Top Five Dead Pixels Society episodes of 2025

A milestone worth pressing pause for: The Dead Pixels Society is marking our 250th episode with the most popular episodes of the year, from AI that actually helps you create less chaos to sales that feel like service instead of pressure. 

Ever found yourself frantically scrolling through thousands of photos trying to find that one perfect shot you know exists somewhere? This frustration sparked the creation of MediaViz AI when founder Troy DeBraal's business partner slammed his phone down in a restaurant after failing to locate a crucial photo of his son. "Why can't you build something that can keep track of all my good photos and get rid of all this junk?" he demanded – and a revolutionary AI photo curation platform was born.

What if everything you've been taught about sales is actually holding you back from extraordinary success? Marc Von Musser, sales expert and founder of Soar and Roar, challenges conventional wisdom with a refreshing perspective that could transform your approach to business.
 
Growing up as the son of a renowned photographer who captured 150 national magazine covers in a single year, Von Musser learned early that success comes not from transactions but from capturing essence and creating value.

Ever wonder how a school photo lab with 600,000 students a year keeps quality high when half the photographers are new each season? We sat down with Robert Ste-Marie, CEO of 36Pix, to explore Eva. This data-driven evaluation platform scores every image so managers can catch problems fast, coach with clarity, and tie rewards to real outcomes. No fluff—just the metrics that move sales: smiles, closed eyes, blur, glasses glare, face shine, and exposure repairability, accordin

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Chapters

• 0:00 Milestone Intro And 2025 Recap
• 1:34 AI Agents For Photo Search And Curation
• 5:45 On-Device Culling And Personalization
• 9:43 From Smartphones To Cameras And Security
• 12:03 AI That Drives Printing And Purchases
• 15:44 Monetizing Fan Photos In Sports
• 19:50 Selling Without Selling And Integrity
• 25:16 Data-Driven School Photography Quality
• 30:30 Training, Benchmarking, And Smile Rates
• 35:01 Film To Digital And Business Model Shifts

Transcript

Erin Manning: 0:27

Welcome to the Dead Pixels Society Podcast, the photo imaging industry's leading news source. Here's your host, Gary Pageau. The Dead Pixels Society Podcast is brought to you by Mediaclip, Advertek Printing, and Independent Photo Imagers.

Gary Pageau: 0:47

Hello again, and welcome to the Dead Pixel Society Podcast. I'm your host, Gary Pageau, and today we're looking back at top episode of 2025, and this is our 250th total episode. So let's have a look at what was entreating our listeners in 2025. Coming in number five was AI-powered photo curation Troy DeBraal with, the CEO of Media Viz. And here's a section from that interview. So what would be an example of how an aid gentic AI system would work? You said it acts on your behalf. So let's say, for example, would it let's say you type a query in a stock photo space and it would say, I'm looking for uh, you know, a jockey in a red thing on a black horse or whatever, and it may search, but then could would it go create the image using a generative AI model or what is that?

Troy DeBraal: 1:50

I suppose it could if that was the purpose of the agent, but in that situation, I would think of an agent more like you had one stock system and you were looking for a particular set of keywords to find just the right image, and you said, agent, go through this very large archive and find this, right? Instead of just initiating a search for you, if they didn't come back with the perfect image, because they would review them before you saw them as well. Right.

Gary Pageau: 2:24

Okay.

Troy DeBraal: 2:24

So it's not only reviewing the results for you so that it's making a pre-choice, but it may even be making a secondary choice to solve your problem for you.

Gary Pageau: 2:33

Okay. That's kind of interesting. So it may be actually be independent of the source of the images.

Troy DeBraal: 2:41

Absolutely. And I certainly see a genic AI evolving very quickly to that point where where's the greatest number of resources today to solve people's problems? On the internet, right? So you may direct it at the beginning, but then ask it to do that further direction if it doesn't succeed all on itself or all by itself.

Gary Pageau: 2:58

So, could it do you see it in doing something? Let's say, let's stick with the stock photography example. Let's say, for example, you put something in and I want to have a a jockey and a red uh top, and it doesn't find it. Will it like go out and find another stock agent and maybe even negotiate the rights?

Troy DeBraal: 3:14

If I had if I was building an agent like that, that's exactly what I would do. Enable it with commerce, enable it with negotiation, and make sure that it could go far and wide to find what I was looking for. And if it didn't, say I made you a generative piece, is this what you were looking for? Because maybe I can go look with visual search now instead of text search.

