Imagine offering 45,000 items in your line through three direct mail catalogs, plus an extensive website.  Welcome to Mid America Direct, the world's largest supplier of Corvette parts and accessories, and a major marketer of products for Volkswagens and Porsches.  Their product offerings include virtually everything you could ever need for these automobiles---from engine and transmission components to decorative accessories and apparel. 

Started with $500 in 1974, Mid America now does over $35 million in sales and employees 125 people in a 58,000 sq. ft. complex located in Effingham, IL.  They mail 4,000,000 catalogs annually to a customer base consisting of 900,000 names.  From a humble start with a two-page mail order sheet featuring jackets, T-shirts and emblems, Mid America's Corvette catalog alone is now a 4-color wonder, weighing in at a whopping 252 pages.

Catalog production is handled completely in-house at Mid America. With each catalog constantly being updated for multiple mailings throughout the year, capturing the 4,000 images per catalog represents a major part of the production process.

Ed Baumgarten, photography supervisor for Mid America, is responsible for the digital photography department.  They utilize a DCS 660 Kodak-Nikon hybrid digital camera with a firewire going into a Windows 2000 PC server.

The catalog department then transfers those images into their Macintosh network for production in Photoshop and Quark.  As the company's webmaster, Baumgarten also uses the photos on their website (www.madirect.com), and shoots products for both applications at the same time.

To maximize the efficiency of his department's workflow, Baumgarten brought in an Orbiculight system to handle all of the tabletop lighting set-ups.

"Previously we outsourced the work," he says.  "Now we do all of the tabletop photography in-house, and the lighting for every tabletop shot is with the Orbiculight.  The increase in productivity is amazing.  We can easily do 85 shots per day, compared to 3-4 four before the Orbiculight. Knocking out the backgrounds is a snap.  It's also easy to duplicate the lighting on set-ups that were done weeks before with the Orbiculight."

"The complete system is also very compact. It sits in a corner with a camera in front of it on a monopod.  There are no problems with knocking over strobes or tripping over stands.  The Orbiculight has really been the key to our productivity."

"Outsourcing the photography was very expensive for the number of shots we were doing," he adds.  "We were paying $75 per shot, plus tying up personnel to supervise the sessions.  Shooting everything ourselves with independent lights couldn't give us the volume we needed.  We calculated that we paid for the Orbiculight in the first four weeks.  The savings to Mid America have been amazing.  I'm a big proponent of this system.  In a shooting environment like ours, it pays for itself very, very quickly.

            In the printing business, profitability is often determined by efficient use of time and manpower. Save time on one job and you have more time to take on another job, and on and on...

            For that reason, Fisher Printing in Orange, California has become a big proponent of digital photography and, especially, Astron’s Orbiculight integrated lighting system.  Founded in 1933, Fisher’s focus is primarily on designing and printing four-color sales flyers for grocers and markets, such as the well-known IGA Stores and Certified.  According to the third-generation printing firm, the Orbiculight system has proven to be a very productive tool in their workflow. 

            Photo studio manager Rudy Villa says that his company began to do in-house photography when customers started requesting it, about 5-6 years ago. “As we grew,” said Villa, “we started getting requests from the bigger grocery chains to have certain items photographed on a short turnaround, and to have everything related to sales flyer production isolated into a single workflow. We started small, with a Sony digital camera, and shot maybe 10 or 20 items a week to test the process. It really worked out, and as our salesmen would go out, one of the questions that came up from new customers was whether we shot product photos.”

            Two years ago, Fisher graduated to a Kodak DCS 315, but was still using a tabletop with white paper draped over it for a shooting station. A single umbrella and a spotlight provided lighting. The biggest change in the company’s studio set-up, says Villa, was the acquisition of Astron’s Orbiculight, which vastly increased time savings and image quality.

            “From our previous way of shooting to now is really night and day,” said Villa. “Its design is excellent. The Orbiculight has a dome that curves over the tabletop, a flat lighting bed, and a sweep that goes up the back from the bed that can be adjusted forward and back. And we can drop the bed or dome if we need more room for larger items.

