How 36Pix Uses Data To Elevate School Photography Quality At Scale

Ever wonder how a school photo lab with 600,000 students a year keeps quality high when half the photographers are new each season? We sat down with Robert Ste-Marie, CEO of 36Pix, to explore Eva. This data-driven evaluation platform scores every image so managers can catch problems fast, coach with clarity, and tie rewards to real outcomes. No fluff—just the metrics that move sales: smiles, closed eyes, blur, glasses glare, face shine, and exposure repairability, according to the company.

Ste-Marie walks us through why manual folder dives fail at scale and how Eva creates a near-real-time feedback loop without slowing down shoots. Robert explains how studios can weigh different criteria by job type, link images to individual photographers via camera IDs or filename rules, and compare each shooter against company benchmarks across the season. The result is a clear, fair picture of performance that turns training into revenue: raise smile rates, cut reshoots, and reduce contract risk.

Ste-Marie shares surprising insights from live data—like how much expression variance exists between photographers on similar jobs—and how those findings shape better onboarding and coaching.

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Chapters

• 0:00 Meet 36Pix And Ava
• 1:00 From Studios To AI Background Removal
• 3:50 Scale Problems In School Photography
• 6:20 Old Ways Of Evaluating Photographers
• 8:40 The Spark To Build Ava
• 10:15 How Ava Scores Images
• 13:20 Near Real‑Time Feedback Loops
• 16:10 What Ava Measures And Weights
• 19:10 Data Surprises: The Smile Gap
• 22:10 Coaching, Trends, And Fair Benchmarks
• 25:10 Using Data With Schools And Contracts
• 27:30 Pricing And Onboarding Mechanics
• 30:00 Linking Cameras And Photographers

Transcript

Erin Manning: 0:02

Welcome to the Dead Pixel Society Podcast, the photoimaging industry's leading news store. And here's your host, Gary Pageau. The Dead Pixels Society Podcast is brought to you by Mediacllip, Advertek Printing, and Independent Photo Imagers.

Gary Pageau: 0:18

Hello again, and welcome to the Dead Pixels Society Podcast. I'm your host, Gary Pageau, and today we're joined by Robert Ste-Marie, who's the CEO of 36Pix in Quebec, Canada. Robert's here to talk to us today about Eva, which is their new platform for evaluating photographers. Hey Robert, how are you today?

Robert Ste-Marie: 0:37

Very good, very good. Very excited to be on your podcast and share some of the cool technologies that we've been putting out.

Gary Pageau: 0:44

Speaking of cool technologies, that's kind of what you're known for. But you really started in the studio business. Can you kind of, before we get started on Eva, can you walk through us through kind of the evolution of the company?