Gary Pageau: 3:34

Right. That's pretty cool. So I mean, now that's not what MediaViz AI does now, but it's it's in the it's in the beginnings of that, right?

Troy DeBraal: 3:42

Our dream for the the purest form of a genic AI for Media Viz and our AI systems is to really act for you as you're taking photographs, mostly on your phone, I think, where that comes into play, where you know, our theme that we talk about a lot is let's let people create and let us curate. So if we had our own agent, we would probably have our AI living on your phone and encourage you to just go and take photos and we would do some of the decision making of do I actually show this to the author or do I just throw it away? Is it too bad even for them to see? And you know, if they're taking lots of photographs, then what are the best 10% of these photographs that I can present and say, here's what I think you should keep?

Gary Pageau: 4:26

What about like even going to the level of, hey, I know this photographer, how they edit, how they shoot, and I'm gonna pre-apply some actions to it.

Troy DeBraal: 4:38

Absolutely. You know, I think that that's the natural extension. And we talk a lot about those different phases of post-photography production, right? So, you know, whether you're getting into editing before you're actually doing your some of the curating always seems odd, right? You want to you know, take your full set and cull it down to just the images you want to edit. And so we see that process being a natural extension of what we're doing. And you know, our AI is you know, I think, unique in the terms of it not only specializes to a person, but we do a one-on-one AI. So if you put your photos in, there's an AI system that springs to life and learns from your collection and really takes in the decisions you've made, your composition decisions, your aesthetic decisions, the colors you use a lot, the subject matter that you shoot. So we can learn about you before it makes those decisions. And that to me is the next extension of that. Well, if I can learn about the things you do while creating, I can also learn about what you do after to make them perfect.

Gary Pageau: 5:36

You know, it's kind of interesting that raises kind of an interesting question of that of like who is the photographer, right? I mean, but I've if you think about it, you know, with iPhones now, um, and Android, same thing, but with smartphones now, there's so much computational photography going in there to improve images that most people aren't really aren't even aware that the pictures they shot probably wasn't as good as it came out because Apple and Google put all their all the goodness in there to you know optimize it.

Troy DeBraal: 6:06

We see a huge break around 2018-2019 where photos just completely shifted. And you know, if we look at our historical collections that we take in, you can kind of see where because we have a filter for blur and a model for blur. There's a point where it's almost not needed anymore because people aren't taking blurry photos anymore unless it's on purpose, you know, right?

Gary Pageau: 6:28

Yeah, yeah. So they're or even like flash. I mean, flash photography is more or less disappeared now in a lot of ways. I mean, I mean, people have them on the phones, but I think people use the light on the phone more for a flashlight than for a flash photography. Absolutely, it's better at that, so it's just gonna it's interesting. So you identified certain verticals uh for the company to go after sports and entertainment, uh, digital asset management systems, photo labs and printers, school portraits and stock photography. Why did you identify those markets in particular? What was kind of your thought process on that?

Troy DeBraal: 7:09

We thought that those markets, in different ways and in different flavors, had the best qualities for us in terms of a mass amount of multimedia being produced that humans were either hand coding, annotating, curating, processing, where we could offer them not only efficiencies, but better products and services by inserting us like in the beginning of their workflow.

Gary Pageau: 7:33

Okay. That's kind of interesting. So you need to be kind of more on the front end, because I think most people think of AI as being a sort of as a back-end curation or cataloging type model, but you're thinking it needs to be more on the front end.

Troy DeBraal: 7:50

And the system is designed to do both, the platform is, but we think that the biggest bang and the biggest value is at the beginning. Because again, we want to encourage photographers in the future, go out and create more because you don't have to look through 10,000 photos versus 4,000. Right. We'll do that for you. And the best place to do that is right at the beginning of the process in almost all those workflows.

Gary Pageau: 8:15

So, do you see this being built into like maybe not just smartphones, but also like standalone cameras like your Canons, your Sony's, your Nikons?

Troy DeBraal: 8:23

Absolutely. I think when you get to the point where you can have the type of compute resources on a much smaller form factor, you will see all that move into any capture device that you can have.

Gary Pageau: 8:33

I mean, yeah, I even mentioned like even like security cameras, ring cameras, all things like that, where you know, I need to find this specific incident that happened in a short amount of time.