            “What’s really been nice is that you can isolate your lighting, so if you have too much glare on one side, you can tone it down and then compensate without affecting other aspects of the shot. With our old system, we were always having problems. We found ways to succeed, but my assistant might be holding a piece of paper in his left hand, holding a card on the bottom with his right hand, and be trying to bounce light under the subject to get the light source where we wanted it. With the Orbiculight, unless it’s a really big item, one person can handle just about everything and get great shots.

            Villa notes that the Orbiculight features a front-mounted control panel with 16 sliders that adjust light levels. “When you move a slide,” said Villa, “you can actually see where the light is being directed, while with our other system you didn’t know until you took the shot. With the Orbiculight you can pinpoint how the shot is going to look on the screen, and from there make adjustments for your aperture and f-stop. Basically, once an item looks good inside the dome, you’re pretty much done and it’s just a matter of intensifying or reducing the light.

            “That’s what has saved us so much time, especially with shiny items like bottles. We used to get hot spots on one side, but the other side of the bottle would lookß pretty good. Then we’d concentrate on leveling it off, and the other side would look bad. With the Orbiculight, you get a uniform, well-lit shot.”

            Like many studios having problems with lighting, Villa says, Fisher also used to spend a lot of time making corrections in Adobe Photoshop, adjusting for shadows and glare. Items shot with the Orbiculight might require a quick adjustment of some type, but nothing like the huge number of corrections previously required.

            “The Orbiculight is an amazing thing to work with,” concluded Villa. “Common sense shows you its advantages right off the bat. In our business, time is really the biggest expense. What little time we can save in any area is actually money in our pockets, because we have more time to move on to other projects.

            The movement towards digital photography has been accelerating so quickly that recent converts often speak with the authority of long-time veterans.

            For instance, take Dave Johnson of Icon Media in Anaheim Hills, California, whose firm provides graphic design, catalog production and ad agency services to suppliers in the automotive industry.  Icon Media went digital just last year, but has already experienced a wide array of positive results from the investment.

            Before starting its in-house digital studio, Icon had outsourced all of its photography to local photographers, but wasn’t happy with the results.  “Our staff had been dabbling in photography themselves for awhile,” says Dave Johnson, Icon Media’s president.  “To be honest, we weren’t really that satisfied with the work we were receiving from outside photographers, so we taught ourselves the basics of how to shoot products.  Bringing it in-house made sense, and as a result our designers also became photographers.”

            Icon’s in-house digital imaging studio now features three G3 and two G4 Macintosh computers, Agfa and Epson scanners, Mamiya R264 and Leaf Lumina digital cameras, and an Orbiculight integrated lighting system from Astron Systems.

            Today, says Johnson, the Icon designers who are creating the firm’s ads and catalogs are also intimately involved in the photographic process.  “Now, when we’re laying out an ad or a catalog page, we’re not building the layout around the limited photography from an outside photographer, who may or may not have gotten the shot we need.  Instead we’re creating exactly the shot we need for a layout, and at any angle or perspective.  It’s really freed us.  The designers can create the photo they want, since they’re often the one doing the shooting.”

            The purchase of the Mamiya and Leaf cameras, the Orbiculight, and a few accessories totaled about $50,000, says Johnson, but the investment has already paid off.  “Particularly with the Orbiculight, we’ve really been able to increase the speed of our work.  Before, we’d have to send a product out for photography, scan it and outline it.  With the Orbiculight, we can create a shot that’s basically already outlined, thereby enabling us to really pump the products through our workflow.  Lighting set-ups are incredibly easy with this system.

            “Our clients have benefited the most from our in-house photography, since we’re faster, and it simplified their lives when we became a one-stop shop for them.  We’re also more profitable ourselves.  We can turn a flyer around in about a week now, where it used to take us two weeks.  And, we can charge for the photography, which is a new source of revenue.”