Key team members

Danny Bay (general manager)

Photo: Gino Demeer

Danny was reared in Cleveland Ohio (American Mom, Kiwi Dad) and came to New Zealand in the last year of High School. He's seen the light, having developed a passion for Rugby and the All Blacks, but is still puzzled by Cricket.

Danny graduated from Auckland University with a degree in statistics and computer science, gaining some interesting experiences in engineering, manufacturing and distribution along the way. He has a number of years experience in the album/lab/software industry, mainly as a developer for Photojunction and LabFTP. He's also done time in client support, which has given him a solid grounding in the photographer's point of view and problems.

Danny was project team leader for PJ Remix before his promotion to General Manager in 2007.

stephen baugh (managing director)

Photo: Johannes Van Kan

After university Stephen worked briefly in the family business (Queensberry) before spending seven years in corporate sales with Fuji Xerox in Brisbane. He returned to Queensberry in 1996 after marrying Sonya and persuading her to leave the Queensland sun for Auckland's occasional showers. Stephen has 20 years IT experience and is the driving force behind Queensberry's and Photojunction's IT systems and software, which have all been developed in-house.

ian baugh (director)

Photo: Johannes Van Kan

Ian graduated with an arts degree too long ago to remember (OK, the early '70s), then worked in secondary teaching and small boat design and construction, including a foreign aid project in the Solomon Is. Ian developed Queensberry with his wife, Heather, who founded the company, also in the early '70s. Ian's focus as a Director is on business planning, marketing and the strategic development of Photojunction.

The Photojunction story

The Photojunction story began in the mid-90s when Queensberry offered the first ever fully customisable albums on the wedding market. With photographers wanting to custom-design every page in every book, Queensberry needed the ability to create page layouts from hand-drawn plans faxed by their clients. The system Queensberry developed was very effective but operated completely in house. In the studio, photographers sketched their designs with pen and paper...

A new millenium

Queensberry began to explore the UK and North American markets in 2000, after more than twenty years doing business in Australia and New Zealand. One of the first questions posed by the first studio they visited was, “I’m shooting digitally – can I design these albums on my computer?” Unfortunately the answer was no!

An urgent review of “album planning software” wasn’t encouraging. The software available had limited functionality and was template-driven, whereas Queensberry’s clients insisted on the ability to design their albums to fit the photographs, not vice versa. Certainly nothing was available that could design Queensberry albums.

The birth of Photojunction

As a result Directors Ian and Stephen Baugh committed the company to a studio front-end for their in-house system, and the result was the first release of Photojunction in 2001.

It was a matter of weeks before users began to ask interesting questions: Photojunction could send their orders to Queensberry. Why couldn’t it send their work to their lab as well? It had all the necessary data, after all.

The true potential

More interesting questions followed as Stephen and Ian began to understand the true potential of a program that could handle all of a wedding and portrait photographers’ main software needs:

• Organise your images for viewing and display them to your clients for purchase.

• Send album orders to your supplier AND automated print files to your lab.
  

• Produce professional quality slideshows with minimum effort.

• Increase sales with less time, less money and less stress.

The development schedule began to look very long. Other trends were also apparent:

• Digital wedding photography was becoming a mainstream practicality.

• Album-planning software was beginning to proliferate.

• Digital (un-matted) albums were becoming popular.

• And to do business in the digital era every album vendor needed an album-planning software solution.

Opportunity or overhead?

It was becoming equally obvious to Stephen and Ian that album-planning software might not be an opportunity for much longer. In fact, it was looking suspiciously like an overhead. Vendors could never say, "My software's finished”. And they would always have developers and support staff on their books.

Finally, the implication was that until someone came up with a better way, photographers would be condemned to second-rate software. No vendor had a vested interest in software that solved all the workflow issues. Or if they did, they lacked the resources to develop and support it.

For those reasons, Stephen and Ian decided to incorporate Photojunction Ltd as a separate company with its own staff in July 2002, and to throw open the software to all photographers, whomever their suppliers might be.

New vendors sign up

The first vendors to commit to Photojunction were the Australian companies Seldex and Photo Mounts and Albums. Queensberry had enjoyed earlier business relationships with both companies, so it was perhaps no coincidence that they were first on board. Photojunction remains very grateful for their early show of support.

Today you can download Album Resources representing sixteen independent manufacturers for Photojunction Retro.

Into the future

In November 2007 Photojunction released PJ Remix, the working title for a completely rewritten application designed from the ground up to take full advantage of contemporary computer power and the experience gained from thousands of users, and many vendors.

Many thousands of development hours have gone into a dramatically enhanced application – a powerful expression of Photojunction’s confidence in the future.