Troy DeBraal: 8:43

Absolutely. I mean, and a lot of those things, you know, you have to store that video either right near that camera or actually in the camera. So why not do that processing in that place too?

Gary Pageau: 8:52

That's kind of amazing when you think about it. So, what about you know, a lot of my audience are in the printing side of the business. Why do you think something like a media viz AI platform will actually help in the printing side of the business?

Troy DeBraal: 9:05

Sure. You know, and and two reasons. Kind of one back to our original thesis that people had too many photos on their phone that they either couldn't or they were not going to manage. Like one of the two was true. Um, right. So we kind of looked at the market and said, well, we see a bunch of different opportunities for automation and curation and understanding to be created around their photos, but really kind of centering on one, we can help people clean out their photos. And when they do, they have to review their collection, right? Get all their memes out, get all their junk out, do whatever they need to do. That makes you look at the content you have and often motivates people to say, Hey, I do want to get prints of XYZ. So the most basic, just help people understand what they have and see the value in their own collection. But then secondarily, you know, so many carts just get abandoned for photo books and photo products as people get halfway through and just quit. So we thought we could condense those workflows and leapfrog people across those customer journeys and close more of those deals online. Um, that was the most simple premise.

Gary Pageau: 10:11

Um, yeah, no, it absolutely makes sense. I mean, I mean, I've been looking at you know the photo book abandonment thing for you know probably 15 years, and it's you know not going down by by any real appreciable amount. People start photo books and never finish them. And usually the number one reason is uh back from a prior life doing consumer research on this, is consumers say they don't have the right picture, they don't have the picture they want, right? So, how do you think Media Viz could help with that?

Troy DeBraal: 10:40

Yeah, and we're actually exploring a lot of that right now of how do we move into the edge so that we can do that for customers and consumers and customers of our customers so that they can get a more holistic view of what they have before they enter into these print processes, so they are more likely to finish them.

Gary Pageau: 10:58

Yeah, because that's that is that is probably the number one big issue with with photo books in particular, is that I want to touch a little bit about the the sports and entertainment piece, right? Because can you describe how it seems to me like you know, if you go to a sporting event or whatever, it's really like they're trying to create all these experiences to monetize the event. Is that where your systems can tie into that?

Troy DeBraal: 11:25

Yeah, absolutely. Um, and you know, there's a couple things that we're actually talking about right now that kind of fit nicely into that category. And I think it comes back to what we talk about a lot internally, which is everything in the world is kind of involved in real estate, right? So even photos, when you are trying to get people to purchase a photo, it's to put in real estate in their house, right? So you want to convince them that your memory or your memorabilia is important enough to be in their real estate. And with the sports teams and entertainment, it starts with creating those moments that you can then convince somebody is valuable enough to be in their real estate. And that starts with exploiting their own real estate. So we're kind of fitting into that puzzle of well, again, why don't we help you set up or in your natural photo areas where you're, you know, beckoning people in to have little experiences, props, green screens, whatever it be. Take as many photos as you want, encourage your fans to take as many photos as they want. And then we will curate those. We will alter those photos if necessary so that they can get a photo package on their way out the door offered to them post-game, but a way to not only memorialize their experience there, but to allow them to express themselves at the same time. We thought that was like the perfect marriage. You could express yourself, had a better get time, and get a record of it.

Gary Pageau: 12:45

It's just amazing me how sports and entertainment venues went from we we forbid you from bringing any cameras in here to we want you to use your camera and just use it, use it, use it at these entertainment venues. It's it's really been a uh complete 180 on that.

Troy DeBraal: 13:00

Some of the things that we talk about, especially with that industry, is you know, everybody wants the great content from their fans, and they don't want to deal with all the stuff that gets sent in that nobody wants, right? Um, and there's a big spectrum there, but we think we can help people out at that point too. Like ask your fans for data, we'll go through it, curate it, and you only get to see the good stuff, you know.

Gary Pageau: 13:21

And you even, I'm sure you'll look for things that are maybe not appropriate for every viewing audience, and maybe even see again, maybe even find out what the rights are, right? For the usage for that.

Troy DeBraal: 13:31

Exactly. Absolutely.

Gary Pageau: 13:34

Coming in at number four is abundant mindsets and the art of selling without selling with Mark Van Musser. And here's a clip from that episode.

