Marathon Photo

What runner doesn’t like to have pictures of their race day efforts? I am no different. A picture of me striding strong to the finish or flashing under the finish line banner is a must keep.

These big races have photographers along the course capturing pictures that they hope to sell us runners after the race. We have come to know and expect it. Therefore, there was no surprise yesterday when I received an email with a link to my photos from the Disney races. Awesome, I couldn’t wait to look through them.

Browsing through them, most were either too distant or too dark for my taste. For the most part, the Disney races are run at night. With the only light coming from the camera’s flash, I looked like a white fence post with an orange shirt hanging from the top. My shorts and shoes just melted into the night.

I will say that there were a few decent photos. There were enough that I looked into purchasing a few of them. Oh, the sticker shock that I received. Getting just one photo would run me well over $30 dollars. Ok, maybe I should just look at downloading this photo. Well, this was $29 dollars – just for photo to be downloaded.

They also offered the option of downloading all of my photos for $69 dollars. Ok, this sounded like a better option so I went with it. Even thou, most of the photos were not very good.

Once I download them however, I found that “all” was really “all” for one race and not “all” of the races.  There must have been some fine print somewhere that I missed.

As I set here typing this post, I realize that I just contributed to continuation of their business practices. Honestly, $29 to download just one image is too much.

Look at what iTunes did for music. Consumers can buy the song that they want for a couple of bucks. Why not do the same thing for pictures. Isn’t it better to make a couple of dollars off a few hundred pictures than $29 off a couple of pictures?

One other thing that I would like to point out to the Marathon Photo guys give me one zip file with the high resolution photo, the medium resolution, and the thumbnail version. Don’t make me do a “right-click” and “save-as” to download them. This customer experience could be a lot cleaner.

 

Just a thought from the far side of the moon,

 

The Cool Down Runner