Robert Ste-Marie: 0:56

Absolutely. Um, 36 Pix is really two divisions. Um, one of them is the studio divisions in school photography, and the other one is the imaging editing software. The company actually started a little more than 20 years ago. We were printing for other studios, and then that quickly merged into our own studio division or school photography division. And just about the same time, we started developing technologies to remove backgrounds. That that was back then it was all green. Obviously, now we can remove just about anything, but back then it was all green, and it was really finicky, you know, traditional algorithms, and it was really, really complex. And and yeah, and we've, you know, for 20 years we've been going at it, but five years ago, I say five, it's probably five, six years ago now, that AI became more popular, more accessible, and all all our technology went from traditional algorithm to to AI technology. So that really changed uh our business and what we can offer. So we have the two divisions, and that's really uh, I think it's been a real advantage for us to use our studio intelligence of running a large school photography studio combined with our uh uh technical wizardry to come up with really uh well-engineered solutions. So maybe a little bit because I think that the context is important here. Our studio division uh does a little bit over 600,000 kids a year. So we take pictures of uh 600,000 plus uh students every year, and that all the way from pre-K to university pictures. So that comes with a bunch of challenges. That for us, that's about 125 photographers on the road. And during our peak season, it's anywhere between 10 and 25,000 images that come in every day from our photography team. And this is really the biggest challenge of school photography. It's the photography. Uh, that's key to everything, data and and and and photography. One of the reasons why it's a huge challenge, and I'm gonna talk about our company, but also you know, it it's pretty typical in the industry where like our turnover um of photographers is approximately 50 to 55 percent, meaning that you know, 45-50% of our photographers are gonna come back from the previous season. Right. So that means that more than half of our photographers are people that that we have to train. We actually retrain everybody every year. You know, we have a couple days of training in in August. Uh it goes over a whole week, actually. So we train them to the best of our abilities on our different programs, and off they go. This is a bit of the craziness of our business because these people that we send out, and like I said, a half of them, I didn't know them or we didn't know them a few weeks before. Brand new, brand new employees, they get into the field and they become the face of our business. Right. And if they don't do a good job, then that's a direct correlation to our sales. If the image quality is not good, it's gonna affect our sale. And in some cases, if they really screw it up, then we actually lose contracts. And if you were to, you know, to talk to somebody outside of our industry and kind of explain, say, hey, I'm gonna start a business, you know, and and we're gonna create content and I'm gonna sell that content. Obviously, content here is the pictures, and you know what? Half the people are gonna create our content, we've never met them, you know, before two weeks ago. We're gonna put them outside, we're barely gonna follow what they're doing, we're gonna have a great business. Probably everybody would tell you, no, that's that's just not gonna work. But it does work because our industry kind of works with it and and and makes it work. That's kind of the the bigger, and everybody in this in the industry struggles with that. And um, and so how how we do it is the typical way that our industry rolls with that is that as the images come in, usually you'll identify one or multiple employees to try to look at what's coming in. But imagine having to go through thousands of images every day. You will your brain, maybe not you physically, like your brain will go asleep at one point, and you're just not gonna see what's going on. But that's typically what we do in our industry, and and and and this is really, I think, one of the most obvious problems that had to be solved, and yet it was it didn't exist before we came up with a new product called you up.

Gary Pageau: 5:46

So, how were you doing it before then, right? I mean, obviously you have to evaluate photographers because, like you said, you're bringing on 50% new people every year because of attrition, or you may have to let people go, right? Because you're probably getting feedback or you're seeing stuff. So, how are you evaluating before those people who you said, you know, listen, you know, you're not cut out for this, you need to find a new career, right? What was your process before that?

Robert Ste-Marie: 6:09

Yeah, that's a really good question. So the images come in, and and we have people that go through folders, use different tools to look at the images and try to spot any trends in exposure or bad photography, and then feedback is given to the photographer. The problem with this is that a lot of things, because there's so many images coming, a lot of things will be missed. And there could be a case where there's a photographer over multiple days as created a mess, right? And and it takes you a week to find out, and and every day they're shooting, every day they're going to a different school, taking pictures, and you end up with five contracts, six, seven contracts that have gone sideways, and and you're just kind of learning about it now. So so that's kind of the way I would say most of the industry has something similar to what uh we were doing in yeah.

Gary Pageau: 7:05

I mean, obviously there's a quality control step, and I I haven't talked to any studio who says, no, we completely trust you know these movie photographers completely. We're gonna send them out in the field and you know they're gonna come back with golden shots. You know, no one does that. I mean, everyone's got some sort of system, right?

Robert Ste-Marie: 7:21

That's right. That's right. So this whole thing started now a bit more than a year ago. I was having lunch actually with our director of photography, and we were not complaining, but yeah, kind of complaining about the cost of photography. The cost of photography has gone up a lot over the last five years. So that was part of the discussion. But the other part of the discussion is that okay, we're paying our photographers, you know, a lot more than we used to, and we cannot evaluate them properly. So we end up the season. There's usually a bonus, end of season bonus for photographers. And literally, if they're still breeding at the end of the season, you know, if they stay with us the whole season, they get their bonus, and that's fine. But it didn't go any deeper than that. So that's when kind of the whole idea started saying, Well, hang on one second. We have some technologies to evaluate images, we kind of know the business. Maybe we could put a dashboard that tracks that. And that's when really I said, and that when that little worm got in my brain, I could could never come out after that. Right, exactly. And and that's when we started putting the pieces together. Okay, what what are we missing missing from a technology point of view? And and we started building Eva. And basically, what what Eva does as the images come through EVA, every image gets evaluated, and then we look at it for kind of the common stuff, you know.

