Americans love to have their pictures taken. The psychological reasons for this are murky, and it may simply be that we are so overstimulated by our environment that we need a visual record of everything we do in order to remember doing it. In any case, this is how event photographers make their money.

Event photographers may be found at public events, sure enough, such as graduations and marathons, at college or company parties, at amusement parks and rock concerts, on cruise ships--wherever a number of people have assembled. These happy hordes are in a good mood because of where they are and they want to preserve that moment.

Perhaps you are a visitor to New York waiting in a queue outside the window at the Today Show at the NBC studio in Rockefeller Plaza, holding up a tacky homemade sign and hoping it will be flashed across the miles to the folks in Iowa. You're having a great time. Suddenly there appears before you a man with a big flashy digital camera and a Pocket PC. He has the knowing look of the technologically savvy and you eagerly take the perforated card he hands you. You tear off half, fill in your e-mail address, and hand it back. He scans the bar code on it with his Pocket PC. The half you keep contains a URL. Then he snaps you grinning in front of the building, tacky sign and all. Just about as soon as you can get to a computer, you're going to see your picture on the Web, and then, if you so choose, you can order a beautiful professional print online. Memories are made of this, are they not? They are, and so are photographers' careers.

A snappy solution

This simple situation illustrates how the convergence of two technologies, digital photography and mobile computing, has created a new business opportunity. The usual method for marketing event photography has involved sending proofs through the mail, an expensive proposition. Furthermore, fallible paper systems were used to record the names and the sequence of photographed subjects, which were then manually matched up, sometimes with a great deal of trouble.

"Tests show that electronic marketing using electronic proofs sell just as well as paper proofs," says Jim Nichols of NBCpix. "But in this business, the obstacle has always been matching customers with photos."

Jim's solution was twofold. First, he got his brother Ken Nichols to invent a hardware solution to synchronize the clock on the digital camera with that on the Pocket PC, in this case the Compaq iPAQ. The result was an interface box (Fig. 1). Thanks, bro. Second, Jim wrote software to download the digital camera data (timestamp and picture filename) to the Pocket PC. Although not having programmed in ten years, he was able to use the easy eVB (eMbedded Visual Basic) development environment to create the PhotoMatch application.

Fig. 1. Digital camera and interface box capture image.

PhotoMatch lets the computer keep track of whose picture is being taken and in what sequence. After the person whose picture is about to be taken fills out his or her e-mail address and returns the card to the photographer, the preprinted barcode is scanned into the Pocket PC (Fig. 2). The Pocket PC computer records camera orientation and customer sequencing data (Fig. 3). Later, this sequencing information is merged with the picture files from the camera on a desktop computer with a program called PhotoMerge (Fig. 4).

Fig. 2. Preprinted card is scanned and given to customer with picture access code.

Fig. 3. Pocket PC records camera orientation and customer sequencing data.