Marc Von Musser: 13:45

It's just one of those things where there's another byproduct in sales that no one talks about, and that's the byproduct of being a con man. When you look at Jordan Belfort in the uh just lie your ass off, which was a lot of what's integrated and woven into traditional sales. Yeah, there's a reason he became a drug addict. I can't I can think of half a dozen to a dozen sales trainers who were big in sales who all had a drug problem or an alcohol problem. Why is that? Because they were lying, and the core identity of a human being doesn't feel good when they do that. They knew they were lying.

Gary Pageau: 14:17

Right.

Marc Von Musser: 14:18

Jordan Belfort knew he was lying when he was telling somebody to buy this stock that was that was not even going to make it through the week.

Gary Pageau: 14:24

Right.

Marc Von Musser: 14:24

Taking people's retirement, he screwed $250 million out of grandparents and he's paid back $2 million. Right. There's a reason that he was trying to numb those voices. So if you want to be great, you have to do the right thing. You have to get in alignment with being an advocate for people. And that was part of the whole core of heart-driven selling that I started to notice when moving away from the heart of the numbers, it's a numbers game, into serve people. Now, the other byproduct is you wake up proud of what you do. Second part is you wake up to thank you, thank you, thank you emails. The third part is you start waking up to other referrals.

Gary Pageau: 14:59

Right.

Marc Von Musser: 14:59

When I was at Tony Robbins, I took over the sales training for Tony Robbins. I was his director of coaching and their sales teams were not performing. So they saw what I did with the coaching department, something I had never sold before. But again, I followed the same process and we went from 2 million to 30 million a year in coaching sales. And the other part that we noticed is that when I shifted to the process I did, which was serve people, we went from $11,000 in product sales, selling Tony Robbins products to $2.1 million in six months. We went from $17,000 in event sales to $4.8 million in six months. And so that's the part two that's going to make or break businesses that you won't get when you're just buying on price is the referrer. You can build a referral army when you serve people. And I'll give you an example specifically. I bought a sauna. Now I could buy a sauna directly from China for anywhere from one to $4,000. A great sauna, right? I did not have certainty that they were going to deliver. I had never bought an sauna from China. I saw all the ads. I also was looking on marketplace, buying a sauna on a resale marketplace, one to five grand, same thing. I ended up spending $15,000 on a sauna, and I was happy to do it. When I got on the phone with the person and I said, hey, I'm up in Big Bear. It's cold, it's here. I have this space. I want a three-person. Next thing you know, she didn't con me into buying a $15,000. She asked me what I was going to use it for, how often I was going to use it, what my intent was. So health became a concern. I wanted low EMF. I didn't want the chemicals. I wanted uh what's called a hybrid. So it has the traditional sauna and it also has infrared. Next thing you know, I bought that. She was so good at walking me through the process. I had some delivery issues. She was so good at solving those, I have referred a bunch of people to her. So that one sale has turned into probably five additional sales because they were so good in the process. And I paid five times more than what I was going to pay. Cheap is not always the place that people will go. People want the experience. And that's a big part that people underestimate.

Gary Pageau: 17:04

Well, you also have to recognize, too, and I think you touched on this earlier. You know, not everyone is your customer. Now, clearly, you're, you know, you've got means to spend $15,000 on a sauna, so she kind of qualified you on that. Probably if someone was not have the ability to do that, they probably wouldn't have called her in the first place.

Marc Von Musser: 17:24

That's right. And they could have very much. And that that's a great point you make, Gary, which is I'm not here to sell everybody. I'm here to enroll people I can serve. Right. And when you start to understand, it's kind of like if most people don't know who their audience is, they're trying to sell everybody.

Gary Pageau: 17:41

Right.

Marc Von Musser: 17:41

That's about them. Exactly. And part of it is finding finding out what the person needs. And I I did this too. I'll give you an example, a funny story. So part of the way that I took our company uh from $11,000 to $2 million in product sales was I said to the coaches, because I was the director of coaching, I said, guys, serve the client. That is your number one rule. And so all of a sudden, after we did, we're doing that was in six months, by the way. So we're doing about $4 million now in product sales. I get called into the office of this chief financial officer who starts wagging his finger at me saying, Did you tell your our clients that they could go buy a product from Jack Canfield, the guy from Chicken Soup from the Soul? And I said, Well, honestly, I don't know the call, but it's quite likely. You go, what do you mean? And I said, Our job is to serve the client. They're paying us on average four to $12,000 a year for coaching. We're going to offer resources, input, and help them get to their goals. Right. So he's going back at me. And as I did that, I started to ask him, and I said, the person I work for had three national uh New York Times bestsellers, but Jack Canfield had 39. He's the most successful author in American history, Chicken Soup for the Soul.

