MANSFIELD, Ohio – Keeping overhead costs and capital low is one reason Daniel DiOrio could open his new business in a “growing downtown” area.
Sheer passion for the work is another way the 1996 Lexington High School graduate was able to launch his business – HSP Imaging.
“What I like to do and what everyone here likes to do is work with images,” he said. “A lot of people don’t understand that what is taken on the camera isn’t what they see when it’s finally printed.
“There’s so much work that goes into making that image look as best as it can, and that’s what we like doing.”
The business, which deals in image manipulation, retouching, extraction, color correction, and green-screening, officially opened this wek with five employees, including DiOrio. It is located in Suite 804 of Chase Tower on Park Avenue West.
DiOrio has worked in the photographic industry since 1998 – the same year he graduated from the Art Institute of Pittsburgh with an associate’s degree in computer animation and multimedia.
“I worked locally here in a wholesale lab, and I also have been involved with Picture Day Photography,” he said. “I worked with them and actually was a shareholder in that company for four years, and I also worked at a design company for about a year.”
He said his focus, however, has always been in photography – both editing and capturing – and whenever he hasn’t worked with a company, he’s been a freelancer or operated his own business.
“Our primary focus here is to work with wholesalers – the people who actually print the pictures,” he said.
Wholesale labs handle the work photographers either can’t or won’t do, according to DiOrio, adding that many labs now focus on printing and have large overheads with employees and equipment.
“So they’ve found that it’s easier to send out some of that work to outsource the editing and the imaging of it to other companies because then they don’t have to maintain a staff for that or the extra equipment,” he said. “That allows people like me, who are really good at the editing and imaging part of it, to work with those labs and give them exceptionally good prices, where they wouldn’t be able to do that themselves at their own facility.”
Essentially, companies like HSP Imaging are the wholesaler to the wholesaler, DiOrio added.
“We like taking something that really isn’t as great as it could be and making it the best, and it’s very rewarding,” he said. “We don’t get to see it necessarily because we’re on the back end of it, but it can be very rewarding when you see the end user get that picture and say, ‘Oh, wow. This is amazing.’”
While the focus mainly is on retail work right now, down the line DiOrio said providing other services, such as graphic design, would be one way HSP Imaging could expand.
“To be able to expand out creatively would be really, really cool,” he said.
THE NAME: Though HSP Imaging is a new business, DiOrio has used the “HSP” name for four years.
The three letters aren’t an anagram, he said – just “some joke letters from college days.”
“I’ve run a production studio since 2011, but that was always just me,” he said. “It was a sole proprietorship that was HSP.
“All I did was add ‘Imaging’ to the end of it and went to an LLC (limited liability company), and I was able to bring in employees.”
KEEPING IT HOMEGROWN: One of the big reasons why DiOrio decided to begin this venture is to show that some beliefs within his industry are false.
“A lot of these labs and photographers don’t think this (type of work) can be done in the United States because it is semi-technical work, and they think the costs are going to be higher than if they outsource it overseas,” he said. “And that’s where most of the work is going.”
Despite the common practice, DiOrio believes this kind of work can be done in the country and at a competitive or lower price.
To do that, an affordable location was one of the first steps in keeping costs low, which is what he said he got in Mansfield.
“Being able to keep my overhead down is what’s allowing me to keep my employees’ values up,” he said. “And by value, I mean giving them the money they deserve and to live on and also being able to keep our prices reasonable for our wholesalers.”
He also builds a lot of his own equipment, such as computers, instead of buying them from “big box” stores, which he said are more expensive.
Moreover, DiOrio said he always wanted to have a business in a downtown area. And the opportunity in Mansfield “has been great.”
“I think Mansfield has a lot to offer,” he said.
SPREADING THE SKILLS: In addition to providing a specific set of services to wholesale labs, DiOrio said HSP Imaging will offer imaging courses to the public.
“I like people to learn about imaging and what you can do with it,” he said. “There’s a lot of people out there that want to do this type of work, but they just don’t know how to do it or how to even get started with it.”
Each course will be four weeks long, he said, meaning there would be eight classes for each.
“There will be a full syllabus, and it will be a planned-out thing,” he said.
There also will be a “deserving” charge associated with it, but DiOrio hasn’t determined what it will be yet.
“We’re planning on doing imaging courses, which is what our company does,” he said. “And we’ll have the eight classes and will go over everything from retouching to manipulation, and I’m even going to touch on color theory.”
The courses, which he hopes to begin in December, will be two hours twice a week in the evenings – tentatively on Tuesdays and Thursdays.
