It all started in 1982 when Ivor Ginsberg ran his one and only Comrades Marathon. He finished in 10:59:59 – literally one second before the( then) 11-hour cut-off – and afterwards said to his running friends it was a pity there was nothing to commemorate their run.“ In those days there was a company photographing Comrades, but it took them forever to send out contact prints for runners to make their orders from, and Ivor decided there must be a better way,” says Johanna. |
“ He said, why not just send out the actual prints and trust the honesty system amongst runners to pay for their photos, or send them back. So, we established Portrait Place and started with some smaller events, and then the 1983 Comrades, where we sent out about 2500 runners’ pics. Right from the start we did it right, too, by adding a printed overlay in gold embossing with the race name and year, and the athletes told us they were overwhelmed when the envelopes with their pics arrived in the post. By 1986 we had added the Cape Town Cycle Tour, many more events followed, and we’ ve just grown and grown from there.”
Today Portrait Place trading as Jetline Action Photo( JAP) photographs close to 150 events a year, including about 20 overseas races through its Action Photo UK subsidiary.“ Currently we’ re the only company in SA doing this work on this scale, and as far as we know, we’ re the only company that identifies all the pics and then makes them available to the athletes,” says Devorah“ There are some individual photographers and smaller companies who do similar work, but they usually upload their pics in time slots from the event and athletes must really search for their photos.”
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DETAILED LOGISTICS
Photographing a big race like the Comrades is a massive and costly undertaking. Firstly, JAP has to pay a substantial fee for the rights to photograph the bigger races, and must then sell photographs to the athletes to recoup that outlay. The planning then starts months before the race, with up to 50 photographers booked for an event of that size in order to cover start, various points on the route, finish, medals, permanent numbers and PR shots, and transport and accommodation must be booked for those team members who come from out of town. Most of the photographers used are freelancers, but they all use JAP equipment on the day, set up in the same way to ensure consistency, so 50 cameras with all their lenses, batteries, flashes, etc, and up to two terabytes of memory cards, must be checked, packed and transported to Durban.
Johanna, Devorah and the team then do a route recce to choose the best shooting positions, taking into account lighting and backgrounds.“ We take great care to look for locations that represent the event, and really try to give the athlete the best possible product. We spend a whole week sorting out route access and shooting positions, and on the day our photographers must be there until the last athlete has passed,” says Johanna.“ After the event, all the cards go back to Joburg, where our magnificent team of 15 full-time staff members is expanded to 30 and we work non-stop in shifts to identify and upload all the photographs,” continues Devorah.“ This year it took us one and a half weeks to sort 300,000 pics from Comrades, and we couldn’ t do it without such a great team”
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THE BOTTOM LINE
Of course, the million dollar question is how JAP reacts to complaints from runners that race photos are becoming too expensive.“ We try to explain to people the kind of outlay we make just to be there, and how much goes into getting those pics. Most of the time they understand,” says Johanna. Devorah adds that“ Customers also sometimes think that ordering pics from a previous year should be cheaper, but in order to keep those pics available, we need to store them on servers, which takes up hundreds of terabytes of expensive server space. But we don’ t add a surcharge for older pics.”
In the meantime, the company is introducing new technology and concepts, like Pic2Go, which allows the free upload of pics straight to an athlete’ s Facebook page, simply by using a barcode on the race number. This was used for the first time at the JointEze Irene Ultra earlier this year.“ The runners love it, because they already have a start or finish pic on Facebook an hour after the race. We still upload all the pics to the website for normal orders, but if a race sponsor wants to go the extra mile, we offer this service,” says Johanna.“ We just want to give runners a great memory of their races, and it is terrific to have some people telling us that they still love their pics from 20 years ago.”
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Images: Jetline Action Photo & Sean Falconer |