At the end of the educational [...]]]> From my perspective as a photography teacher, I see how aspirational professionals view photography, and I’m a part of how it’s taught. It’s a massively changing industry at the moment which makes it a moving target as far as teaching is concerned, but it keeps us on our toes.

At the end of the educational year, I thought I’d share a few perspectives on some trends I’ve noticed.

Quality: The tricky thing about quality is that it needs a frame of reference. If you’re 18 and you’ve never experienced film or the quality of a medium format image, and you’ve grown up with dodgy Photoshop techniques and jpgs, then how do you evaluate your work in regards quality? I push quality from day one, but I’m beginning to realise quality means very different things to people because of different frames of reference. I need to find a way to standardise everyone’s frame of reference at the start of the year so we can all appreciate quality for what it can be.

Methodology: The problem with where we are at with digital is that it’s been so haphazard. There are so many techniques, so many experts, so many ways of doing things, so many sliders…. What is missing however is a solid methodology. This comes back to quality. It’s always going to be a bit hit and miss without a consistent methodology to guide the capture and processing of an image. How to develop that methodology is the hard bit. So many experts with competing claims…

Facebook legends: This is the scariest one. I’m starting to perceive a trend that students think one year education and a Facebook page is enough to make them a professional. They couldn’t be more wrong. Everyone has a camera these days, which makes everyone a pseudo photographer. So the only way to become a professional is to actually be able to clearly differentiate your work; to stand out from the crowd (and that crowd is massive now). A two year Diploma is just the start on the road to becoming a true professional, which probably requires another half decade of experience on top of the formal study and a whole lot of effort and talent to be even in the mix.. There is such an overwhelming amount of mediocre photography out there. Let’s commit to not contributing to that as best we can. Let’s commit to a professional approach and a long term view; to build a broad skill set that will bring us above the masses.

Processing / Editing: These are two different things. Processing is about taking the data the sensor has collected and turning that data into pixels of the highest quality. It’s about good contrast, colour correction, levels, correcting for any lens flaws etc. It’s not artistic, it’s technical. Editing on the other hand is where we interpret the image. but there’s absolutely no point being creative on top of a technically weak image. It’s just makeup on a pig. Photoshop is not an emergency ward for grievously wounded images!

Digital manipulation: Everyone has an opinion. I’m admittedly a bit of a purist. I like what Photoshop makes possible, but I want to keep my work in the realm of photography. I think it’s dangerous to merge photography with illustration. I think the way we are going cgi will do us all out of a job in a decade. There is a clear trend towards convergence with technology, and the arts have always embraced mixed media. But looking at the 2011 Australian Professional Photography Awards, I think it’s a bit scary what they’re rewarding. I would have called the Photographer of the Year, the Digital Photoshop Artist of the Year. I think the distinction is important. Photoshop should be subjugated to the needs of photography, not the main game. I think it’s a slippery slope when you realise that a lot of the work we are seeing commercially are composite images with very little basis in reality. How we use Photoshop requires a lot of thought and is a philosophical and political position.

The blown out look: There is a ‘trend’ for overexposed shots, particularly in the wedding and portrait industry. How on earth did that happen? How can you have a trend for blown out highlights? It’s madness. Let’s just throw away all detail in our highlights and call it a trend… Please don’t go there.

Lighting: One final one. The strobist movement has done wonders for students. So many photographers starting out have a lot better understanding of lighting and off camera flash than they did 5 years ago. A lot of students now have flashes and triggers and even studio lighting, something that was basically unheard of 5 years ago. This is a positive development the way I see it.

OK, back to the trenches…

It was a pretty decent play.

Too many times [...]]]>
With many types of photography (studio and art photography particularly come to mind) the value of pre-visualisation and pre-production is enormous. Many photographers starting out don’t spend enough time on the preparation side of a shoot, and it’s often in that prep work that the value of a photograph is decided.

Too many times (way too many times) I have seen students come into the studio with basically no preparation at all. They know what their subject is, and they have their camera with them, but that’s as far as it goes. What I’m talking about is at a totally different level. I’m talking about someone coming in to the studio with their props, their lighting plan, their colour scheme worked out, and their shooting tech sorted – like what f stop they’ll be shooting at, what lens they will be using, and basically having the finished shot in their minds eye, so they can walk in, set up the lights, props and the model, shoot it, and get close to what they had envisaged.

