Running an event photography operation is demanding, period. Running an event photography business on an ever-moving cruise ship amplifies those challenges massively. Delivering high-quality prints swiftly and efficiently is the backbone of any successful event photography business, and a cruise ship operation is no exception.
The rigourous demands of photographing passengers at various events, activities, and pop-up professional portrait studios are monumental. It’s fair to say that running a ship’s photography operation is arguably one of the most challenging environments for an event photography business. Shooting thousands of photos daily, organising, storing, sorting, backing up, and, most importantly, printing and delivering them to guests is a complex web of carefully orchestrated procedures. Even without unforeseen complications, meticulous attention to operational detail is required to deliver a seamless service. However, stuff happens. Machines break down, and if you’re stuck in the middle of the ocean, it’s no laughing matter; you cannot call tech support to drop in with a much-needed spare part. So reliability, along with print quality, is vital.
The Ship’s Photographer is a cruise ship photography concession that operates the onboard photography experience on a small fleet of five cruise ships, mainly in the Mediterranean and Caribbean and other parts of the globe. The company has been in operation since 1995.
Andrew Burt, The Ship’s Photographer’s Managing Director, tells us that the fleet of five vessels shoots around 7,500 photos weekly, of which they print about a thousand.
The Ship's Photographer used to use an inkjet-based system to deliver prints to the onboard guests. Working in a fast-paced environment, the demand on a printing machine is high, and The Ship’s Photographer used relatively expensive inkjet machines to fulfil their gruelling print demands. It was not a small investment for the company, but nothing compares to the cost of a system failure, which can grind a photo operation to a standstill with a devastating impact on revenue and the guest experience, not to mention stress on the staff. Burt explains that the inkjet printers cost £25k, plus a £1k annual service agreement each year per machine.
The Ship's Photographer switched to Citizen and dye sublimation after a catastrophic machine failure in Asia. Burt explains, “We could not get local support in Asia for a machine with an error message preventing it from printing. We would have needed to fly a technician from the UK to Singapore without guaranteeing they had the right parts to fix it. This cost was significantly higher than installing a couple of new Citizen printers onboard. As all our inkjet printers were out of warranty period, the failure cost was considered too high a risk to the business.” And with the Citizen printers costing a fraction of the inkjets, the decision to switch was easy for Burt to make.
The Ship’s Photographer now uses two Citizen printers, the CX-02 and CX-02W, for printing 6x8 inch (152 x 203mm) and 8x10 inch (203 x 254mm). It is quick, easy, and hassle-free for the photo team to load media using drop-in paper loading, along with easy ribbon handling. The choice of four finishing options – such as glossy, matte, fine matte and lustre – is selectable through the printer driver and potentially offers more choices for the guests without hassle for the photography team. The printer itself is compact and lightweight, fits easily into small, cramped spaces and is easy to move. The dye sublimation printing process, which heats dye to vaporise and transfer it onto a material, has advantages too: such as vibrant colours, smoother gradients, durability, and resistance to fading, making it an ideal solution for the cruise ship event photography business. These considerations are vital to a cruise ship operation where space often comes at a premium. Burt explains that they’ll even be able to relocate their lab to another smaller part of the ship, relieving space that the crew can use for laundry services and improving the well-being of the staff. The printers themselves are simple to set up, they are also more environmentally friendly, and the sleep mode reduces energy consumption by 98%.
The Ship’s Photographer is one of the longest-surviving photo concessions. It’s a relatively small company, and as a consequence, it has a creative agility that can help make decisions like switching to a dye-sub solution. Being small means it can also focus its business on solid relationship building, so partnering with Citizen was a perfect match. Citizen’s Business Development Manager Adrian Hickson, had former experience in the cruise ship photography business, and his knowledge helped beyond just understanding the onboard printing needs of The Ship’s Photographer but also extended to helping with the complex logistics of liaising with port agents and the sometimes arduous complications of shipping things across the world to meet ships at very specific points in time and place.
The Ship’s Photographer is now seeing year-on-year growth and is looking to expand to other cruise lines in the future. Innovative concepts such as iris photography and simplifying product lines have contributed to this, but so has made strategic technical decisions, such as the recent switch to the dye-sublimation printers provided by Citizen. This alone has created efficiencies with quality, space, time, and costs and is perhaps part of the reason The Ship’s Photographer was a recent winner of the cruise line’s Excellence in Innovation awards.