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.
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)
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.
I have to admit, when I first saw the Microsoft Windows 7 party video, I thought someone had slipped some acid into my mineral water. It blows me away that the corporate machine that is Microsoft could possibly think that the video was anything other than cringeworthy. Like, could you get any more un-cool? Weird…. just really, really weird.
If you haven’t seen it, here is is below.
But then I found this video, which sort of ‘restores balance to the force’ somewhat. A bit of fun, and much more human. I don’t encourage pirating Operating Systems at all – I actually think Windows is a great bit of software and I’m happy to pay for it, but Microsoft’s problem is with their marketing more than their product.
I thought I’d be an eternal hold out, as I’ve never been a fan of Facebook, and figured Twitter was much the same. but after using it for a few days, I’m just beginning to see it’s quite different from Facebook, and has an awful amount of potential, both privately and in the business realm.
I read recently a persuasive blog post that valued Twitter in the 5-10 Billion $ range. That’s pretty staggering. Of course, to be that valuable, business has to be involved pretty heavily, and anytime business gets involved things tend to lose a lot of shall we say quality, and end up being a lot more like tarts on the street corner flirting their wares.
So it will no doubt be with Twitter. Every company under the sun now tweets, and for the life of me I can’t quite see where the interest is going to come from. I follw a few photographers and friends and even interesting celebrities and popstars. But why on earth who I want to follow a corporation? Follow Coca Cola and find out when the next Diet Diet Diet Coke is released. Yawn… I follwed Dell to see what it was all about, and in that case it had a purpose in that it was a factory outlet and there were good deals to be had. Ahhhh he thinks.. that’s where corporations will get us all hooked. The instant deal. “Greetings followers, For the next ten minutes get a 1.245% discount on Dell monitors….”
For the time being, I promise not to sell you anything, but I will practice a few tweets and see what it’s all about. Check out my Twitter page and Follow Me for my mind-blowing musings ;0
Oh, and I still don’t get Facebook. I’ve been a member for a few years and I’m sooo not using it. Chase Jarvis might, but he’s just a media whore
Barred spiral galaxy NGC 6217 (NASA/ESA/Hubble SM4 ERO)
Space just blows my mind. The thing is the scale. It’s just incomprehensible. We think in terms of kilometers, whether it’s hundreds or millions. But out there, kilometers is meaningless. Light years is the standard measurement, and even then we can be talking about millions of light years…
Take this galaxy here, an image from the Hubble telescope. To get to this scale of the universe, we first have a solar system which is the immediate vicinity around a star and any of its orbiting bodies. A galaxy is a collection of stars (and their accompanying solar systems). But a galaxy has millions of stars. Millions. Each star is like our sun. The closest star to our sun is if I can remember rightly Alpha Centuri and it’s about 4 or 5 light years away? Not sure on the detail here, but it doesn’t really matter. The scale is already incomprehensible and we’re still inside our own galaxy the Milky Way. This picture is of a completely different galaxy altogether. And there are countless galaxies in the cosmos. Countless. Is that starting to sink in?
Sometimes when you look up in the sky you are seeing single stars. At other times however what you’re seeing are complete galaxies. The Smaller and Larger Magellanic clouds are an example of this. Once you get out in deep space like the Hubble Telescope has, then zillions of galaxies appear, with vast space between them. How vast the cosmos is, as I said, is totally incomprehensible to our tiny brains.
One thing is certain to me. The cosmos is teeming with life, and we are but one tiny planet among untold billions of planets. We just can’t see them. The scale is too big. We can’t pierce the veil of space that is hiding all the other untold billions of solar systems out there.
Sometimes a fragment of understanding comes to me. The scale of it fleetingly dawns on me and then is gone. I can’t hang on to it. It’s just too mind blowing. And the only other thing that comes close to being as mindblowing as the outer direction of the cosmos, is that it goes just as far in the other direction. Whole universes must exist in the microscopic worlds that we also can’t see. Thinking about it in that light, scale is eveything. We all exist together, just in different scales of size and time. Isn’t it amazing to be alive and considering these things.
I follow quite a few blogs, mostly photographic ones, but a few others as well.
One photography blog that I’d really recommend is Zack Aria’s blog. Zack is a great photographer, and he runs some very cool workshops, but he’s a really good thinker as well. He’s deep, sincere and very inspirational.
