Custom photography and video marketplace SmartShoot has released a new feature allowing you to browse the profiles of the filmmakers and photographers on the site.
The company was previously known as TurnHere, and it focused on creating promotional videos for businesses. However, it relaunched in October as a more general marketplace for photo and video services, such as finding a wedding photographer or a videographer for a recitcal.
You can post your job to the SmartShoot site, the professionals on the site bid for the work, then you browse their bids and profiles and choose the one you want to work with.
Now you can browse profiles without even creating a job. Instead, when you look at different SmartShoot service pages, like this one for wedding photography in New York, they include a list of some relevant professionals, and you can follow the links to their profiles, which include jobs counts, ratings, and portfolios. For example, here’s the profile of a photographer in New York.
For now, the usefulness of those profiles is a bit limited — I’m guessing that they’re being used primarily to convince newcomers that yes, SmartShoot does have some talented people. (The company says its network includes 15,707 creative professionals who have delivered 53,884 projects and been paid $13 million total.) In fact, when you’re reading a profile, you can’t actually interact with the photographer or filmmaker — instead the site directs you to create a proposal that’s posted to the general community.
However, it sounds like SmartShoot has plans to expand the profile functionality in the future, for example by adding a search feature. And a spokesperson tells me that the company is open to the possibility of allowing users to reach out to the professionals directly: “If this happens to become a frequently asked request we will definitely build it.”
By the way, if you want to try out SmartShoot, the first 100 users who mention “TechCrunch” in their product description will get a 10 percent discount.