Gary Pageau: 18:49

Right.

Marc Von Musser: 18:50

And he sold 500 million books and he was teaching a course on how to write a bestseller. So I looked at the CFO and I said, So how many has this person sold? Our boss? Three. Does he teach people how to write a New York Times bestseller? No. How many has Jack Campfield? 500 million and he's teaching people again. I said, Do you want me to go back to your way where we slam everyone with our products and you get $11,000 in product sales, or do you want my way where you can made $4 million in product sales?

Gary Pageau: 19:18

Right.

Marc Von Musser: 19:18

Because if you want, I'm going to do it my way. If you want, I'll do it your way. What do you want? He took my way. But in his mindset, though, he was so short-sighted, thinking he's losing money by steering somebody to somebody else.

Gary Pageau: 19:32

Coming in at number three is how 36 picks uses data to elevate school photography quality at scale with Robert St. Marie of 36 Picks. And here's what that sounded like. The photographer had the opportunity to tweak what's in or the studio, I should say, have an opportunity to tweak what's important to them. What's important to you know your studio may not be as important to them.

Robert Ste-Marie: 19:57

So the way, very good question. So the way we we actually do that is that we have a way to put where where the studio can put different weights on the different things that we're measuring.

Gary Pageau: 20:07

Right.

Robert Ste-Marie: 20:08

So you might say, I'm doing a high school job, and you know the kids are not very smiley in high school. Um so I'll take I'll I'll put the weights down a little bit for uh for smiles. But here's the thing though, this is this is what I find interesting. Every time you look at data, there is for me in my life and my previous life too. When you look at data the first time, there's always a surprise. Right. And I have to say that for me, the biggest surprise, because I've never really looked at our images, but with a platform like that, it gives you easy access. Literally, within a minute, you know exactly what's going on. What really surprised me is the lack of smiles. Interesting. The variability between photographers. And there's where you say, okay, you know, high school, yeah, you know, maybe 20% it's normal to get 20% not smiling. But then you see people are running at 30, 35, 40%, and then some other on the other side, like 10%. And I'm thinking, and then I go look at elementary school pictures, and I still see lower numbers, but still a fair amount of no smile. And that became, at least for next season, something I think we got to put more training on because right.

Gary Pageau: 21:28

I mean maybe that maybe that photographer is a buzzkill or something, or they're giving out vibes or something, and that's gonna affect your body. That's a problem, right?

Robert Ste-Marie: 21:37

And and and and I'm so interested now that we're finishing our season to run some analysis on what happens to sales when you have no smiles compared to smiles. And maybe high school, maybe it's not a big factor, but I can bet you that elementary schools, if the kid is not smiling and and have a good expression, right? You're probably less likely to sell that image. So for me, that was one of the things, and talking to some of our customers that have used it, we we're all coming to the same conclusions. I was surprised by the lack, I wouldn't say lack of effort of making the kids smile, but I think we can do better.

Gary Pageau: 22:17

Well, maybe lack of success is maybe a better word, right? Because like you said, put it in the photographer's shoes, right? There, they've got maybe 25-30 seconds to develop an instant rapport with a with a with a student, get that smile, right? And it, you know, there's a lot going on there.

Robert Ste-Marie: 22:32

So maybe, just maybe we should spend more time training or photographer tricks to make them smile, right?

Gary Pageau: 22:38

Exactly. Well, yeah, because I mean if you can say, okay, you're at you know, uh 40% not smiling, so you're getting, you know, so and our our rate is or our buy rate is lower than those with a higher smile rate, you can basically you know tie that together and say, yeah, you know, this is what we need to work on. You need to wear a big red clown nose on your face, or yeah, uh whatever works at the end of the day, you know.

Robert Ste-Marie: 23:04

Maybe the clown nose is not gonna work in high school, but it might work in elementary school. But the other thing too that that's really cool is that there's a way to share the the the photographer's dashboard with the photographer, so they they see their their their data and it actually compares their data to the average in the company. So the reason why we did that it takes away the oh, I'm being persecuted by being singled out, but it measures everybody the same way. So if your average is, I don't know, 10% non-smile, okay. How is the rest of the company? Is it 12? Is it 15? Is it five?