That’s at the heart of it – envisioning a shot. Pre-visualising it. Seeing it in your head. Seeing the colours, the lighting, the pose, the mood, the props… all that. The closer you can get to what you WANT to shoot BEFORE you shoot it, the closer you will get to the desired result. And that result will be about 10 times better than a shot taken just trying your luck in the studio. That doesn’t mean there isn’t room in the studio for experimentation or serendipity. There are always lots of things to be discovered in the studio by trying different things. But what I’m talking about is having a plan before you start to shoot.

Let’s look at a particular shoot and analyse what sort of pre-visualisation and pre-production went into it, and why and how it helped the overall success of the shot.

The shot above is one I took recently of my boy, Eddie, in his cricket gear (see some more on my blog). It was originally inspired by a photo I saw (a close up of lips with hundreds and thousands on them – thanks Hannah). One day it dawned on me that hundreds and thousands would be a good way to tie in the concept of “junior cricket” to the shot. Anyone who knows anything about cricket knows cricketers often wear zinc on their lips and under their eyes (they are out in the sun all day). So hundreds and thousands in place of the zinc – hey presto – a great little prop to tie the concept in.

That was the start – the idea. Then I started imaging how I was going to light it. I know he would be wearing his whites, so I started by thinking about contrast and visual impact. I ended up deciding on a blue background to give good contrast to the clothes and his blond hair. I also wanted a gradient in the background so I had to figure out how to achieve that. Then I thought about how to light the subject itself. I knew that for some shots he would be wearing his cricket helmet, and so this led me to thinking of lighting that would get in under the helmet. I also wanted the lighting to reflect the mood of the shot. Low key contrasty lighting seemed to me the wrong approach so I went with a frontal beauty light style, a type of light that would get in under the helmet and also give that bright and youthful, energetic mood I was chasing. It was also a good choice to clearly light the hundreds and thousands. They had to be an obvious key point in the shot. Also thinking of the lighting, I knew a way to make the catch lights be dominant in the lower half of his eyes, without it looking like the lighting was dominantly coming from below.

Finally, I thought about the posing and props. I knew the back of his bat was red and the handle green, and I’d decided on blue for the background. Then I had the opportunity to buy him new batting gloves for his birthday the week before, and so I looked at the colours available and ended up going with the green ones to match the green of the bat. Seems like a lot of colours, but in my mind I could see the dominant colours would be white and blue, with red and green accents. RGB anyone? Primary colours and a good combination.

So on the day, I set up the lights, first the background, and then the front lights. I didn’t use a light meter at all (shame on me I know) but I’m familiar with the studio lights and I hardly even had to tweak the lights from their initial settings. This was also because I’d thought about my camera settings and had already decided I would shoot at 1/125th, f8 @ 100ISO. The important figure there obviously is the f8. That would give me my lens’ sweet spot as far as sharpness went and also give me enough depth of field to carry my model. I’d also set the lights based on this setting and got it close to right the first time because I knew what sort of output I’d need from them to get f8.

So when I’d set the lights up, the next step was to introduce the model. He stepped into the frame, and the very first shot looked just like this. Well it was very different in some ways (he had his helmet on), but what struck me when I looked at that first image was that all my pre-visualisation and pre-production had paid off and delivered the very image that I had seen in my mind for the previous few weeks of planning. It wasn’t an epiphany or anything, but it was a powerful moment nonetheless.

So if you’re not planning your shots and can’t see them before you take them, start trying to do just that. You might be surprised what lands in your camera! Hit me in the comments if you can tell me how I got the gradient in the background

Star ratings are one of the two most powerful tools we have in our digital workflow (the other being keywords)!

Suck that sentence up for a few seconds. Do you know why?

Basically, it’s because with keywords and star ratings, a database (catalog software, Lightroom library module etc) can sort our photos [...]]]>

Star ratings are one of the two most powerful tools we have in our digital workflow (the other being keywords)!

Suck that sentence up for a few seconds. Do you know why?

Basically, it’s because with keywords and star ratings, a database (catalog software, Lightroom library module etc) can sort our photos in a matter of seconds in the most powerful manner possible. With a couple of clicks we could sort 20,000 photos and filter them down to our absolute ‘best of’ folio collection or find those priceless photos of our dog eating our shoes. Without keywords and ratings, we have 20,000 photos to look through…

So they are very powerful. But HOW they are applied is equally important, and it is this subject I want to expound upon, after seeing some very famous and influential photographers (Scott Kelby and more recently David DuChemin) totally stuff it up. The influence these guys have is expansive, and not something I can compete with obviously, but I have to do my bit to remedy the situation…. More after the jump.

