In Focus Vol. 3 No. 6

Chip Shot

By all appearances, it’s the perfect business model: photograph beautiful golf course, play a round of golf, photograph beautiful golf course. In reality, it’s a lot more work, and here’s how Dimpled Rock makes it worthwhile with wide-format printing.

When Dimpled Rock began its business selling wide-format landscape décor photographic prints to golf courses, the company was paying about $20 per square foot for output. With the recent addition of an Epson 7880 purchased through LexJet, printing costs are down ten-fold.

Along with the cost reductions, Dimpled Rock has realized an increase in quality and control that allows it to more effectively market its photographic and printing product to high-end golf courses. With the trained eye of commercial photographer Gary Kellner, who is Dimpled Rock’s creative director/photographer, golf courses and their patrons are getting stunning works of photographic art super-sized for their location.

Kellner’s wife, Deborah, and Dennis Chupa are Dimpled Rock’s managing partners, handling finance and marketing respectively. The group put a program together for the golf clubs in which the course is photographed for free with no commitment on the club’s part. The resulting portfolio, thanks to Kellner’s outstanding photography, sells itself.

“Part of what motivated us was the lack of decent photography on so many golf course websites,” says Kellner. “If you go to a golf club’s site, with the exception of perhaps the top two percent, most of the photographs are so bad it wouldn’t entice anyone to play golf there.”

Dimpled Rock realizes that a golf club’s primary business is maximizing its course for the best golf experience possible, rather than capturing and making the most  of the course’s visual presentation to the general public. Therefore, once a course is photographed, the service is welcomed and appreciated by Dimpled Rock’s golf club clients.

“In addition to the gallery-style prints, we sell the rights to the images for ads, their website, and collateral materials. We started working with 16 golf clubs, and since the beginning of April we’ve added 30 clubs,” explains Kellner.

Kellner says that most of the gallery-style prints are output on Sunset Select Matte Canvas and framed, though he has done a few canvas gallery wraps. Kellner prints a fine-art line on Epson Somerset Velvet, and plans to incorporate Sunset Textured Fine Art and other Sunset Fine Art and Fibre papers in the mix based on his successful testing with the Sunset Portfolio Packs.

“The plug-and-play ability of the printer is amazing. We got it on a Friday at about three o’clock, and by seven I was printing,” says Kellner. “We’re running the ImagePrint RIP with it, and I’ve found that ImagePrint is something you just have to have. Its ability to scale images without degradation is priceless. The color control is amazing as well. I can micromanage the images to the nth degree; I can tweak colors, densities, contrasts, and saturation on the fly without having to mess around with Photoshop or anything else.”

Kellner says that a healthy portion of Dimpled Rock’s gallery-style print sales are for the homes and offices of the golf club’s members and visitors. Once they see the style and elegance the prints bring to the club house they want it to dress up their own spaces.

The prints typically range from 24 in. x 50 in. to 30 in. x 60 in., but Kellner has printed any number of custom sizes, including one that was 78 inches long. Since there’s no such thing as a standard wall, Kellner’s ability to print in-house allows him to custom-fit any wall or space.

“It’s a different world, and it took some time for me to get used to producing more of a retail product as opposed to assignment photography. I have to shoot this on my own time to make a sale, but once we get out there, get the shots, and get a portfolio in the pro’s hands, it’s phenomenal,” says Kellner. “I’ll usually get out before sunrise and pre-scout the course to get a lay of the land. I’ll set up my first shot and go from there until about 10. Then I’ll stop and maybe play a round of golf in the middle of the day, and then pick up again around four or five. It’s tough, but somebody has to do it.”