Bamboo Room for Mary

Just a few test shots on my phone to give you an idea of what the Bamboo Room could look like online. Shots from my cameras will be even in lighting tone etc.

It’s a great, open space and with a little bit of staging (clearing surfaces etc.) and shooting at the right times of day (day and night) the interiors will look far better than this when shot and metered with a professional camera.

This would be a great shot at night with a band playing.

Interiors - a few ideas

  • An even wider angle on this would look stunning.

  • Highlight the bar - the great curves, and keep the lighting moody and inviting.

Again, highlight the bar, with people and without. We can keep the harsh light from the street by shooting just a little later in the day. Great opportunities for some lighting here.

With a little staging, highlight this outside area. Also, good to shoot a band playing outside from this vantage point.

Wide shots from the bar facing out, a little light on the stage looks great.

Price

Ok here’s the deal. Real estate photographers, as we’re in Palm Beach with all our fancy houses, cost an arm and a foot. Hourly rates range from $100-$500 a shoot, then there’s the editing and whatever else they tack on. This would be at least a 3-4 hour shoot - but if you want (and you do) night shots with bands (inside and outside) and general shots when you’re full at the bar etc., then that’s an extra trip and more hours and and and. If you go the Thumbtack route (freelancers online) you’ll get a photographer for a low hourly ($100/hr probably) but also a photographer who ‘needs something for their portfolio’ - meaning they don’t have the experience or wherewithall to shoot and edit beautiful interiors - which is why they need shots for their portfolio. I’m guessing you could get a less-than-professional job done for $500 and a professional quality delivery for around $1000.

Because of the special place that Rudy’s holds in our community - all the people you’ve helped out over the years - and because it’s you - I’m willing to do this work for a nominal fee of $250. I’d love to do this pro bono but it’s really a lot of hours of work and I’m already near to my charity limit this year, and it’s only March. Eric has agreed to help me with the setup and staging (he doesn’t know what he’s getting into) so that’ll make it a tad easier for me. That’s for everything, the same quality professional work I do for Campbells (yeah that one), Pacific Foods, local bsuinesses, the PDX Jazz Festival etc. etc. Coming back for busy nights to shoot that band or whatever (I live right here) and taking all your considerations into account. There’s a lot to work with here - and pictures are a part of selling the Bamboo Room as an event space - but not everything.

So one piece of the puzzle is the pictures - there are other considerations, below.

Other Considerations

Website | SEO | Google My Business

OK - before I get into this just let me say that I find all this internet/social/website jazz a necessary evil - it’s hard to understand what, if anything, any of this does for your business - it certainly helps, that’s for certain, but there’s an awful lot of money wasted on web designers, SEO ‘experts’, social media strategies etc. and the list goes on. I’ve been doing this long enough to see how people get swept up in all this, spend a lot, and get practically nothing in return. It’s not all a colossal waste of money - some of this is necessary - but as I tell all my clients, you need a strategy more than you need to pay someone $500 a month to post a few pictures on your IG feed. I don’t do (a lot) of this work myself so I’m offering you this as a heads up - not a sales pitch. I do collaborate with a company that does all this - from website copy to SEO and all that - so if the time comes when any of what’s mentioned below is useful to you, I can set that up for you/provide you with quotes etc..

Domain | Website etc.

So I don’t know what the status is with the former website, but I’m thinking you will want a separate url and website for the Bamboo Room. You could suffice with a subdomain (bambooroom.rudyspubinlakeworth.com/) but that’s a lot of letters. bambooroom.com is for sale at $3000 - bamboo-room.com with the hyphen is for sale at the usual rate ($22/year). That’s all for you to figure out - we can discuss this if you like - I think the benefits of having a separate url are legion and for the price a good idea. You would need a separate website, so that’s an annual fee of c. $200 and the cost to build it. It’s a simple site, or, rather, can be, so it shouldn’t cost more than a few hundred dollars. I can get a quote for you if you decide to go that route. None of this would preclude having any of the bamboo room rental info on the Rudy’s site as well - there are numerous options, redirects etc. we could discuss.

The biggest reason for changing the domain name is the legacy attached to the previous establishment. There are comments and negative reviews you want to separate yourself from. This is especially important for Google My Business.

Google My Business

You’ve got one for Rudy’s - you know the deal. This one, at least, is free. When you decide on a new or keep the old url, you’re going to want to set all this up like you did for Rudy’s. Make certain you list it on Maps as well. Anyway, all this will need a refresh when you’ve figured out the strategy - using the new pictures for the listing, and posting 5X a month. I would be happy to discuss best practices for using GMBiz with you so you can get the most out of it.

SEO

Oy. SEO. Yeah, crucially important and requires some analytics and competitor research, keywords all that stuff. This doesn’t need to be a big expensive deal. The folks I work with have all the tools and it’s not as big a deal as everyone who sells this stuff wants you to believe it is. Applying the research with proper keywords in your copy, the right page headings and canonicals - all of this is pretty standard and shouldn’t cost a fortune. The folks I work with are more than reasonable and if and when we get to this point I can get a quote for you.

OK - that’s all just the basics I would think would be the minimum to give the new Bamboo Room a proper online presence. Apologies if it’s too much or just a lot, but my ethos is to help my clients succeed, not to just provide photos for them, and so I felt the need to get into it a little more.

A bit about my work:

As you’re on the website, you can see my online portfolio. I’ve had a long career in photography, from starting out doing work for international charities in Africa, Nepal and the Middle East, to working with big corporations here in the US. I work with a lot of local businesses, from headshots to branding, and shooting the PDX Jazz Festival in addition to helping out numerous bands with their branding and online image. A lot of that work can be found on my IG feed @brooksbankphoto. A link to my reviews on Google is here: Google Reviews.

Happy to discuss this with you at your convenience. I’m right downtown so can meet up with you whenever, wherever.

Thanks Mary - looking forward to speaking with you soon!