, the other
couples are perhaps distracted by your efforts as I outline above.

Well, again, I certainly don't presume my views are shared by the majority,
but perhaps they offer a partial explanation for your lack of success so
far.

Best of Luck.

Ed

On 8/10/07, tango at bostonphotographs.com <tango at bostonphotographs.com> wrote:
>
> As some of you may know, I am a passionate photographer and in the last
> few months I covered a few festivals and milongas (you can see the results
> on my website under EVENTS). I have a 9-5 job, as a computer programmer
> but I'm getting to a point where I'd like to stop doing that. As such, I
> put some thought into becoming a full time photographer. Part of that
> research was to see if one can combine tango with photography and try to
> make some money (not necessarily make a living just by covering tango
> events).
>
> So for a few of the festivals I covered, I offered prints for sale, at
> what I thought would be a reasonable cost ($3.75 per 4x6 print).
> Alternatively, I also offered the full resolution files for a similar
> cost. While I was not expecting much, I was quite surprised to see that
> among the three festivals I covered (Alternative in Providence, Yale in
> spring and Boston in June), only ONE person purchased 3 prints. That's it.
> I was wondering if anyone cared to comment on that. Is this what you
> would've guessed? I know I would certainly pay to have some good shots of
> myself. One reason I can think of is that people could see (and download)
> a decent size picture from the web for free and apparently that is good
> enough for most people.
>
> To try to clarify what kind of future a professional "Tango photographer"
> and/or "Tango/videographer" might have, I have a few questions I would
> like to ask the community.
>
> 1) If a screen resolution picture of you dancing is free to download,
> would you have any interest in a 4x6 paper print at $3.75? How about in
> having the full resolution file for $3.75
>
> 2) If a screen resolution picture of you dancing is NOT available to
> download (but rather just a tiny thumbnail size one or a screen size image
> with watermarking covering most of the surface), would you have any
> interest in a 4x6 paper print at $3.75? How about in having the full
> resolution file for $3.75
>
> 3) I was thinking about offering (at festivals and/or milongas) a service
> to record video of the patrons dancing (on demand). It would work like
> this, the interested party would come see me, pay a fee (per song), and
> we'd agree on timing. Then I would record them dance with their favorite
> partner (using a device that allows me to film from a height of 12-15feet,
> which would allow me to track them at all times). They would then get a
> DVD at the end of the evening with a high quality recoding. The price I
> have in mind right now would be $10 per DVD + $10 for each song recorded.
> So to have a full 3 song tanda recorded, the fee would be $40. If one more
> DVD (with the same content) is needed, for the other partner, it would be
> $10 extra. Is this something you would be interested in? Do you find the
> price: too high, low, about right? An example of a recording I made is
> here :
>
> http://youtube.com/watch?v=tATLum7aDCc .
>
> Obviously the quality the youtube video is abysmal compared with the
> original file which the customer would get.
>
> I would appreciate any thoughts you might have on this issue.
>
> Cheers
>
> Sorin
> my photography site: http://www.bostonphotographs.com
> my milonga review site: http://www.milongareview.com
> blog: http://sorinsblog.blogspot.com
>
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