For decades, Di Murphy has combined her love of sports, children, and photography through Tintype Studio, Inc. (www.tintype.net), which she founded in the Chicago, Illinois, area, in 1980. Since then, she and her staff have photographed more than 2 million young athletes in the Northern Illinois area. Once a shoestring operation run out of a spare bedroom, the business, now called Tintype Imaging, is a 6,000-square-foot studio with some 25 employees.
Di was teaching Spanish at a local Catholic high school and photographing school dances on the side when she saw a copy of Rangefinder that had ads for U.S. pro labs marketing sports products and services.
SNAPSHOT:DI MURPHY
What is your favorite place to shoot?
“A baseball game. I love the time of year, the weather. The kids are so excited and all dressed up in their uniforms. They love the backdrops we use. We can set it up so they feel that they are right there at Wrigley Field!”
What’s in your gear bag all the time?
“Among other things, a Canon EOS IDs Mark II, a dedicated flash unit, a 70-210 mm f/2.8 zoom lens, medium zoom, a number of other lenses, a teleconverter, adapter, and batteries.”
What product increases your productivity or profitability the most?
“I would say ExpressDigital’s Darkroom Pro, because it’s so comprehensive.It’s the piece of software that allows us to do just about everything, from printing to capturing images in the field to creating graphics to editing. It’s the core software my company uses.”
What is the best advice you were ever given?
“The best practical advice I’ve ever received is ‘the customer always comes first.’ Make all you decisions based on the customer.”
What business advice can you pass along to others?
“Rebook your business as you are doing business. Get them while they love you, because you can’t grow if you don’t keep the business you have. The other secret is to treat your current customers as if you were still courting their business.”
It was the breakthrough she had been looking for. “Suddenly, I saw a niche that needed to be filled, and a creative way to do it,” Di recalls. “I called all the local Catholic grade schools to see if I could photograph their football programs.” She wound up booking every one!
Soon she was taking photographs for several local baseball leagues. “Sports photography is so much fun. I love children, I love photography; it was a perfect match for me,” she says. By 1982, Di was able to quit teaching Spanish and become a full-time professional photographer.
Committed to bringing quality photography into the park districts, she began photographing school sports programs in the south suburban parishes of Chicago, expanding into youth baseball, and eventually into all youth sports. Working with School Pictures, Inc. and Jostens for 10 years, she was named the salesperson of the year in 1994 and was inducted into Jostens’ President’s Club in 1997.
At the 1998 PMA conference, Di heard a presentation by Graham McFarland, founder of ExpressDigital, which transformed her perspective and her business. “He talked about sports photography and all the high-tech, digital programs you could use to market your business, be creative, and extend the season,” she remembers. “He talked about everything I wanted to do. He had put together a package and a system I knew would work for us.” A year later, Tintype Studio had adopted a complete digital workflow.
“ExpressDigital and all of its programs—Darkroom Pro, Labtricity, PhotoReflect.com—changed the way we did business, putting us in total control of our product and our marketplace,” says Di. “ExpressDigital Sports & Event and now Darkroom Pro have allowed us to transform our business from film-based to digital. It also allowed us to do our own printing. This completely changed how we did business. We were now in complete control of the entire process from booking to delivery.”
ExpressDigital software made it possible for Di to train photographers and production staff quickly and thoroughly, which put them in the field faster. It has given the studio a competitive edge by being the foundation for all of their product development and marketing strategies. In 2006, Tintype Imaging was awarded the ExpressDigital Trailblazer Award for excellence in photography and impressive business growth.
Today, Tintype and its 25 employees shoot about 100,000 kids a year and have contracts with more than 200 leagues. “A lot of our competition is just going digital now,” she explains. “Our biggest advantage is that we’ve been digital for nearly a decade.”
Di’s suggestion for studios just getting started: “Be sure to rebook business during a job. When working with a client, a sports league, for example, sign them up and contract them right then and there for the next season. Get them while they love you, because you can’t grow if you can’t keep the business you have. Also treat current customers as if you were still courting their business.”
