Nate Ritter

Today we drove around checking out the beaches around San Diego and stumbled across Josh taking surfing pics like the ones below.

I overheard his girlfriend handing out slips of paper and talking about how he was going to have those surfing pics online for people to purchase later in the day. I grabbed one of the pieces of paper from her and then went over and talked with Josh a bit.

Thinking it was a good twist of an idea I had seen before (people taking pics at a club and then giving business cards out with the web address on them), I asked how long he had been doing this. He said this was his second day he had been working on this idea. Instead of the club, Josh took his photo skills to the beach to catch a surfing competition. Obviously, it works really well when you have someone to do the marketing duties as you take the photos. Personally, I think it’s a brilliant idea for a business.

I did take a look at his site, and it’s not too shabby. The gallery was nice, and I found out it was from Smugmug. I liked both Josh’s surfing pics as well as the gallery so much, that I figured I might be able to test the waters with something other than Google ads on some of the higher ranking pages I have on this blog. We’ll see if it turns out better than the $2/day I get from Google - let’s hope so.

In the meantime, I posted this little story for a few reasons:

1. Taking surfing photos and marketing at the event is a great business. Nice work Josh.
2. Since I like the gallery Josh was using, I figured you ought to know about it too.
3. I really like the marketing technique because it adds value to the people’s days who were originally just there to see their son/daughter surf. They might not have the huge lens that these photographers have, so it’s a great opportunity to get some pro surfing pics for a great price.

Technorati Tags: surfing pics, surfing photos, surfing pictures, photography, gallery, galleries, entrepreneur, business, idea, san diego