Heilicopter Pics-RIPOFF
 

I ordered a helicopter pic of my boat that was taken earlier this summer on Lake St. Clair. I'm not going to name any specific company, but i received a poster size picture that they wanted $750.00 for. I obviously sent it back. Beware of this, who would pay $750 for a picture? Has anyone had any similar experiences?

Well, you should have held onto it. You would have had them over a barrel. If you don't buy it who will....nobody. So you offer them half what there asking, or any amount for that matter. To them something is better than nothing.

Where else can you get a aerial pic of your boat running??????

uh nowhere.

Its all relative,
for someone like me that paid less than 10k between boat+trailer+truck its an insane amount of money.
for someone who paid/borrowed 150k or more for boat+trailer+truck its chump change..
If they are charging that much and are still in business someone must be paying that much.

i bought them and though they were worth it

We hooked up with a guy this past weekend that has a plane that lands on water and does shoots on occasions in his spare time. He's a private jet pilot full time. He's been on our lake every weekend for the last 3 yrs. Anyways 4 of us went out and ran and he took over 100 pics. In return, we 4 also ended up with near 100 photos of him. We all had a blast. A couple shots of him from my boat, and a couple he took and emailed me today. His are small files for email, so small pics. I'll be getting all the full size pics on CD next weekend.

I was on the ground the whole weekend in St Clair.

I couldn't justify getting a chopper for a calm water race.

I sure hope that poster was at least 4 feet x 6 feet ! :eek:

I got the same guy to take some shhots of me. The one good pic eas all scratched up so before I sent them back, I took a quick scan of them. I sent them a letter telling them I wanted the one pic if they could reprint it withought the scrathches and ads of yet no new pic. Glad i scanned them..

Come and do the Chicago poker run and for about $400 you get breakfest, lunch, dinner for 2 with a DVD and stills.

Great deal !

What are the sizes and quantities of the "stills" that are included with that price ?

I ended up with about 11 stills at 1.2-1.7MB in range

So you didn't actually get "prints", you got the digital files ?

That's an even better deal yet ! :eek:

I need to tell my seaplane buddy to up his rates. I got all 100 pics he took of us on CD for a mere $185.

Granted the pics aren't close to what a chopper can get, but for the price I paid and the number of pics recieved, I can't complain.

Question for ya.

The 100 pics you received, were they all unedited ?

Were they basically however they came out of the camera, uploaded to a pc, then separated from the others pics then burned to a CD for you without any post editing making them ready for print ? :confused:

Yes, just point and shoot pics, then all copied on a cd from memory card. No editing or such. Every pic he took are on the cd so we could pick and choose which one was of print material. Some were useless, some so so, some pretty good. It's more of a hobby this guy does, nothing professional. The pics are obviously not as good as the helo shots because of simple plane vs helo capabilities.

For the price and since it was setup in a matter of minutes because he just happened to be 'floating' by, I have no complaints. Even if only 1 out of the 100 pics turned out any good, not a bad deal for $185. The cost was mainly for his fuel and the fact he has a plane and we don't, though we spent more on fuel than he. :)

A benefit was he took the wife and I up separtly the following weekend for a good hr of flight time, water landings and all at no charge. Well worth more than the pics themselves. Gained a new friend over the process.

Not a bad deal at all. In fact a really great one !

You have the original file so in turn you could make it any size and quantity that you want.

That's very cool that you got a flight as well ! :drink:

At one race last year I offered a trial experiment with something similar.

A CD with the images from the event.

Depending on the package the person chose, it would have included all photos from the wet / dry pits, the races, the awards ceremony, and if they wanted me to shoot a portrait of their team.

What was great about the trial was that I was able to survey the teams to see who was interested in getting any pictures at all. This allowed me to then know ahead of time of the teams I really needed to focus on and those that would not be purchasing photos anyway. I still took some photos of their boat, just not as many. This enabled me to cut down on the time wasted on photos that otherwise will not be getting sold.

The one thing I should have done though was put a number of maximum amount of photos that somone would have received on the CD.
Only because I felt an obligation to have everything on there to be worth printing. In most cases, I did some type of editing to many of the images prior to burning them to a CD.
In turn, it was way so much more work for me for less of a return. I considered myself lucky to have only a handful of people to actually order "ALL Photos" of their boat that weekend. At least though the money was paid up front, and the customers did not have to go through a website to find their pictures.

If I do that again this year, it will need a bit more structuring to it.
Many of them felt it was an awesome deal and asked if they could do it again..

That is a good deal. But, what guarantee is there that my boat will be on both the DVD and any still pics?

We do much the same thing at the Emerald Coast PR. We were in my buddy's Tiger the last 2 years and he handled everything so I'm not entirely positive about costs. But, he got to pick from probably 20 great stills and got video of us running out of the inlet on the ECPR DVD. I'm pretty sure when you purchase the photo/DVD package, they do guarantee that you will be in both. The helicopter takes two boats at a time from the Crab Island Bridge out into the Gulf and back. Plenty of opportunity for great shots. I think the PR itself was $450 to enter. The photo package was extra but nothing NEAR $750 for a single photo.