Gary Pageau: 23:44

And guy, that kind of positions you and it creates, I would hope, a healthy competitive environment, also, or at least uh a basis for self-reflection that what could I do better, right?

Robert Ste-Marie: 23:57

That's right. That's right.

Gary Pageau: 23:58

You're basically basing this on actual data that is saying, hey, listen, you know, only 80% of your people are smiling, and it's and and our studio wide average is 90. Well, how do you think you can improve that?

Robert Ste-Marie: 24:10

That's right. And and what's kind of cool too is that because we have all the data, when the photographer looks in, or or we can look at the same data, there's a trend line across the season, what's their performance, and there's the average trend line of the company. So you can see, did they get better, did they get worse, were they all over the place? So that's interesting too. At the end of the day, it it gives you data, how you act on it. I think every studio will do it a bit differently.

Gary Pageau: 24:38

Sure.

Robert Ste-Marie: 24:38

We try to be on it as quick as we can, you know, share videos for certain things. You have a problem with lighting, you're gonna share with you a training video or something like that. Another interesting thing, and I've heard that from other customers using it too, is that you know, we all have that perception that you know a senior photographer will perform better than a junior photographer.

Gary Pageau: 24:59

What do you mean by senior and junior?

Robert Ste-Marie: 25:01

Senior could would be in my definition, a senior would be somebody that's worked for us that has come back like for the last five years, ten years. Oh, experience, right? Okay, experience-wise. But you find out that it it might be true in some cases, but in some cases, you might have to have the perception that this particular photographer was the you know top of the top. But when you look at the data, you say, hang on one second, they're not paying attention like like we thought they were. Um, and and equally, you know, seniority goes with you know how much we pair a photographer. So again, it it's all data that's been a bit elusive in our industry. And honestly, I think it's that the technology that I'm having the most fun with because I think it's got the highest impact of anything we've done. There's so much potential. We have so many ideas, fun ideas of where where we want to go with this. We've already, I think, uh moved uh the technology a fair amount.

Gary Pageau: 25:59

Do you do you have any of your customers who are could possibly use this to actually like service accounts, like go to a school and say, you know, use it to kind of talk about how effective their photographers are and all that? I mean, because I mean there's all kinds of data being captured, right? I mean, you're catching capturing time efficiency, how well they're moving through the chute, all of those things as well, right?

Robert Ste-Marie: 26:22

It's a good question. The way so far that we're able to use it is that when the data comes in, we're actually we're also catching the job number. Right. So let's say we have a situation with a school where parents are complaining and they're saying, you know, the photography was really bad, the picture of my kid or kids are are are are no good. We can actually now go back to that photographer and actually quickly, and the word is quickly, look at the images that came from that shoot and the quality of of the images. So that again, it it just allows you to I guess drill down really quickly and and go back to your point, go back to a school when you want to re-sign them, at least you're you can know what was the quality of the photography to that school. And and don't get me wrong, this this business is never gonna be about perfect images. But right one of the things I find about school photography that people tend or studios sometimes lose sight of is that quality, I think, is really important. I think the day that we don't produce these quality professional looking pictures is when we don't do school photography anymore, because that's where we're there to provide a professional portrait at a reasonable price to parents of these children. That's what we do, and I think we have to be reminded of that once in a while that this is important, and and you know, uh the wizardry of AI is cool, and obviously we use it to do all sorts of things in our business, absolutely, but your image has to be good.

Gary Pageau: 28:03

Coming in, number two is how Stuart Cohen built a photography career beyond the shutter. And here's what Stuart's advice was. How did that change your business approach as a commercial photographer? Because the the world of competition opened up, right? I mean, it really opened it really opened up.

Stuart Cohen: 28:26

I think that was the beginning of the change because I don't think the competition like caught up immediately. But you know, think about the craft, like what I've seen, and and I do think about the craft and and not shortchanging anybody today using automatic cameras, but you know, I like when I started, we used to have to know how to focus, you know.

Gary Pageau: 28:48

And and I remember backwards and upside down on a glass plate, right?

