It took more than 1,000 shots, but three photographers captured and cataloged dozens of events and miles of exhibits for the National Restaurant Association (NRA) Restaurant

Hotel-Motel Show, held May 18–21, 2002, at McCormick Place in Chicago. 
But today, there’s still no proof binder available to flip through and pass around. Instead, Einzig Photographers in New York City delivered a digital photo catalog. Now NRA’s staff and creative agency can view and download images for use in print, online or in e-mail.

“We were challenged to provide more marketing information in a different format than we had produced in the past,” says Pamela Dohoney, Senior Manager of Marketing and Communications for the NRA in Washington, DC. “We were hesitant to go to all digital, but our creative agency and Einzig said, ‘Now is the time — there’s a cost savings,’ ” she says. 

After using a traditional print photographer for years, Dohoney selected Einzig this year in part because the owners are photographers themselves. “They have an artist’s eye, instead of a business perspective,” she says. That’s one reason she believes their digital images are better than previous years’ prints. “In the past, I haven’t been able to use all of the trade show photos because they didn’t capture what the show was about,” she says. “With Einzig, we had some really creative shots.” 

Each show day, the Einzig team split up to cover different areas — from crowd shots to food close-ups. At the end of the day, Dohoney reviewed 4-by-6 photos in low resolution (72 dpi) on an online proofing site. Occasionally, she suggested different perspectives for the next day’s shoot. “We used to have to wait a couple of weeks for printed pictures, and when you’re waiting you never know what’s on the film,” says Dohoney. “With digital, we saw them every single day. There were no surprises.”

To post 72-dpi images on the show Web site (www.restaurant.org/show), the original digital photos were resized, cropped and enhanced using Macromedia Fireworks. In addition to recapping each day’s happenings in a slide show, Dohoney created a photo gallery for media to download high-resolution (300 dpi) .jpg or .tif files suitable for print publication. She also used photos in an HTML e-mail message to promote attendance among industry professionals within a 90-mile radius of the show. 

Within two days after the show, Einzig had posted all of the images on the proofing site, divided into 10 categories. The NRA’s staff and creative agency access the site, download images marked “For Placement Only” and use them to design marketing materials for various media. Once Dohoney approves the selections, the designers 
order and download hi-res images, which cost less than photo reprints.

Einzig’s “Full Digital Solution” has enabled the NRA and its agency to share images via the Web, with no loss of quality and at a total cost comparable to print. 

“It’s my stock photography for the whole year,” says Dohoney. “We’re putting the images in our premier pieces to entice people to make a smart decision and come to the NRA Show.”