 If I give this photo the title "Marriage" is suggests a story I’ve been interested in all forms of communication for as long as I remember. From songs, stories, poems, books, movies, photographs and other visual arts, I was always engaging in art and story. But not all forms of communication are the same. Anything but, in fact. Indeed, the differences are often greater than the similarities.
Take writing. Over a decade ago I undertook a communication degree at the University of Technology Sydney (UTS), majoring in Writing & Contemporary Cultures. I absolutely love writing. It’s very specific. It’s full of details. It evokes imagination. It creates and peoples amazing worlds. During my degree I also took photography electives to rekindle my slightly lapsed but lifelong love of the static image as an art form. And I found it was very interesting to study writing and photography at the same time. The differences intrigued me. They were so utterly at odds with one another.
A few years later I was again drawn into going back to school, this time to take a Diploma of Photography. I wanted to dig deeper into that form of communication as I had done as a teenager, only this time in a more structured way. To make a long story short, I thrived with this form of communication, and now enjoy it as much or more as writing. And here we get to my subject for today’s rant. More after the break…
Continue reading The role of ambiguity in visual communication
I have to admit, I am seriously impressed with the Digital Photography Workflow website dpbestflow.org. An initiative of the American Society of Media Photographers and funded by the American Library of Congress, it is a fantastic resource for all digital photographers worldwide. It is mainly the work of Richard Anderson and Digital Asset Management guru, Peter Krogh, but of course let’s not forget there is always a large team behind any endevour of this size and quality.
The site covers pretty much every aspect of digital photography workflow you could think of. The layout and structure of the site is simply awesome – well thought out, logical and very user friendly. There are a wealth of graphics and videos to complement the crisp, concise writing, and the quality of the information is about as good as it gets.
There is also a companion book called Digital photography best practices and workflow handbook, put out by Richard Anderson and Patricia Russotti. This takes a broad look at digital workflow issues, and is partly the basis for the dpbestflow website. Another stellar resource that no doubt informed much of what’s on the dpbestflow site is Peter Krogh’s book on Digital Asset Management, called The Dam Book. Make sure you get the second version, as in that book you will almost 500 pages packed to the brim with top level information, which complements the dpbestflow website, but is very different at the same time. This book is very specific to Digital Asset Management, and together with the Digital photography best practices and workflow handbook and the dpbestflow.org website, is all you need to educate yourself about digital photography workflow.
So back to the website. Check it out. Bookmark it. And visit regularly. There is enough information to keep you busy for several months, and in my experience, it’s exactly the sort of information photographers need but don’t know they need. Of course every photographer wants to focus on shooting, but the business aspects are considered by many to be even more important, and workflow is a business subject as it ensures efficiency and professionalism.
Let’s face it – digital photography is a whole new world when it comes to workflow. Analogue was a simple affair in some ways. Of course, the bar was also a lot higher in some areas. You actually had to get it right “in camera” a skill that many photographers today seem either not capable of, or perhaps maybe more accurately, they are simply beguiled by the instant nature of digital and the power of Photoshop and just don’t see the need to nail it in camera.
I understand the lure. Adobe spends millions of dollars on marketing to persuade us to upgrade every other year (either on one of its workflow methods – Photoshop / Bridge / Camera Raw or its Parametric Image Editing cousin, Lightroom). Their widespread adoption and success is subconsciously giving us the message that the image is no longer good enough without it. And it’s true in a way. Digital images do need some editing to look their best.
Continue reading Workflow / Workslow?
Created with Admarket’s flickrSLiDR.
I have been playing with my new iPhone all weekend, and digging around on the net for useful apps and the like. During my travels I came across this very useful little slide show app, not necessarily for the iPhone, but it’s getting to the point where automated galleries for web sites and blogs are the only way to go. I’m sure if I researched this area some more, I’d find a wealth of this sort of app out there. Sure beats building a gallery by yourself.
Unless you’ve been living under a rock lately, you’ve probably heard that Chase Jarvis has once again come up with a great idea (his last one was The Best Phone…)
CreativeLIVE is a new website that is going to offer FREE live presentations (I hate the word webinars) on all sorts of creative topics, like photography, DSLR video, painting, html etc.. They will be free if you sign up and follow them live, and you can buy them afterward to watch again, or in case you missed them. The presenters are very highly regard folk, like Vincent Laforet, Art Wolfe, David duChemin & Zack Arias just to name a few.
I’ll certainly be watching with great interest. Way to go Chase, You really are an inspiration.
Digital Asset Management is going mainstream. And most people don’t even realise it. With the development of Lightroom to version 3 (currently in beta) and the recent release of Aperture 3, sophisticated stand-alone DAM tools are reaching photographers everywhere. They may not be perfect at all aspects of DAM, or suitable for every scenario (multiple users in a studio setting or those that need multiple catalogues etc), but for the single user they are a very good one stop shop option.
They are both catalog applications and parametric image editors. In other words, they process the images and keep a catalog over the entire collection. And now that Aperture 3 allows you to export your image settings back into the DNG file, it’s a cross platform and OS solution (who really wants to be locked into both OS and application forever – come on, that’s just not cricket!)
Microsoft seems to have been left floundering in the dust with its poorly-developed catalog software Expression Media. Once upon a time the predecessor to Expression Media, iView Media Pro was the professional’s choice of DAM software, along with Bridge and Camera Raw. Now, many have replaced all three with Lightroom, and Mac users have the extra option of Aperture.
