Moto Fantastic

Over the winter break, we've been working hard on a number of fronts, and one of these is an important deal we've done with the organisers of the brilliant British Superbikes series, MSV Racing, is to become an official supplier to them, providing them with the high-quality and high-resolution photography of BSB events they require.

After the first round of the 2009 series at Brands Hatch, MSV Racing have been supplied with nearly £35,000 worth of high-resolution photography directly through the MotoProfessional.com website. This alone proves the website is a great way to source high volumes of high-quality and high-resolution photography.

The British Superbikes series is the home and birth-place to the MP service as wel as our sister site londonbikers.com, so to complete this deal with the organisers is both an honour and the start of exciting times as we prepare to open the Moto Professional service up to other professional photographers within the paddock. 

Details of the invitation to other professional photographers will follow in the not too distant future and will be announced here first.

New Logo

As you can see from the picture above, we've teamed up with current World Superbike and former British Superbike racer, Tommy Hill to get a new look for Moto Professional. The current logo on the website was not meant to be the final logo and now thanks to Tommy's great design skills, we've got a sharp new look which will make its way to the website shortly.

You can email Tommy Hill's ImageDzign service at info@imagedzign.com to find out about getting your own logo from him.

Events conspired against us last weekend for the Croft round of British Superbikes. We were already a photographer down with Mike needed elsewhere, but then Andrew had his car blow up on him en-route to the circuit on the Friday. Because there wasn't time to get the car fixed and no way to cover the distance and sort out replacement accomodation in time, we had to scrap covering this round.

This is the first time we've had to do this in god knows how long. Oh well, I know the guys are dead-eager to get this behind them and can't wait for the next round at Silverstone!

Just a quick post to say we've launched if you haven't noticed already. More information to come soon, but right now we need to concentrate on the mad-launch-rush.

After a positive period of beta testing, we're on the last dash to get the site live. If everything goes well, we should have it up this weekend. There's a few loose-ends to finish and then we'll launch it quietly, which will give us time and space to fix any of the infamous launch-time problems that have plagued some site launches.

We've been working hard to get our back-catalogue of photos from various race series' online, though the bulk of it will be coming online after we launch. We've already got tens of thousands of photos ready, but the full catalogue will take some time to bring online. What we plan on doing though is for every new event covered, we'll have the photos online as soon as possible for people to browse and buy.

* Update * - We found some areas where there's room for improvement, so we held off the launch this weekend. We think it's better to launch a solid service rather than rush out a half-baked one. We think it'll take another day or two to make sure things are ready for you all. Sorry for the wait!

We've just upgraded the search feature of Moto Professional so you can now search for more specific things, which will make it quicker and easier to find what you want. The tagging system we have already is very powerful, but now you can combine, or exclude other search phrases as well.

For instance, if you were looking for pictures of Shane Byrne performing a wheelie then before you would probably either search for "Shane Byrne" or "Wheelies" and have to spend some time going through the results which didn't feature both of these elements until you found what you were looking for. Now you can combine the two phrases. - "Shane Byrne and Wheelies" will now show you photos matching just that.

Supported keywords include "AND", "OR" and "NOT". This means you can search for one or the other, i.e. "Arai or Shoei", and you can also exclude items, i.e. "Helmets not Shoei". You can even combine them all, i.e. "Helmets or Leathers not Shoei or Scott". We think this will make life a lot easier for people with relatively complex requirements.

Shortly, we'll be launching Moto Professional, though for now it's in a restricted beta. If you're not familiar with us, Moto Professional is changing the way the motorsport industry aquire professional photography. Before now, only a thin slice of the industry could afford professional photography as it had to come from a commissioned photographer or expensive agency, with that high price-tag was an extraordinary high number of confusing licenses which controlled how you could use the photo. Moto Professional, or MP for short, is changing that and opens up professional motorsport photography to the rest of the industry who want it, wants it quickly and wants it without fuss or a big price-tag.

Our philosophy is very simple; keep it simple. This has worked for thousands of years, so why change now just because we live in the digital millenium? We believe in offering the best photos to racers, teams, websites, publications, sponsors and anyone else in the industry in a way that suits you. To that end, we've created the MP site so that it's easy to browse, search and purchase from. Once a purchase is made, you can download your photos straight-away and use them as per the terms of the simple (but flexible) licenses we've chosen.You can even come back at any time later and re-download them again should you need to. We want things to be as simple as possible.

To start with, we'll be offering the back-catalogue and on-going collections of photos we have taken ourselves for the five major race series' over the last three years we currently shoot at (BSB, WSB, MotoGP, British MX & World MX), which is all well and good, and our photos have wide acclaim throughout the industry, but we're not stopping there, we'll soon be inviting the very best motorsports photographers to join us and offering their photos on MP as well, so you'll be virtually guaranteed to get exactly the shots you want from the events you want. For photographers, this means capitalising upon a huge catalogue of photos which would otherwise probably never see the light of day due to their commitments with their current clients. It's a great opportunity for those needing pro photos and those taking them. The revolution starts here!

We'll be using this blog to describe what we're up to, where we're going and perhaps the odd bit of industry gossip or other exciting things. For now; thanks for reading and we look forward to bringing you Moto Professional!