History:
Started in Golden, Co by Ripple, a MC rider since 1974. Ripple has always been shooting while on MC events with disposable cameras, and other film cameras for 25 years and always had a problem of getting prints to those people who always said, "Hey, make me a copy of that and I'll buy you a beer". Well it took sometimes years to get that 4x6 duplicate photo to those people and a lot of drunk nights before he decided to solve this problem once and for all.
He went digital in 2004 and bought a Fuji S7000 digital camera one day and begin experimenting with the shot and the dynamics of a poker run to see how to make it work together.
After two years of weekend shoots, talking with the people, experimenting with shoot angles and locations, countless methods of trials, success, trials errors, building a web site to automate the sale of prints, creating a detailed field guide and business plan, finding investors for the high end equipment and computer disk space needed to store all those photos and eating a lot of prints, ya, lot of work, but it paid off.
Ripple has his first huge success doing a small local poker run in 10/2006 and decided at that point to turn this knowledge into a real company and expand beyond the Denver market.
Phat Ratt Photo was created Nov 2006 with it's mission of delivering prints to people on their bikes in a timely manner and reasonable prices. it is what people wanted and he found a way to deliver it to them day of event or via the internet where using a credit card they can have a photo shipped to them directly from the printer and not take a year and personal meeting to get each print.
the secondary mission is now to teach other bikers who like to take photos how to do these Phat Ratt Gigs so they can open offices in other cities and expand on this mission of giving bikers what they wanted the most.
Current Standing
Ripple fell ill in the fall of 2007 and has not been heard from since but we hope that when he is ready he will return and continue what he started. Until then the knowledge he gained lives on in his extensive training manuals and partnerships he built along the way. All of which are available to anyone who wants to join the team.
The company new goal and direction is expansion of new offices in cities across the US and adding new photo gigs to the list of available shoots making this a diverse and expansive company.
the growth has already started, in a few short months of the 2008 season there have been 3 new photographers joining each learned how to shoot a poker run in only a few training sessions. we learned from this and updated the training manuals so face to face training was no longer needed opening the door for offices to be opened anywhere on the planet, all over the internet and without traveling anywhere.
It's just in time too, word is out in the MC community that this service is being offered and We are getting emails and calls from other cities event organizers wanting us to shoot their events. now all we need is to get photographers to start shooting them. we have Colorado covered with three offices already, we just need more bikers who like to take photos and have a DSLR. that's it!