Stuart Cohen: 28:53

Well, no, okay, yeah. Well, that was four by five, but even 35. I remember going in college, like going to the side of a freeway with a 300 millimeter lens and trying to follow license plates, right? You know, because I was able to go shoot football games for for my college. So, you know, autofocus was a huge, that was the first thing that was like, oh my God, this is amazing. And that was, I think, in the late 90s. And so, you know, I hadn't been doing it that long, but it was it was a big change. And then, of course, um, you know, digital, I I called the you know, the digital transformation, which to me was 2006, like when the Canon 1DX came out. Yeah, um, I called that the film killer. I remember that, you know, there was there was a lot of trepidation and a lot of people saying, yeah, digital's great, or no, it's not, we want to stay with film. And I was doing a big job back then for Nokia, and we decided, you know, somebody had suggested we shoot it digitally, and we decided that we were gonna do a test with their color separator. So we shot the same subject on, I think it was like three different cameras, like film, two different kinds of film, and and what was the preeminent digital camera at the time. And we sent them off to these color separators, and they made these giant prints, you know, like a piece of the file, and made giant prints, and there was this whole big meeting called for my studio. You know, their color separators were coming, the clients were coming, everyone was coming to see this and make this decision. And these guys came in, like, I don't know, 10 minutes before the meeting started and laid out these big strips. I wish I had kept them and identifying what was what. And to me, it was like, okay, well, the conversation's over. The digital was already so much cleaner. And I never ever had another roll of film. Like there were 300 rolls of film in a fridge at the studio that never got used. And we finally, we finally we started selling them like 10 years later, you know, because we're like, um, we're never gonna use this, let's just sell it. That was a transformation from for us. You know, there was in terms of from the photo perspective, of course, it was a big dollar change because we used to charge by the role of film.

Gary Pageau: 31:08

Right.

Stuart Cohen: 31:09

Um, like, well, aside from, you know, it was plus film and processing, and you know, we would have a budget for film and processing, but I'm the kind of guy that our jobs, we used to shoot 150, 200 rolls of film.

Gary Pageau: 31:20

Right.

Stuart Cohen: 31:20

So regardless of the markup, there was markup. And that, of course, went out the door. Um, you know, then of course, digital text came in into being, and and you needed to keep up with, you know, the digital technology, just monitors and laptops and and hard drives.

Gary Pageau: 31:38

Yeah.

Stuart Cohen: 31:38

I mean, yeah, exactly. And and you know, and you do burn through those, whatever you think. We use them hard and they got torn up. But again, it was just like, how do you re-jigger your company to make it work for the current economy? And that's what we learned how to do. And it was like, like it or not, this is the way it's going. And then I think shortly thereafter, that all of a sudden there were some guys coming into the industry that really didn't understand kind of the craft that we all had to learn. And you can't really blame them for it, it's just because technology made things easier. And and that became, you know, the the field started to get more crowded, I'll just say.

Gary Pageau: 32:19

And our number one most listened to episode of 2025 was Inside SPAC, the largest conference shaping school sports, and volume photography with SPAC's leadership, Corey Cooper and Calvin Harrell Jr. Here's what they had to say among the highlights.

Coree Cooper: 32:37

We are helping the independents, yeah.

Gary Pageau: 32:41

Which I think helps everybody, right? It raises the bar for everybody. And it it I and I don't know if it grows the whole pie per se, because as I just had one of the vendors explain to me the other day, that they're not building any more schools, we're not having that many more kids. It's kind of a market, so you got to find ways to either become more profitable via becoming more efficient or sell the ancillary products, which I think is the other piece of the business, where you've got people now selling banners and mugs and and Christmas decorations and holiday ornaments and everything else with those pictures, which you know, again, that's creating a whole new opportunity for volume photographers to increase their sales and profits, and that's what they're gonna see at the trade show, is on the floors.

Coree Cooper: 33:33

Because SPAC was pretty much school photographers, but then we found a lot of volume guys who were doing the sports business, the T and I's and all of those, those banners that you mentioned. Yeah, and we thought, you know, this is kind of marries well with our school photography, it's volume photography. And so bringing in that sports component also really added to the community.

