New office strategy

We’ve adopted a new ‘no dogshit’ policy here at the JDP liason office in Chamonix… Literally! France is full of landmines of the canine kind!

What’s the Beef?

During our evolution this past season, JDP has grown in several new directions. Most notably, we have gone from JDP Images to JDP Freesport Ltd. In the autumn of 2009, what was for many years a single proprietorship was formed into a limited liability corporation based in Carson City, Nevada. We are very excited to have made this step, allowing us to expand globally and better enable us to support both our photographers and the sports we love to photograph.

This change has generated a bit of confusion, as our website address changed along with our brand. Fortunately many of you have transferred with the new site by way of the auto-forward put in place. Unfortunately, though, not all of our athletes/clients have made the change.

Essentially, JDP Freesport in the company and JDP Images is the library, being just one of many offerings to come under the Freesport banner. For technical reasons, the library was forced to adopt the Freesport name just as we geared-up for the 2010 Olympic Winter Games in Vancouver, though this was meant only as a temporary change while we updated the site.

The changes that have been incorporated – a ‘lightbox’ ordering system; a much faster database structure; direct access to high-resolution imagery for press; a more secure environment – will be joined by some of the great features the previous site utilized, like multi-tier searches and refined functionality. But really, you’ll believe it when you see it. The biggest change for our users, though will be the new landing page; the ‘face’ of JDP. As mentioned before, this blog will become part of that face.

So let us know your comments and ideas. Have a good look through the JDP library and let us know how we can improve our service to the athletes, press, business and the sport, collectively. On the agency side, our goal is to create a powerhouse of global snowboarding imagery available within minutes of competition to the press. On the library side, we’d like to continue to supply the growing pool of athletes, their sponsors and regional press with great photos that sell their talents (as well as their brands).

Many thanks from the JDP team!

Transfer complete

You may have noticed the previous owner of this blog site was ‘Babydawg’, the affectionate name Anna & I have given to our soon-born first child. I’ve just transferred the blog to jdpimages, so there should be less confusion.

If you’re interested, you can follow our baby’s development (and ours as parents!) on Babydawg’s Blog – link at right.

cheers!

JDP Freesport Blog – the early days

Well, it’s a first proper shot at blogging for JDP, so thought I’d let you know what the plan is…

2009/2010 was a banner season for JDP as both an agency and an image library. We covered 46 separate world-class snowboarding events globally, utilizing the talents of more than 16 professional photographers from 9 different countries. Collectively, we brought more than 10,000 images of 650+ athletes into the library, all ready-for-print and referenced for quick, painless searches.

By offering these images free to the athletes we shoot, we managed 1,500+ downloads over the season – an that’s still rising! And from their efforts, JDP has sold imagery on 4 continents to magazines, newspapers and for commercial use alike; not a bad start.

So the next step? We are putting a face on the library. That’s where this blog comes in, to keep those interested informed of where we are and what we are doing. Eventually this will mean each of our photographers creates a blog entry while shooting, giving you access to first-hand accounts of the action to go with the photos; personal stories and background information about the world’s biggest snowboarding events each year. We’ll add to that a calendar of events we are covering throughout the season, biographies of some of our selected photographers and links to new areas we are currently developing, like online print ordering.

So stick with us – we’re growing all the time!

At the moment, we have only one event yet to process – the 2010 Snow Angels charity event hosted by USA’s Gretchen Bleiler in Aspen. Those photos will be online tomorrow (Monday 12 April) so check the site for some great ladies’ halfpipe action.

All for now!