Zack caused quite a stir a few months back with a guest post he made on Scott Kelby’s blog. Instead of the usual “I am an expert” type post, Zack posted a really dark, thoughtful video, called Transform (see above). It’s a bit heavy going, and asked deep hard questions. But many people also found it highly inspirational.
And that wasn’t all. The story continued. Weeks later, a guy, called B, emailed Zack’s about his experience with the Transform video and being a photographer. He had the guts to tell it like it was, in his case, he found it hard to keep it going and be inspired to be a photographer. It was all just too hard. I think he imagined himself alone with those thoughts. Zack turned this email into a very thoughtful follow up post.
As it turned out, B was anything but alone. The comments on that post went on for ages, and a really fine dialogue was happening. People were speaking of their own fears and inspiring themselves to overcome them. It was heady stuff.
To top it all off, Zack had a visit by a door to door saleman the next day. That guy was so cool, and really knew what he had to do to succeed. Zack was quick enought to realise this, and he videoed the guy for his blog. The words of wisdom that guy spoke were there for all to see.
The whole series of posts, videos, comments and reactions make up quite a story. You should check it out. But be warned – it’s quite a journey. It’ll take at least an hour if you want to give yourself time to read a decent amount of the comments the posts generated.
I’ve just finished Peter Krogh’s book on Digital Asset Management, The DAM Book. Recently published in a second edition, it’s not just a slight update on the first edition, which I talked about here. The new DAM Book completely re-looks at Digital Asset Management in light of recent software developments and trends, most notably Lightroom, but also great little apps like ImageIngester Pro.
A lot of what Peter writes about hasn’t changed from his first volume, but in some cases it has, and in others it has just been refined. Mostly though, it has been expanded to look at new workflow options with Lightroom, and seems to cover more ground with the management of working files, and the areas of data validation and the ingestion process.
It’s a much bigger book than the first tome, weighing in at over 460 pages. Now, I’m sure Peter would be the first to admit that this is not lightweight casual reading. It’s technical, and at times, a tad dry, but if you are passionate about your digital photography, and even more to the point, you are someone who wants to learn how best to manage and leverage those assets, then you will plough through this book in the first instance, and then come back and re-read it several times to enable the gradual implementation of all his good advice. For this is no lightweight matter. For someone with 10,000 digital images randomly thrown into folders on their computers, not properly backed up and in proprietary file formats, this is going to be a long, big job. But bringing your archive up to DAM standards will be one of the most valuable things you could ever do to your collection, and this book shows you precisely how, and why, to do it.
The structure of the book is awesome. He starts at the start, with a discussion on why we need Digital Asset Management, what the objectives and benefits are, and then he continues from there. There is a logical flow to the subjects he discusses, and a really good mix of theory, implementation and examples.You can see a list of the Table of Contents for the new book on Peter’s site, here.
Less than a year after the release of the flagship PowerShot product, the G10, Canon have announced the successor to the crown, the G11. More than a few changes have been introduced. The G10’s 14.7MP sensor has been replaced in the G11 with one that Canon describes as a high sensitivity 10 MP CCD. Interestingly, flash sync speed increases to 1/2000th of a second. This is a great feature, and one that many strobist shooters will be very happy about.
I’ve owned a G3 since its release, and while the current model makes it look old and silly, the line of G series cameras have always been known to be of extremly high quality. It’s the one compact camera most likely to be in a professional photographer’s bag. This is because of great image quality and RAW format files in a very compact, unobtrusive format. The styling is also very attractive, with a slight retro feel to it. Pricing for Australia has not been announced as yet, but no doubt it will sit around the $8-900 area, as does the G10.
Wow. How cool is this. I’ve been thinking of getting a macro lately. I’m now very glad I waited. Canon has announced a new lens in the form of an EF 100mm f/2.8L Macro IS USM. They haven’t dropped the old 100mm macro, just upped the ante (and the price) with this new one. It’s going to retail at over $1000 US, so who knows how much it’ll cost here.
Of course, there’s a lot of excitement about the upcoming 7D and potentially a new flash system to rival Nikon’s CLS system, but I’m slowly collecting good glass and letting the body upgrades go past me a few years at a time before I jump. I’m still running the original 5D and will probably wait for the 5D MK III before I jump again. But this lens, I won’t wait very long for at all. Just think – an L series quality f/2.8 macro lens with IS. That would be a very nice addition to my kit indeed.
I’m trying to plough through his latest book on Lightroom, the incredibly long-winded “
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