Users who wish to stay with the triumvirate of Bridge/Camera Raw and Photoshop still have an incredibly powerful and excellent set of tools for image management, parametric image editing and and powerful bitmap editing, but using just these three apps, the cataloging side is missing. There’s not too many good stand alone catalog apps aside from the powerful yet flawed Expression Media, and besides, with the maturation of software like Lightroom and Aperture, there is less and less need for the non-integrated approach. True, a stand-alone catalog application will be more powerful than any of its integrated cousins, but a combined approach will suit many photographers right down to the ground. In many situations, even Photoshop is going out the door. Increasingly it is becoming possible for certain types of photographers to manage their entire work flow, from file ingestion through processing to output like prints & web galleries just in Lightroom alone.
The other bonus is that it spreads Digital Asset management principles out there (despite Kelby’s less than stellar attempts at educating the public about DAM {see my earlier post}) and enriches the DAM side of a photographers work flow, even if many of them don’t realise that yet.
I’m still on the sidelines, preferring my Bridge / Camera Raw approach for the moment, as there is something difficult to define, that I don’t like about Lightroom. I’m still trying to figure out what it is though. It feels like it’s hiding things from me. Maybe I just don’t know it well enough yet… Is it really time to migrate to a single app solution? It’s sure looking like that time is coming. Microsoft paid a lot of money for the leading DAM app at the time, yet it seems like Adobe and Apple are leading the way with integrated solutions. Whether they are fully robust from a DAM perspective is not entirely clear to me as yet, but I can see we are getting very, very close.
This is getting interesting.
I’ve been on an extended holiday since the start of December. Just about 2 months of no income. My wife hasn’t been working in that time either. We are not wealthy people (far from it), and neither are we on any government benefits. We just prioritised our family. I know a lot of people would say ‘man, I just couldn’t do that.’ Not to be argumentative, but I think it’s possible for just about anyone, and it’s all about attitude.
Obviously, you need to be able to take the time off. I am both self employed and work for a teaching institution that is closed most of December and all of January. So for me, it was a no brainer. I missed the last week of school and decided not to take any jobs anywhere else.
We went to Denmark for six weeks to visit family. Then we went skiing in Norway for a week before we came home. After we came home we have acclimatised to the hot weather and gone swimming every day. It’s a hard life :0
But seriously. The rent was paid. The bills were paid. We just prioritised. Sure our bank account is looking thin and forlorn, compared to its pre-Christmas chubbiness. Sure I am dying to get my next pay check. Sure I’m looking forward to getting my kids back in some semblance of routine(at the moment they’re running riot). But we did it. I’m fairly proud of that ability. With two kids, it takes will and energy for something like that to happen.
But now I’m struggling with another concept. That of getting back into the saddle. It’s a big price to pay taking two months off. Life keeps going without you. Emails build up like a traffic jam. Jobs are missed, clients forget you. Clients are annoyed you are not home. Clients ring someone else… You forget what it is you did. The camera feels clunky. Photoshop’s menus are full of strange commands. My 5D is lonely. The batteries no doubt need charging. My back up computer won’t start. I’m completely OUT of the swing of things.
This is going to take a few weeks of solid effort. But it’s like riding a bike. You don’t forget it. You just get a bit rusty. Time sorts everything out. I’ve just got to climb back in the saddle and start riding.
While it’s hard, I’m going to think of a few things:
- Spending time in my beloved Copenhagen
- Getting lots of snow to play in over Christmas
- Seeing my wife’s wonderful family
- Seeing the kids experience Denmark again
- ‘Nu er det Jul igen’ at Amalievej 3 (OK, private joke, you had to be there)
- Learning to ski at Hafjell, in Norway.
- Experiencing -30 degrees celcius
- Leaving my family’s passports on a bus at Oslo airport with 2 hours before our flight back to Denmark (now there’s a story)
- Flying home all the way on business class
Maybe we will do it all again in 2 years….
In a way I suppose it’s partly jealousy. After all, Scott Kelby is the author of many international bestsellers, all of which focus on the art and craft of photography. I could be so lucky. Or clever.
But I do have other, more valid reasons to think less of Scott’s latest book. And it’s this: he has SUCH influence and he’s peddling rubbish. With influence comes responsibility!
 I’m trying to plough through his latest book on Lightroom, the incredibly long-winded “the Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 2 book for digital photographers“. Now while I’m no expert on Lightroom, I do know a fair bit about digital asset management, and over the course of the last 4 years or so, my views on the subject have been largely informed by the world’s leading expert on the subject, Peter Krogh. Digital Asset Management is a broad subject that covers the management of images from the time they come off the camera all the way through to their permanent homes in our archives.
Lightroom is of course an application that covers a lot more than digital asset management, but if you use it, it does have a large role in that process, so it’s good to understand the basics behind DAM to get the most out of it.
And it’s here that Kelby’s book falls over for me. It covers all aspects of Lightroom, and I’m quite happy with what I’ve read in the other sections, but the first section, the section on the Library, is what I’m struggling so much with. It is in there, understandably, that all “digital asset management” type functions occur.
Continue reading Why Scott Kelby doesn’t know a DAM thing
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