Thank you to everyone who filled in the questionnaire about Roller Derby photography that I recently posted. It was not designed to be a scientific study, just a snapshot of people’s thoughts on photography in Roller Derby. I could have pasted it on to every teams Facebook page but as I said it’s just a snapshot, not an in-depth study, but still, I feel a got a reasonable amount of replies to come to some conclusions.
This is the first part in a series of blog posts about this survey. The first couple will focus on the results and then I will go a bit more in-depth with my analysis and recommendations.
If you want to see the survey or fill it in click here:
https://goo.gl/forms/zCfHNuw1glAZ0hLy2
The good thing for photographers is that everyone who participated (100%) felt that good images can have a positive impact on the sport. I think that justifies why we shoot it. Good, however is subjective, and how to measure that would be difficult, but it gives us a reason to keep striving to produce better and better images.
I will concentrate on the first half of the survey in this post. The majority of respondents were skaters (58.5%) followed by photographers (11.3%) and then NSOs/Referees jointly (10.4%). The rest (9.4%) were made up across the other categories. I sort of expected this, skaters being the major stakeholders, photographers with an interest followed by NSOs and Referees who also regularly feature in images.
The majority of people who replied (50.5%) had been involved with the sport for 5 or more years, then two to five years (36.4%), two years or less made up the rest. Again as expected, as those in the sport longer are more likely to have made it on to teams or be at events where photography has taken place. It could also be that newer skaters feel they have less say on the structure of the sport and decided not to comment, or the channels I used attracted longer term skaters.
The favourite type of images, well, first and second choice were close, ‘Apex jumps/outstanding athleticism’ (43.9%) followed by ‘General action’ (38.3%) in first place followed by ‘General action’ (34.6%) and then ‘Apex jumps/outstanding athleticism’ (30.8%) in second. ‘Referees’ were the third favourite image (34.6%) followed by the ‘Crowd/general feel of the bout’ (24.3%). The least favourite types of shot were ‘Other’ (35.7%), this was not defined, followed by ‘Crowd/general feel of the bout’ (30.6%).
This next section may be of use to photographers. Of all the platforms where people look for images of Roller Derby, Facebook was the only one used by all respondents. Instagram was next
(39.3%) followed by the photographers website (25.2%) and then Twitter (12.1%). Print based media, magazines (9.3%) and newspapers (8.4%) were less than 10% each. Again the lack of Derby print based media may be a factor, with most Derby magazines having folded or transferred to digital editions.
Over 90% of respondents preferred to view images online over print.
While people use several platforms to view images, Facebook is the preferred choice (80.2%). This could be due to the ease of tagging and sharing, even though Facebook image quality is less than other platforms.
Finally for this post, most people (57.9%) view images on a smart phone, followed by a PC/Mac (26.2%), then tablets (15%) and the tiny fraction left on another device of some kind, maybe an etch-a-sketch?
So the take home from this for the photographer is; share your images on Facebook and optimise them to be viewed on a smartphone. What these settings are I have no idea. I asked the questions I don’t have the solutions!
Well, that’s it for part one I will be exploring the rest of the survey in the next post.
www.roller-derby-on-film.co.uk
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