Gary Pageau: 8:42

Like at what point is it coming in uh in the workflow? Is it intercepting, you know? I mean, are you doing it as they're coming in prior to editing?

Robert Ste-Marie: 8:50

Or that's a good question. Actually, a lot of some of our customers have asked the same question. Most of our customers put the images through Eva before anything else. Okay, you could use it post-editing, it's gonna make your number your scoring because Eva does score every image that comes in. So it's gonna make your scoring better if you've corrected it and done some stuff. But then you're starting to hide the problems, right?

Gary Pageau: 9:16

That's what I'm saying. You want to identify those early because if we're fixing for poor exposure automatically and using technology to do that, you're not catching those to begin with. Now, some could argue, well, that's why we have the correcting technology is to do that. But what you really want to do is get the images golden in the camera as much as possible.

Robert Ste-Marie: 9:34

That's exactly right. So I would think that most people, that's the first thing they will do. And the faster you can do that, the faster you can correct a problem. If you see some work coming in, and and we're able with our technology to uh segregate the images between all the photographers. So when you set up the system, you put all the photographers' name, so you know every image that comes in, you know who it belongs to. So when you see a problem, you can contact, and we have tools in our platform to contact our photographers. Uh, we have all sorts of dashboards we can share with them.

Gary Pageau: 10:07

But this is not an end-of-season sort of response. This is a live response. Somebody does a shoot. That's right. You're seeing the grades, and you're saying, you know, uh, Michelle up in the northern Quebec province area is having problems. We need to get that person on the phone and fix that.

Robert Ste-Marie: 10:25

That's right. So it is really meant as a near real-time tool because it's not real, real time. And and this is just a word on that. We we we looked at, okay, could we do it at the camera on the spot? Right.

Gary Pageau: 10:40

There's do it on the iPad right there, right?

Robert Ste-Marie: 10:42

Yeah, I mean, it's in theory, it's it's the coolest idea, but in practice, a couple things is that there's a lot of processing that that needs to happen in the background. But even if you put that problem away, the photographer, it's really challenging for a photographer to stay on beat when you're doing school photography. There's so many kids you've got to go and you really don't have a lot of time. Right. If your iPad or computer is constantly flashing at you, saying, Stop, you're doing something wrong, you're just not gonna get through it. So there's a couple real obstacles to doing real time. So, near real time is at least within 24 hours, you kind of know what's going on. But what's kind of interesting too, now that we've done this this whole season, we're we're also offering someone like I say, hey, we can run your whole season, at least you'll have a good retro view of what went on and who we're we're investing.

Gary Pageau: 11:28

You could even theoretically type bonuses, right, or a concentration to that if you wanted to.

Robert Ste-Marie: 11:33

That's right, that's right.

Gary Pageau: 11:34

So, what are some of the things that Ava evaluates? Because I just I just figured out about five minutes ago that Eva is short for evaluation.

Robert Ste-Marie: 11:43

So that's right, that's right.

Gary Pageau: 11:44

I'm a little slow on the uptake. No, no, no. That listen, it's it's good, it's good. So, what are the things that it grades on uh specifically?

