Athena's mission: Surprise 60th Birthday Party for Dad
At Perfocal, we are really proud to deliver great photography services at highly affordable rates. What's better, our service is on-demand, which means we're almost always available for your dates & needs, even at short notices.
Recently, we covered an interesting family event which is slightly different than usual. Customer Athena wanted to hire a photographer to come by and take some candid shots on her father’s 60th birthday party. The special bit is, it's a surprise party ? which the lucky dad totally had no idea of! Read below to see how Perfocal helped on Athena's big plan.
Photoshoot details:
Customer: Athena
Type of shoot: Birthday Party Location: Barking, East London
Package: 2 hours (£169) Add-on: High Resolution JPEGs (£19)
The Challenges
It isn’t every day that your father turns 60 years old, so Athena wanted to be as involved as possible during the surprise party which meant she didn’t want to be stuck behind a camera. To both fully capture this once in a lifetime milestone in her father’s life as well as be a part of the action, she elected to hire a photographer.
The thing is, by the time she decided that she wanted a photographer there was just a week before the big day. Also, her venue in Barking, East London was one that isn’t well covered by many central London-based photographers and she knows few active local photographers around.
Issues tend to arise when looking for a good photographer in such a short time frame. Looking for a local photographer yourself means it can be difficult to find someone who's affordable, good at what they do, and reliable enough to show up on short notice.
On top of it all, having to ferry all of your gear to a remote venue can be troublesome and many photographers tend to tack on extra charges for having to go out of their way, adding extra fees that aren't entirely necessary. In short, Athena was concerned she wouldn’t be able to find a photographer that was both willing and able to make it actually happen without her having to do tons of legwork on her own.
Athena’s Next Steps
At this point, Athena found Perfocal online and decided to give us a shot (in a good way...). She simply filled out our easy to use booking form where she typed in the type of shoot, date & location, and selected our 2 hours event package (£169). She also wanted some extra high resolution photos for prints, which were available as a simple add-on option for a small, fixed charge. The entire process only took a few minutes.
Then, our system automatically worked to match an awesome photographer from our pro pool, and fast. Within ten minutes Athena's request had been picked up by a suitable photographer, Mark, who has all of the necessary resources to make Athena's plan a reality was ready & committed.
Mark is a seasoned photographer fully verified by Perfocal for events & party photography through our strict vetting process. Equipped with 2 Nikon professional full-frame DSLR cameras (a D3 and a D700), he showed up ahead of time and stayed low-key until the big surprise was revealed. During the 2 hour party, he worked tirelessly capture the candid and emotional moments, with four different lenses on hand plus a more than satisfactory lighting kit. The results were fantastic.
After the shoot, all unedited photos were uploaded to Perfocal for the finishing touches before being delivered to Athena. As standard, the editor team then had the photos edited and delivered more than 240 beautiful photos to her in less than 48 hours time, all for the price of £188 (which includes £19 for the Extra High Resolution JPEGs add-on).
Takeaways
Thanks to how our system is built Perfocal was able to confirm a fully verified professional photographer willing to do the 2 hour shoot that was only a few days away within 10 minutes. From there, the photographer and the editor team managed to deliver more than 240 edited images, in 2 days after the party, for only £188.
Perfocal's vision is to become "everyone's perfect photographer". We define a "perfect photographer" as someone who has the right skills & equipment, is reasonably priced, and most importantly, is available whenever the client needs us. Occasional special circumstances like this are great tests for our services, and we’re happy to say Athena was very satisfied with how our photographer captured her father’s special day. Here’s what Athena had to say about her experience with us:
"Perfocal photographer was very professional and the pictures turned out great... I would recommend this company and the photographer to anyone..."
Athena on Trustpilot.com
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