The room pulsated with Daddy Yankee's "Gasolina" as slender cylinders of colored lighting cut through the club-room smoke. Pockets of Emory students gathered by the corner bar or crowded the dance floor. Sporting flashy outfits and mixed drinks, everyone was out for a good time.

Except for Emory junior Mary Dudzinsky, clad in a black fleece jacket and toting a camera with a battery pack clipped to her waist. She was there to work. "Hey guys," she shouts over the music to two dancing couples. "I'm from Party Pics. Get together, this would be a great picture."

As an Emory Party Pictures photographer, Dudzinsky takes pictures of sorority date parties, fraternity mixers and nightclub events. After spending hours jostling through crowds and hassling students to pose, she edits and uploads the pictures, which are posted on emorypartypictures.com.

Then partiers can go online and buy print copies of the photos.

But many students will never log on to view the pictures. As free social networking sites like Facebook expand their reach, paid services like Emory Party Pictures face declining sales, forcing them to re-examine their business models. Emory senior Adrienne DeMarais says she used to buy photos from Party Pics after every one of her sorority's events freshman and sophomore year. But not anymore. "If I keep any pictures from events now, I'll always take them myself, with my own camera," she says. "I guess I just post them on Facebook or look at ones my friends have posted."

Emory Party Pictures, founded and staffed by Emory students, has always enjoyed widespread support from the community. When it was created in 2003, digital cameras were fairly uncommon. But now, fully entrenched in the Digital Age, the company faces new challenges to its operation.

Party Pics took an initial hit in sales when Facebook launched at Emory three years ago. Since then, the company has focused on tightening its relationships within the Emory community and emphasizing the novelty of its product in order to protect its niche market - students who want high-quality photography prints rather than pixelated online substitutes.

Ryan Jacobs ('02BBA) was flipping through his friend's pictures on the photo-sharing website Shutterfly when the idea hit him. Intrigued by the concept of online photo sharing, Jacobs called Shutterfly and professional photographers to discuss new innovations with digital photography, an emerging technology at the time.

With one startup already under his belt - a year earlier he had founded Emory Links, an online resource for Emory students and local businesses - Jacobs founded Emory Party Pics in 2003, one year after he graduated. "Whereas Emory Links was a huge undertaking, Party Pics was simple," Jacobs says. "It was fun. I wanted to give the Emory community its own party pictures company, rooted in every way in the community."

Jacobs purchased a few Nikon singlelens- reflex digital cameras, trained students as photographers and started networking within Emory social circles.

Within six months, Party Pics had begun working with most Emory organizations, including every sorority and fraternity. At semiformals and mixers, well-connected and outgoing Party Pics photographers became a constant presence.

After the business was comfortably established within the Emory community, Jacobs - who had been involved in every aspect of the company, from photographer to manager to latenight photo editor - began to streamline the business and hired a campus manager, 25-yearold Lizzie Breyer. Although he splits his time between Atlanta and Chicago, he can still rattle off the schedule for every Emory social event.

But about three years ago, photo sales began to slump. Facebook exploded onto the scene, smothering Emory Party Pictures' status as the school's go-to social outlet. "I used to log on [to emorypartypictures.com] just to see what everyone had been up to that week," Emory senior Ashley Pier says. "But now it's so much easier and more fun to do that on Facebook."

Jacobs agrees. "Emory Party Pictures used to be the primary website for social interaction at Emory. Now it is a very, very distant second to Facebook, which has greater interactivity."

Emory Party Pictures had to change - and fast. "This has been a very introspective time for Emory Party Pics," Jacobs says. "I've had to make some big decisions." For one, the company began charging shooting fees to Greek organizations last fall. The company has also started to pay its photographers based on productivity rather than paying flat rates per event. The more faces that appear in the photographs, the more the photographer gets paid. After all, who's going to buy a photo where they can't recognize the face in the picture?

Jacobs says this change has produced more efficient, enthusiastic and motivated photographers. Dudzinsky, whom he considers one of Party Pics' best, says that during the initial training, she learned not only how to use the camera, but also how to approach people, arrange them in a picture and be a fun and creative presence. "Sometimes you have to be aggressive," she says.

The company has also focused on improving communication between the management and social chairs. Breyer, the campus manager who handles many of the day-to-day operations, says she speaks to each social chair about once a week.

Hiren Patel ('06C), who organized events for his fraternity last fall, says that he had a lot of communication with Party Pics. "They really try and establish a relationship with you," he says. "They were always looking for my input and suggestions." One suggestion from a social chair was the inspiration for the company's new product: an archive DVD custom-made for each Greek organization.

Most of all, the company is counting on the quality and novelty of its product to successfully ride the wave of Facebook and other new media. "We're still the only company on campus that produces hard copies of photos. With us, people can go beyond just viewing them online like on Facebook and MySpace," Breyer says. "They're a keepsake, not a snapshot."