Robert Ste-Marie: 11:52

Yeah, so but before I tell you that, we had a whole thing about uh coming up with a name, and we obviously ended up on EVA, but my selection was Judgy, but I got voted out on that. Judge Dredd, maybe so yeah, so we we evaluate glasses glare, smiles, uh eye close, blurriness, what we call face shine, and and some of these things where exposure actually is is is the other one. So I think there are there's six things. Exposure is a really interesting one. It's a bit of a web bar of soap because exposure is something when you look at an image, especially when it's a thumbnail, sometimes it's hard to get the full story. And and what what I mean by that is that you can look at an image, and let's say the lighting on the face is looks pretty good. The the clothing could be blasted or clipped or or or or satisfied. So we have some very sophisticated way of looking at exposure, and we're assessing what's the repairability of the image. It might look not good, but we can recover it through AI color correction and all that. Right. Um, so so we're trying to take all of that into consideration when we look at exposure. The killer problems are stuff like eyes closed. I mean, if the eyes are closed, I don't care that AI can rebuild fake eyes. I mean, that picture is not gonna sell. Right. Blurriness is another killer. Glasses glare if the lens is way covered. Again, AI will create an eye because AI will do whatever, but yeah, it's not, it's gonna look really weird.

Gary Pageau: 13:27

Yeah.

Robert Ste-Marie: 13:27

So there's a couple of problems that are more important to correct quickly. But what's kind of cool with a system like that is I'm gonna say that in a good way, but AI doesn't really care who you are. Meaning the way it's gonna judge your images is not gonna be different between you and the photographer next door. Because we we spend a lot of time determining, okay, what should be the right threshold? What's a pass, what's a fail? Right. And and that could be debated till the end of times, really.

Gary Pageau: 13:57

Right. And and and and with your system, does the photographer have the opportunity to tweak what's important, or the studio, I should say, have an opportunity to tweak what's important to them. What's important to you know, your studio may not be as important to them.

Robert Ste-Marie: 14:10

That's right. So the way, very good question. So the way we we actually do that is that we have a way to put where where the studio can put different weights on the different things that we're measuring.

Gary Pageau: 14:21

Right.

Robert Ste-Marie: 14:21

So you might say, I'm doing a high school job, and you know what the kids are not very smiley in a high school. Right. Um, so I'll pick I'll I'll put the weight down a little bit for uh for smiles. But here's the thing though, this is this is what I find interesting. Every time you look at data, there is for me in my life and my previous life too, when you look at data the first time, there's always a surprise. Right. And I have to say that for me, the biggest surprise, because I've never really looked at our images, but with a platform like that, it gives you easy access. Literally, within a minute, you know exactly what's going on. What really surprised me is the lack of smiles, interesting the variability between photographers, and is where you say, okay, you know, high school, yeah, you know, maybe 20% it's normal to get 20% not smiling. But then you see people are running at 30, 35, 40, and then some some other on the other side, like 10%. And I'm thinking, and then I go look at the elementary school pictures, and I still see lower numbers, but still a fair amount of no smile. And that became, at least for next season, something I think we got to put more training on because right.

Gary Pageau: 15:41

I mean maybe that maybe that photographer is a buzzkill or something, or they're giving up vibes or something, and that's gonna affect your body.

Robert Ste-Marie: 16:01

And maybe high school, maybe it's not a big factor, but I can bet you that elementary schools, if the kid is not smiling and and have a good expression, right? You're probably less likely to sell that image. So for me, that was one of the things. And talking to some of our customers that have used it, we we're all coming to the same conclusions. I was surprised by the lack, I wouldn't say lack of effort of making the kids smile, but I think we can do better.

Gary Pageau: 16:30

Well, maybe lack of success is maybe a better word, right? Because like you said, put it in the photographer's shoes, right? There, they've got maybe 25, 30 seconds to develop an instant rapport with a with a with a with a student, get that smile, right? And it, you know, there's a lot going on there.

Robert Ste-Marie: 16:46

So maybe, just maybe we should spend more time training or photographer tricks to make them smile. Right, exactly.

Gary Pageau: 16:53

You know, well, yeah, because I mean because if you can say, okay, you're at you know, uh 40% not smiling, so you're getting, you know, so and our our rate is or our buy rate is lower than those with a higher smile rate, you can basically you know tie that together and say, yeah, you know, this is what we need to work on. You need to wear a big red clown nose on your face, or yeah, uh whatever works at the end of the day, you know.

