For students enrolled in the Professional Photography Program at the New England School of Photography, Alison Geehan, Vice President—Business Operations, explains how NESOP chose to use DRR to showcase student work:

"I first heard about Digital Railroad through New England School of
Photography’s (NESOP’s) photojournalism instructor, Glen Cooper. Interested
in the idea of this photographer’s community Marketplace, I met with Tom
Tinervin, Digital Railroad’s Senior Director of Platform Sales and Support,
at the 2007 PhotoPlus Expo in NYC. An experienced businessman and
photographer, Tom was able to speak to all the facets of Digital Railroad
with clarity and enthusiasm.

After careful consideration, NESOP decided to contract with Digital Railroad
and now has one collective school archive and has provided its students in
the final year of its Professional Photography Program with individual
archives on this site. This is an outstanding opportunity for our students
and our program. It provides them with a point of redundancy for storing
their images, is an excellent marketing tool, and acts as a marketplace and
storefront for their images and a delivery tool for their work.

Tom Tinervin recently came to New England School of Photography (NESOP) to
discuss Digital Railroad, its uses and functionality with NESOP’s faculty,
staff and students. His presentation was clear and informative and sparked
great conversation and action among the audience present. Tom laid out the
many tools Digital Railroad currently provides for its members and discussed
the additional tools that will be added to the site in the near future.
This was not a hard-core sales presentation—we were already sold on the idea
and had already contracted with Digital Railroad. This was an informative
seminar given as a courtesy to NESOP and its community to inform and excite
them, and it was a great success.

During the presentation, Tom discussed the (photography) industry today, its
opportunities and challenges. He discussed the importance of how a
photographer presents himself/herself and the overall idea of branding
oneself in the market, and of course he discussed how Digital Railroad was
able to assist photographers in accomplishing global distribution. In the
industry today, it is all about personal identity, providing added value to
the client and bringing value to one’s images. The best way to start
bringing value to one’s images is to get them seen, and Digital Railroad is
an amazing tool for this. Members can use Digital Railroad as a stand-alone
archive, or even contact the company and point their individual domain name
directly to their archive. NESOP students are using their archives to
market their images and link to their websites, but also as a delivery tool.
With this tool, they can send images directly from their archive to a server
or via FTP. With Digital Railroad’s extensive research network, NESOP
members are already receiving e-mails daily from alerting them to images
that are being sought for purchase, and they then have the option of
submitting them to buyers.

Digital Railroad is not simply a stock site—to refer to it as such would be
doing it a disservice. The photographer can control not only the images
that are seen, but who sees them, whether they are sold and their pricing.
Digital Railroad also maintains a commission/fee structure highly favorable
to the photographer. While e-commerce is already built into the site,
Digital Railroad will be adding invoicing and print fulfillment to make the
photographer’s job even easier and more efficient.

© NESOP Images

Needless to say, NESOP faculty and students are excited about the working
with Digital Railroad. It is a remarkable tool for our students—getting
them exposure and concrete experience in the business of photography, while
making it a simple and seamless process for them. Our faculty, who are all
working, accomplished, professional photographers are excited about the site
because it addresses where the industry is moving and is just one more place
to market themselves as fine art and commercial artists. It has been a
pleasure working with Tom and Digital Railroad."