Star ratings are now a defacto standard. They are ubiquitous. Bridge, Lightroom, Aperture, Expression Media, IDimager, iView you name it. Star ratings are part of the XMP metadata core. Even Windows supports them natively. So support is not an issue. Unlike Lightroom’s Flags for examples, the usage of which Scott Kelby suggests is a better idea! Huh? Sure Scott. Let’s all spend countless hours ranking our photographs, and then lock ourselves into one single software solution for all time instead of using an already existing and much superior solution that is cross platform and application…

But even more important than support, star ratings are the only type of file based metadata that deals with how good an image is. That means that star ratings alone can help you sort your massive collection of images and filter them down to your very best, your best, or even your worst. All with a few clicks. But it all depends on HOW you apply star ratings. If you whack a 5 star rating on all your best images, as Kelby suggests (and even David DuChemin had done as I could see on his recent CreativeLive seminar), then you’ve just gone and thrown the power of star ratings out the window.

Why? There are actually several reasons. One is that you have no room for growth as a photographer. And hey, we all grow, no matter our age or professional status. So the first rule of thumb is to give yourself room to grow. Personally, I think most photographers can suffice with using just 1,2, and 3 stars for their collection. If you are really, really good, maybe you could use 4 stars for your absolute best of collection – you know, like your 50 signature shots. Basically everyone can leave the 5 star rating for when they have 10 years more growth and a 100,000 more images to sort through. Because this brings me to the second important way to use star ratings. The real power of a rating system is when it is a ratings pyramid, with the best images at the top being relatively scarce in relation to the total number of images in the catalogue. Again, if you have 20,000 images and 10,000 of them are rated as your best shots, it’s not going to help you much. If instead you have 200 images out of that 20,000 rated as your 3 or 4 star images, then there is a powerful and realistic representation of the best of your collection. So keeping the right proportions is important, and will keep your ratings pyramid in the right shape. Otherwise you might end up with a ratings light bulb, much less useful…

In his last book on Lightroom, Scott Kelby’s less than stellar advice was to rate all your good photos as 5 stars and delete the rest… I have to say I nearly fell over when I read that (luckily I was sitting down at the time). Then he went on to suggest that you shouldn’t even use ratings and that Flags in Lightroom was a better idea… Sheesh.. I imagine Peter Krogh would be frothing at the mouth at this.

So there you go. As part of your workflow, you should review your shoots and apply star ratings across the entire shoot. If you are using CR2 or NEF or other proprietary RAW file format, the information will sit in the xmp sidecar file. If you are using DNG as your RAW format, the star ratings will be written directly into the file. A possible rating system could look like this: 0 stars for shots you don’t want to delete, but are nothing special. Up to 50% of your personal work might get no star. 1 star would be a decent shot. 2 would be an excellent shot, and 3 stars would be reserved for your absolute best. A more thorough explanation and breakdown of this system can be found in Peter Krogh’s The Dam Book, or on the dpbestflow website.

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 [...]]]>

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…

What are the differences between photography and other forms of communication such as writing or movies? Movies, in many ways, and despite their visual form, share more with writing than they do with photography, but it’s probably fairer to say that movies inhabit a space of their own, sharing bits of both worlds. Stills photography is very dissimilar to writing, except for the fact they both tell stories. Photos however have very limited scope or space to tell the story. We could imagine the photo is the opening paragraph of the story. It sets the scene and gives us all sorts of detail, but only about a split moment in time. So how do we move the story forward – how do we introduce the plot? How do we continue on from the opening paragraph? Enter ambiguity. Let’s have a look at how ambiguity can be used in photography.

One of the major limitations in photography is that you have a single frame to tell a story. You have no supporting text, no context and very limited time to make your statement (they say at an exhibition, you have app. 3 seconds gaze per image). Now of course these are generalisations. There are such things as triptychs, photos do have titles and sometimes supporting essays, and context to boot. But generally, an image must stand alone and communicate its message in very quick time indeed. And with purely visual language. As with written language there are conventions, cliches, social understandings and other devices that can assist in the telling, but nonetheless, a photographer has to use an entirely different form of story telling to the author.