Robert Ste-Marie: 17:17

Maybe the clown knows it's not gonna work in high school, but it might work in elementary school. But the other thing too that that's really cool is that there's a way to share the the the photographer's dashboard with the photographer, so they they see their their their data and it actually compares their data to the average in the company. Oh the reason why we did that it takes away the oh, I'm being persecuted by Eva. I'm being singled out because it measures everybody the same way. So if your average is, I don't know, 10% non-smile, okay. How's the rest of the company? Is it 12? Is it 15? Is it five? And guy, that kind of positions you and it creates, I would hope, a healthy competitive environment, also.

Gary Pageau: 18:04

Or at least a basis for self-reflection, that what could I do better, right?

Robert Ste-Marie: 18:10

That's right.

Gary Pageau: 18:10

That's right, you're basically basing this on actual data that is saying, hey, listen, you know, only 80% of your people are smiling, and it's it's and our studio wide average is 90. How do you think you can improve that?

Robert Ste-Marie: 18:24

That's right. And and what's kind of cool too is that because we have all the data, when the photographer looks in, or or we can look at the same data, there's a trend line across the season, what's their performance, and there's the average, the trend line of the company. So you can see, did they get better, did they get worse, were they all over the place? So that's interesting too. At the end of the day, it it gives you data, how you act on it. I think every studio will do it a bit differently. Sure. We try to be on it as quick as we can, you know, share videos for certain things. You have a problem with lighting, you we're gonna share with you a training video or something like that. Another interesting thing, and I've heard that from other customers using it too, is that you know, we all have that perception that you know a senior photographer will perform better than a junior photographer.

Gary Pageau: 19:12

What do you mean by senior and junior?

Robert Ste-Marie: 19:15

Senior could be in my definition, a senior would be somebody that's worked for us that has come back like for the last five years, ten years. Oh, experience, right? Okay, experience-wise. But you find out that it it might be true in some cases, but in some cases, you might have to have the perception that this particular photographer was the you know, top of the top. But when you look at the data, you say, hang on one second, they're not paying attention like like we thought they were. Um, and and usually, you know, seniority goes with you know how much we pair a photographer. So again, it it's all data that's been a bit elusive in our industry. And honestly, I think it's the the technology that I'm having the most fun with because I think it's got the highest impact of anything we've done. There's so much potential. We have so many ideas, fun ideas of where where we want to go with this. We've already I think uh moved uh the technology a fair amount.

Gary Pageau: 20:12

Do you do you have any of your customers who are could possibly use this to actually like service accounts, like go to a school and say, you know, use it to kind of talk about how effective their photographers are and all that? I mean, because I mean there's all kinds of data being captured, right? I mean, you're catching capturing time efficiency, how well they're moving through the chute, all of those things as well, right?

Robert Ste-Marie: 20:36

It's a good question. The way so far that we're able to use it is that when the data comes in, we're actually we're also catching the job number. Right. So let's say we have a situation with a school where parents are complaining and they're saying, you know, that the photography was really bad, the picture of my kid or kids is are are are are no good. We can actually now go back to that photographer and actually quickly, and the word is quickly, look at the images that came from that shoot and the quality of of the images. So that again, it it just allows you to I guess drill down really quickly and and go back to your point, go back to a school when you want to re-sign them, at least you're you can know what was the quality of the photography to that school. And and don't get me wrong, this this business is never going to be about perfect images. But right one of the things I find about school photography that people tend or studio sometimes lose sight of is that quality I think is really important. I think the day that we don't produce these quality professional looking pictures is when we don't do school photography anymore, because that's where we're there to provide a professional portrait at a reasonable price for parents of of these children. That's what we do, and I think we have to be reminded of that once in a while, that this is important, and and you know, the wizardry of AI is cool, and obviously we use it to do all sorts of things in our business, absolutely, but your image has to be good, right?