Calvin Harrel Jr.: 33:56

And there are those of us that have been around a long time that recognize that a camera on the shelf makes no money. And so if you're only shooting, if you're only shooting during the school season and then you put 10 cameras on the shelf and they're dead until the spring, you know, uh what would that that's not a good investment, let's just say. So you take the exact same equipment effectively for doing T and I sports group photography. Right. Uh, why wouldn't you do that? And and one of the things that we're recognizing also is when we talk about percentage of participation, average order value, and that sort of thing, the sports segment is a very, very good one. Uh, in fact, it's oftentimes better than the actual school services segment for a variety of reasons because there's fewer service items, there's fewer points of contact, etc. It's not necessarily a stable because you get boards that change and everything else happens much more frequently. Yeah, much more frequently. But other than that, they just it was a natural marriage. Um, one of the things that's gonna you talked about the uh ancillary items, you talk about uh yearbooks is a major one for many of the school photographers that are selling their yearbooks directly to their schools. And uh in January, I'll be introducing uh uh through with another organization a digital yearbook product that's never been seen before. And it's like it's unbelievable what is now available, what is what we're capable of in the imaging world as it relates to these volume segments, right?

Gary Pageau: 35:28

So, Koy, let's pivot a little bit to the event itself. Uh for the basics. So we know we covered it earlier, but we'll just get through the basics of where when is it and where is it?

Coree Cooper: 35:39

Okay, so it's in Las Vegas and it's out the South Point, which is only about a 10-minute ride from the strip. Uh, and we have discounted hotel rooms and also discounted resort fees. All of this information is on the website. It is January 21st through 24th. So Wednesday is pre-con day. Pre-con is an all-day class that kind of revs you up for the regular conference. It's an additional add-on to the regular conference. Right. Um, and we do cover the basics Schools 101, sports 101, volume 202. This class is designed for people who've already know the basics, but now they're looking to be rather than a single operator or two owners, right? They actually need to hire a staff. How do you scale my business to grow? That's the class that you need. We also have sales training. Now, our sales trainer is a professional sales trainer, he's not a photographer, and that's a great class for you if you have any sales reps that need to learn how to sell. And then this year we have an international track. So Calvin mentioned that we've had other SPAC pop-ups, as I like to call them. We've had them in Germany, we've had them in the UK, we've had them in South Africa. There are many SPACs, usually one day, one room, a whole bunch of speakers. We are in bringing them all back to SPAC, back to the mothership, so to speak. And we've given them a track as well because some of the business topics are a little bit different when you're talking about an international basis. So that's just basically Wednesday, but we do start off with a kickoff party. We're giving everybody.

Gary Pageau: 37:29

I'm shocked to hear that. That's that's shocking to me that that would happen.

Coree Cooper: 37:34

We gotta get together and we gotta get through the hey, how was your year conversation before we start learning, which is Thursday? Thursday, full day of education, five classes happening at the same time. Agenda and session descriptions are all on our website. Thursday night, we have our beautiful awards dinner, uh, sit-down dinner, and we have a party afterwards, of course. Great entertainment I booked for this party. Friday.

Gary Pageau: 38:04

Are you revealing that now?

Coree Cooper: 38:06

Or uh, you'll have to wait a week or two.

Gary Pageau: 38:08

I was gonna say it says to be announced on the website, it doesn't say yet.

Calvin Harrel Jr.: 38:12

So it's gonna be but Corey, and by the way, we got I I want to plug this in. I'm not gonna speak to a specific vendor, but we have vendor partners that are absolutely unbelievable. They sponsor the nighttime parties, the the the cocktail parties, the entertainment at the uh uh uh parties and that sort of thing. They actually, that's in addition to their normal booth fee, that which is still a great rate for the booth, but they sponsor those things just to make sure that everybody is enjoying themselves. So I just want to plug that in. Our vendors, we truly appreciate them. Yep.

Coree Cooper: 38:49

Right. So then when we move into Friday, we have classes in the morning after breakfast, but then, which is very different than most shows you've been to, we have a dedicated trade show. Meaning, once trade show starts, which is at 11:30 on Friday, and we stop all education. We don't want you to have to choose between learning something and engaging with an exhibitor. We give that time dedicated to our exhibitors, and they also have sideshow rooms, which is their own sales presentations in smaller rooms. Trade show, we have over 100 vendors, 40,000 square feet, a lot of demos running in the booths. You'll have everything from lighting to backdrops to e-commerce to printers to um am I forgetting any of the major categories? We've got even uh gear for tripods. Uh, we try to cover it all, everything that you might need in your business.

Erin Manning: 39:50

Thank you for listening to the Dead Pixel Society podcast. Read more great stories and sign up for the newsletter at www.theadpixels society.com.