Milan Rose, a fast-growing studio specializing in school photography, is breaking all the rules and proving school photography doesn't have to be dull.
'I grew tired of seeing children look like assembly line products,' explains President Susan Harding, a veteran of the school photography business. 'School photography is so predictable: the same shot, head and shoulders on a blue background, year after year.'
So she and daughter Michelle D'Amico founded Milan Rose to raise the level of school photography. They offer schools and parents choices of innovative background sets and poses, in addition to the traditional head-and-shoulders. Their yearbook accounts are opting to show more of the child in creative settings as a new look for school annuals and are embracing all the digital effects Milan Rose offers.
Milan Rose, based in Hillsborough, N.J., also takes advantage of all digital production has to offer--not just shooting digitally, but optimizing and retouching each image. And to maintain the quality control on which the Hardings insist, the company has installed its own Kodak Professional ML-500 Digital Photo Print System to produce photo-quality, dye-sublimation prints to meet high-volume production demands.
Born of frustration
Similar to many other businesses, Milan Rose opened because the owners couldn't get what they wanted elsewhere.
'Time and again, my grandchildren, Chloe Milan and Madison Rose, brought the same boring portraits home as their mother did when she was a child,' Harding explains.
So, using digital tools, she and D'Amico produced sample photographs of Chloe, Madison, and their friends in several special settings. D'Amico showed them to the children's preschool, and the rest is history. Milan Rose incorporated in spring 2001, but it didn't begin pursuing school contracts and officially open its doors until January 2002. Harding took on two partners, experts in the area of photography and digital technology, James Lamberton and Gary Gennarini. Now, the company operates in New Jersey and New York, and has franchised an operation in Terre Haute, Ind., Harding's hometown. At last count, the company had more than 80 schools signed up, and the list is growing daily. The company will contract to shoot preschool through high school portraits, sports, communions, dance schools, proms--virtually every kind of school photography.
'What we found is you can shoot a really good picture in a unique background set in the same amount of time as the traditional school picture,' Harding explains. 'People love the difference. They really do care about the quality of their children's school photography.'
D'Amico, who worked for a school photography company for seven years, agrees. 'A school photography company may have a whole department of people handling parents' complaints about poor framing and pictures of kids with their eyes closed. Those are things you'll never see in our pictures.'
Technology contributes to quality
Every school photography company is finding ways to take advantage of digital imaging technology. Milan Rose does it from start to finish.
It starts with digital capture, using Canon EOS D60 digital cameras that produce 6.3-megapixel images. Milan Rose typically sends a team of three people into a school with each camera: one kid wrangler, one photographer, and one assistant who studies each image after it's captured to ensure the studio gets a good image of each child. Sometimes, the photographer has to shoot two, three or four frames to get a good expression.
The digital image files arrive back at Milan Rose's headquarters and are immediately downloaded to an image server. Then, production personnel print out proof images on HP Photosmart 3820 inkjet printers or HP 4550 Laserjet printers using Camedia Software. Production personnel select which frame to print of each child based on the proofs, then work from the proofs and notes from parents to retouch the selected images using Adobe Photoshop. The parents might specify to remove a Band-Aid or blemish, minor bumps, bruises, and more.
After this 'grooming,' the images are sent into production. The lab uses Kodak Professional Digital Print Production (DP2) software to drive the ML-500 Digital Photo Print System. Before acquiring the ML-500 system last summer, Milan Rose printed images using inkjet printers and long-lasting inks. But, as the company grew, it became clear it needed a more production-oriented output device, particularly to deliver on Milan Rose's promise of five-day turn-around.
'With our inkjet printers, we got two prints every three minutes,' recalls Lamberton. 'The ML-500 delivers a print every 13 seconds.' He says, running 8-by-10-inch prints at the full production speed of 270 per hour, it can run for two hours unattended.
Growth from demand
When Milan Rose first opened its doors, Harding liked to be in the field, supervising the photography. Now, with the business growing day by day, she's too busy with sales and marketing to get out the front door very often and relies on well-trained teams. But she continues to insist on offering what other school photography companies usually won't. As the company prepares to shoot a school with 900 children, she's overseeing the creation of a Winter Wonderland background with snowman props--a special request from the school.
'Everybody here wears dual hats. We may all end up working on a set to get it done in time,' she says.
Looking ahead, she says the company is on track to achieve $1 million in sales in its second year of business. It's also slated to move to a new 2,500 square-foot headquarters facility in Hillsborough. Harding is pushing hard for continued growth in the New Jersey home operation, as well as to add additional franchises.
'Good people are crucial to any small business, and we have been blessed with many,' says Harding. 'They're dedicated and committed to doing whatever it takes to get the job done and delivered on time, and to ensure the integrity of our product.
'Start-up has its own set of challenges, but we meet them every day and have a lot of fun at the same time,' she says. 'It's a great thing to earn a living doing what you love!'
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