Ambiguity is one such way to draw the viewer in. As in writing, a truism is this:  Show, don’t tell. And surely it is better to show instead of patronisingly and all too specifically spell out the message. But that’s in writing. In photography, being overly detailed and specific is, in a sense, very difficult. One can rely too heavily on cliche perhaps to tell too simplistic a story, but with photography I often find the greater difficulty is in telling enough. A way I find that the best story tellers approach this difficulty in photography is to lead the viewer into a story but leave a large enough dose of ambiguity as to leaver the viewer caught up in the story but left, without resolution, to  stand and ponder the direction or possible outcome of the situation he or she finds himself engaged in. To reinforce the writing analogy it’s like writing a book with a great opening chapter which sets up the story and introduces us to the conflict at the heart of the tale, and then we turn the page to find… just blank pages.

So in a way, photographers need to learn to turn its greatest limitation into a strength. Instead of trying to tell the story as we would in traditional oral or written form, we need to use the greatest strength of visual imagery, which is clearly impact, to draw in our prey, lure and entice them with enough story to engage them, and then leave them floundering in front of the picture, forced to use their imagination to find some form of resolution or closure, before moving on.

To do this we need to leave some clues, some gaps, some elements open to interpretation to entice the viewer to begin to start to construct the story further in their head. We all love stories. They are a deep a part of us as anything. We just need something to latch on to to carry it forward. If it’s all told for us, then the story is over.

So leave a few clues, introduce some conflict or contradiction. Don’t spell it out too clearly, and let the viewer take a ride…

Let’s look at the image I posted at the top of the article. Whether or not it’s the best photo ever taken is not important (kidding, I definitely know it’s not the best photo ever taken.) But let’s analyse the story.

OK, what have we got here? We have a natural environment, right down to a naked women. The ONLY man made element in the frame is her wedding ring. (And yes it’s on her right hand – in some cultures, this is the hand used). What else we got. We have the water of course – lots of it. She is in the water, which in itself could signify lots of things. But she doesn’t look like she’s just taking a dip. She’s naked for starters. And she looks sad. Or troubled. She’s hugging herself and we can’t see her eyes. Is she crying? What has happened in her life? As I wrote on the caption of this shot at the top of the post, if you gave this a title, for example, Marriage, it would all by itself lead people towards a certain story line. Quite a different story no doubt than if we called it, say, “Cleansing”, which might lead us entirely down another path. But these titles only work as they do because there is a lot of ambiguity in the shot itself, and the story is hard to pin down.

Here’s another example. I call it Feet First.

Loads of ambiguity here. We can see that someone is lying down in a fire blackened forest. All we can see is their feet and legs. We can’t even see their upper torso or arms. Do they have any? Are they dead? Is it a man?  (probably, judging from the apparent size of the feet, and the way the jeans sit). What’s the significance of all this? And why in a forest? And what about all the regrowth? Is that supposed to tell us something?

I think a photo like this (one of my absolute favourites by the way and a Silver with Distinction winner at the 2007 APPA Awards) has got so much more to say by being ambiguous than if we could see a huge knife sticking out of him or something obvious like that. I didn’t want to constrain this photo into a straight-jacket of a story. I wanted people to be curious. Its original context was a folio called Still-Life and instead of having a title (Feet First) it had a quote beside it, as a way of leading people in. The quote was this:

“Life is a pilgrimage.
The wise man does not rest
by the roadside inns.
He marches direct to the
illimitable domain of eternal bliss,
his ultimate destination.”

Swami Sivananda

Not as ambiguous perhaps as some other text, but not specific enough either to know precisely what’s going on. OK, it’s very leading. And that was as it was meant to be.

So to recap. I consider ambiguity a very powerful tool to facilitate storytelling in photography. Use the visual impact of a photo to capture a viewer, using its ability to clearly show setting and initial story. Consider also using a title or quote to lead the viewer in a certain direction, and finally, whether you use a title or not,  make sure there’s enough ambiguity in the shot to give the viewer some room to construct the story further. Make sense? Hit me in the comments if you want to discuss it further.

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 [...]]]>

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.

But I do have other, more valid reasons to think less of Scott’s latest book. And it’s this: [...]]]> 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.

If you are not really aware of what sort of program Lightroom is exactly, well it’s no real surprise. In a way it’s trying to be everything to everyone. And it seems to do a damn good job of most of it. It looks slick. It aids workflow, and allows you to focus on the photography. But ignoring the beautifully designed interface and all the bells and whistles, under the hood it is a parametric image editor, coupled together with a cataloging application. Of course it can also spit out galleries, slideshows and prints like there’s no tomorrow. It has a modular design, so these modules can be added to in the future (if and when Abode can think of some new ones – hdr anyone?) But at its heart, it’s a catalog and an image editor. It looks like it does the image editing really well (as I said I don’t use it regularly yet, but have looked it over), and I’m not surprised, as it uses the latest Camera Raw engine to do the heavy lifting. But from what I can see, and from many other informed reports on the DAM forum, it doesn’t do quite as good a job on the cataloging side. Never mind, no program is perfect at release 2.5.