Gary Pageau: 22:17

Yeah, I mean, because that I mean that was always one of those things where it's like, you know, the old fix-it in Photoshop thought, right? That was sort of that idea. It's like, well, no, you if you you want to get it right in the camera as close as possible and do as little in that in the AI is sort of that's right, the new Photoshop in that sense.

Robert Ste-Marie: 22:33

Yeah, that's right. I mean, it's a good old saying of, you know, garbage in, garbage out. Yeah, yeah. If if if if you were starting with an image that was not well shot, yeah, you can bring it back, you can probably sell it, but it's not gonna be the best experience.

Gary Pageau: 22:47

So when you were developing this, I was just seeing a need for it. You were you were using your own studios data on this, correct? To train your models?

Robert Ste-Marie: 22:56

Absolutely. I mean, we've we've done most of the AI. If you look at our AI product, um, again, because we have our own shop and all that, we we were uh it's a little easier for us to train models and do what we need to do to get to the right technology. Um, so yeah, again, that's a huge advantage to have our own studio and developing product because we see the problematic of running a shop in terms of size. We're I think we're number three in the country in Canada, we're definitely number one in our province. We've got the issues that you will find when you're taking when you're doing over a thousand schools in in a couple months again.

Gary Pageau: 23:35

Right.

Robert Ste-Marie: 23:36

You know, if we could do that on a yearly basis, it would be such an easy job. Yeah, yeah. And all this happens like literally within two months. Yeah.

Gary Pageau: 23:44

What is the the the model for the customer, right? If I was interested in in using Eva, is it you know a monthly charge? Is it per image? Is it per photographer, per job? What is the what is the investment there on a per photographer?

Robert Ste-Marie: 24:00

It is a charge or a fee per image, uh, simply because our cost is based on images. An image comes in, we're gonna use all sorts of of cloud services and compute and processing time and storage and do all that. So and and we listen, I when when I started that project, I said, you know what, maybe I'll break that and we'll go with with some other business model, but it's kind of hard because if you say, well, I'm gonna charge per photographer, yeah, but we change photographers all the time. So what other model could work? So we stuck to the good old my cause basis is per image, so we'll charge per image.

Gary Pageau: 24:36

Yeah. Yeah, I mean, it makes sense. It's just it's one of those things where it's just again, just kind of there's a lot of different ways you could slice that, right? Right. So when you're trying to, when you're getting set up on this, let's say, for example, I was interested in becoming a customer, what's the onboarding process like? Because this is a whole new concept in evaluation. So I imagine bringing people on board is a bit of a challenge.

Robert Ste-Marie: 24:57

So yeah, and and and this is this is a really, really good question. The the friction, if we call it that way, is we need to put the photographer data into the system. Uh, because doing all this, if you can't split the image automatically between photographer, you lose a lot of usefulness.

Gary Pageau: 25:18

Sure.

Robert Ste-Marie: 25:18

Um, so there's basically two ways of doing this. There's there's one one way is when an image is taken by a camera, there's always in the file there there's the what we call the camera hardware ID that's coded into that file, that that image. Right. So that tells us which camera took it. And mostly in our industry, a photographer has a dedicated camera. So we can make the link between that hardware and that photographer, and we have a platform at in Eva to do exactly that. We can basically link photographer with a camera idea or multiple camera ideas. So one photographer can have multiple cameras, and then automatically when an image comes in, oh, that image belongs to that photographer. So that's one way to do it. The other way is that some of our customers actually code the image name with the photographer's initial or name.

Gary Pageau: 26:13

Okay.

