As Trimm Photo hits out four-year mark and is coming up on our four thousandth follower we wanted to talk about what got us here and how the page has evolved. If you have some spare time you might find this interesting so here, we go.
Before Trimm Photo was a page, Cheryl Trimm took photos at football games and posted them on her personal Facebook page and tagged her friends just like most parents did. She always had a good response and kept shooting game after game. Then one day, and I remember it well, at a Fairbury football game her husband Keith (who is writing this) decided to crawl out of the stands and try it as well. Keith had a long history in photography, shooting for the school paper, the college paper, FJN, shooting portraits and had a dark room in his house. The kind of dark room where you had to process negatives and print photos with chemicals with red lights.
Keith’s father Don Trimm had a portrait studio back in the 1960’s and Keith used a lot of his old equipment in his new dark room. Move ahead a few years into the digital age (and after laying off photography for a long while) Keith decided to give it a crack again this time concentrating on sports and special events like he did in college. Side note here, the name ‘Trimm Photo’ is an homage to Keith’s father Don who used to stamp the back of his proofs with ‘Trimm Photo,’ instead of ‘Trimm Photography.’ That may have been the case because the word ‘photography’ wouldn’t fit on the stamp he purchased; we will never know for sure. But when Trimm Photo was created we decided to go with that name in honor of my father who passed away. Trimm Photo does sound like we are a photography studio but we consider ourselves a media site as we do stories, interviews and a lot of video work.
So September of 2016 Trimm Photo was created and for the first year it was slow going. I can still remember when we had 200 followers and that seemed to take forever. I can also remember when after shooting racing in Beatrice one summer we gained that many followers in one day.
In the beginning we only covered the local team, which of course was Fairbury since we live in Fairbury and our children go to school here. Both of our children were active in sports and that’s the reason we started. Maybe the reason why we grew so slow in the first place was because we only took photos of the Fairbury teams and only shot the opposition by accident. Then one day it hit me that maybe we should cover both teams and bam, things took off.
This was before the NSAA granted us a media pass which I will say ranks up there with me (Keith) passing RN boards. I jumped through the roof when we got our passes. That in itself is a story that I will get to. So we travel everywhere the Fairbury football team played and covered every game since 2016. Somewhere along the line we decided, or should I say Keith decided that we should cover other schools that weren’t playing against Fairbury. Cheryl thought I was nuts but I could see the advantage of growing the page by covering other schools and I will say that was one of the things that makes me most proud about the page.
I have met so many teachers, students and coaches from other schools and expanded my horizons covering the student athletes. I can say that has been the high light of Trimm Photo and one of the main reasons we continue to this day.
I can remember how much head wrestling coach Derek Garfield from Fairbury helped grow our page in the beginning. When we started, I didn’t know squat about wrestling but I knew we had a good wrestling crew. I think I met Derek during football but I must have just shown up on the wrestling deck (like I do all the time now) with my camera and video recorder and started to cover the team.
Derek would always share whatever I did and the page grew and grew. He is a great interview as well. Whenever I need an interview with him, I’d get the camera ready, tell him how many seconds of interview I need and say go. He then proceeds to give me exactly what I want in the time I need. I then shoot B roll for the overlays and wham; I go home and process the video. I have probably interviewed him a dozen or more times.
Then I decided I wanted to expand into Beatrice because of the size of the school. I didn’t know anybody over there but I knew I wanted to make Beatrice a regular part of Trimm Photo so I contacted Jordon Johnson who is the head wrestling coach for Beatrice and talked to him about covering his squad as well. Next day I was on the wrestling deck shooting photos and video and then expanded into volleyball, basketball, soccer and whatever else I could get. I have been in BHS more times than I can count and have always been made to feel welcome there.
So that leads us to the other schools we cover. I am going to make an exception here and elaborate about one school in particular that has gone out of it’s way to make Trimm Photo feel welcome and that is Southern in Wymore. I can’t tell you enough how they go out of their way. If you are familiar with how we do things, we often put games up for a vote. Southern always wins by a landslide, and I’m talking fifty to five sometimes. The first time that happened was at a basketball game that was not a home game so I couldn’t make it, but it has been the same for basketball and volleyball.
We consider our territory to be about forty miles in diameter from Fairbury which includes Wilber. We have tried to include Crete, and we have shot a lot of games there but it is on the fringes of what we can call our area. Anything outside that and people haven’t heard of us. Although I have been surprised before when we cover a visiting team from outside our area and people like and comment from those towns. This is one reason why when we cover softball tournaments, we usually concentrate on the home teams, because folks from Lincoln, Kearney and Grand Island don’t usually respond.
Another thing we concentrate on is covering sports that the main stream media ignore. I can’t tell you how many little league baseball and T ball games we’ve covered. Never saw anyone from the local paper there squatting by the fence with a telephoto lens. Just moms with their cell phone cameras.
The last thing I want to talk about is how we got our NSAA media pass. The first two years we covered sports we had no sponsors. We always gave our photos away for free and then one day decided to ask for sponsorships like they do in racing. (We cover a lot of racing.) and for those years had to rely on passes that booster clubs would give us to get into the games. We always saw those NSAA passes the other media had and wanted one for ourselves so we looked into it.
The first year we applied we were turned down. They said we could have one if we found a newspaper that would sponsor us. We told them we didn’t want to work for a paper and felt our work was good enough on it’s own. We showed them that we covered many schools but, in the end, we lost out. We also realized that as a husband and wife team that our chances were low to begin with so last year when we applied again, we were shocked to find the passes in our mailbox. Like I said before, I jumped through the roof so to say. I guess we proved our worth. Again, this year they granted us the media pass and we are running with it to cover as much as possible. Sometimes I think we cover too many events and overwhelm our followers. We post almost daily.
With the new era of the COVID 19 we didn't know what would happen with sports and special events (Special events is included in our 'about' statement on the Facebook page) so we wanted to cover as many games as we could before there were no games to cover. At the time of this post we have covered at least one game from every school that we consider to be in our territory. Those schools include Fairbury, Beatrice, Thayer Central, Meridian, Southern, Diller/Odell, Tri County and Wilber.
The special events we have covered in the past include such things as the Diller Picnic, Fairbury Flea market, Fourth of July events, racing (including Eve of Destruction) car shows, 4H events, Miss Jefferson county, two graduation ceremonies including Beatrice and Fairbury, Jefferson county fair including rodeo events, promotional photography for Fairbury high school play production, Trunk or Treat and swim meets.
Probably one of the most popular things we do are Athlete spotlights. We chose to go that route instead of Athlete of the week because it didn't limit us just to those who stood out because of a good week in their particular sport. Maybe that is our version of the participation trophy but we felt there were many athletes that deserved to have their stories told. The other media can continue to do what they want. We also specialize in video production and have created many interview and event videos.
So that is the short story of Trimm Photo. We hope you enjoyed our journey and look forward to covering more events in the future.