Robert Ste-Marie: 26:14

And then when the image comes in based on the name of the image, we assign it to the photograph. So that's a different way. But that exercise, and we have all sorts of tools to help that, but that's kind of the friction where, okay, I have 50 photographers, I have to put that information into the system. We help our customers, we say, just give me a CSV or an Excel or whatever, we're gonna put it in. But that work needs to be done if you really want to get the usefulness of the tool because you need to be able to know which photographer has done what to who that's kind of way the way, and then once once that's set up, then you know you log into the platform and you see the images come in and you can quickly drill down. And again, what what's kind of um interesting is that last year you would have asked me to go look at some of the images that are coming in. I I I wouldn't even have known what to do. I would have, I guess, went to see one of our technicians. Okay, let's find some folders here. And I don't know. But it's like now it's one click. I see everything, I see all the photographer, I see all the images, I can see all the images that came in, all the problematic per problem, and all that. So, just from an image management point of view, just that was like, wow, I can actually look at what's coming into my company.

Gary Pageau: 27:27

Yeah. That is that is amazing if you think about it. Yeah, there's so there was only no way to do that before.

Robert Ste-Marie: 27:34

Yes, but I guess depending how you're set up, which what software you're using to you know to filter your images coming in, how you're organized and all that, that varies a lot between companies. But for us, the images come in, there's a folder structure per job, and and then you kind of have to know how to navigate that. And obviously, but I sure didn't. Yeah.

Gary Pageau: 27:58

So I what I've been interested about this whole idea is that you know, you you know, being a studio yourself and you know, seeing the need for the product and then creating the product, and it must be very gratifying then to see other studios interested in Eva, right? I mean saying, Oh my gosh, I needed that, I needed that all along. What's that like as sort of an entrepreneur or as a business owner who's come up with this thing and seeing it received in the marketplace so well?

Robert Ste-Marie: 28:23

It's the best feeling, honestly. There, it it is the best feeling to develop something that's useful. Honestly, for me, it's been cool to develop all these editing softwares in the past. I would say that it's the the first time that the feedback is so has been so good, so quick, so where have you been all my life, Eva?

Gary Pageau: 28:46

Exactly what you want, right?

Robert Ste-Marie: 28:50

I kind of expected that because it's kind of true obvious that we needed that in the industry, better tools to to deal with the raw material that we need to run our businesses. Sure. And and so, yeah, no, it's been as an entrepreneur or business person to develop something that you're getting really good feedback. And what what's been really special is that many, I would say at least half the customers are on it now, from the get-go, they said, I don't care if if I'm the first user, if it's buggy, whatever it is, I want to participate, I want to give you feedback. I believe even before this thing had liftoff, customers said, I'm in, I'm I'm gonna give you feedback, I'm gonna help you push that technology further. So we've been having some fun, you know, towards the end of the season now, talking to our customers. So, how did you like it? Getting a lot of good feedback, everybody excited, okay, what else we're gonna put in that sausage maker? Right. Um, so um, yeah, and there's a lot of, you know, one of the things that we want to get a lot fancier on okay, you're you're looking for a certain pose or a certain look, I can measure that for you. And then again, the we're just going up the chain and then the type of thing that we can evaluate and give feedback. We spend so much money training our photographers on doing certain things, and every year we break our brains on okay, LM this year, how many poses are we doing? What are the looks? What are the things? And we train our photographers, and then it probably diverges to the to the season where things are getting a bit off and all that, but you don't you don't really know about it. So, how can you try that? So, so that's that's where I think it was uh it was an amazing first year. Uh, we're super excited about you know where we can go with it. Um, and yeah, it's it's been uh it's been a fun ride, honestly.

Gary Pageau: 30:49

Sounds great. Where can people go for more information if they want to learn about uh your company and Eva?

Robert Ste-Marie: 30:56

The best place to go is on our website, 36pix.com, uh, and they can find everything uh they need and and uh yeah, give us a shout and and we'll we'll we'll talk about photography and how to make things better.

Gary Pageau: 31:09

Awesome. Well, thank you so much, Robert. Appreciate your time. This has been great. I learned a lot. Uh it's always interesting how like there's so much innovation happening in the volume photography industry uh with you know new technologies, new techniques, new tools like yours. So it's just fascinating to watch an industry that's been around 100 years continuing to innovate.

Robert Ste-Marie: 31:30

Well, thank you so much, Gary, for having me. It was a true pleasure.

Erin Manning: 31:34

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