Digital Asset Management can be seen to be built up of two parts – a part that is (or at least can be) software independent (file naming conventions, folder organisation, metadata, star ratings, labels, all that stuff that sits in the dng or xmp file and is read by a host of programs like Bridge, Lightroom, PhotoMechanic etc.)  And then there’s how we can use those files in a catalog application.

My problem with Scott is that he gets the first part utterly wrong. Lightroom is an application that takes responsibility for a large number of those core DAM issues, so it’s very important that they get implemented well. And it’s not Lightroom that’s at fault here. It can do what needs to be done. But it does have to be told how to do it by the user. And this is where Scott loses me. He is responsible for the training of hundreds of thousands of people, not only in how to use Lightroom, but also how to approach DAM. Because for many, this will be the first time they encounter any sort of cataloging program, and they need instruction in the very basics. Instead what do they get? Kelby’s very uninformed approach to DAM. He’s teaching hundreds of thousands of people how NOT to do it. It’s hard to read. It’s even harder when you realise the damage this is doing.

Let me take the most offending example, so you can see I’m not just jealous (note the word just). On page 42-43 he talks about star ratings, a feature so ubiquitous now that even Microsoft is supporting them natively in Windows. Initially, Scott’s sage advice (not) is to rate your best photos as 5 stars. ‘Who gives a damn really about 2 or 3 star images’ he says. Either you delete ‘em or you love em. (paraphrasing here, I don’t have the book in front of me).  Well Scott, there are many reasons you are totally wrong, including something called the ratings pyramid. What happens in 20 years when you have 20,000 out of your 40,000 images as 5 star and the other 20,000 are no stars… Where’s the pyramid then? What value does your collection have if you can’t separate your absolute best images from your good ones and your OK ones. The value in a ratings pyramid is being lonely at the top. You don’t want it crowded up there. And by using 5 stars immediately, he’s leaving no room for growth. What about in ten years time, when you’re a better photographer (everyone gets better if they keep at it). You can’t start marking your best shots at 6 stars…

And then it gets worse. Not only does he sooo not get the whole star ratnig system and why that is an absolutely integral part of any Digital Asset Managment plan, he then tells you to not even bother using them, but to use flags instead. Flags? Are they supported in Bridge? PhotoMechanic? Expression Media? Any other cataloging program? I don’t think so. Do you want to lock yourself into one application? Isn’t it smarter to use a system where the info lives in the file and can be read by a large number of programs? The star system (and labels to a slightly lesser degree) are a defacto standard.  You can change applications and the system goes with you. Scott should know that.

I think it’s staggering someone as educated and influential as him could peddle such downright poor information. I like Lightroom to a degree, and I think that it will become the leading DAM application (if it’s not already). Microsoft seem to have given up on Expression Media (which in any case is only a cataloging app, not an editor as well). But if Lightroom is the future, it’s even more important that people are shown how to use the DAM sides of it in a logical, extensible and transferable way. That’s exactly what Scott hasn’t done.

Scott, if you come across this, I’d like an explanation!

As we all know the advent of digital photography has changed photography enormously. Not only has it fundamentally changed the way photography businesses operate, and how professionals are perceived, it has changed our whole relationship with photography. And by ‘our’ I mean everyone’s.

What once was a very simple [...]]]>

As we all know the advent of digital photography has changed photography enormously. Not only has it fundamentally changed the way photography businesses operate, and how professionals are perceived, it has changed our whole relationship with photography. And by ‘our’ I mean everyone’s.

What once was a very simple relationship, both in nature and in volume, and which might have been called ‘me and my photo album’ is now a complex web of relationships with a vast array of both print and digital media. Through this over saturation of imagery, we have become sophisticated consumers of visual communications, and we consume imagery voraciously on a daily basis, but still the vast majority of people don’t look past the surface impression and still don’t have a good understanding of what makes a professional photographer a professional, and an amateur just that.

It is clear, that in many ways photography is being devalued. Online, the $5 stock library sites, like istock.com are a good example. Getty Images and other traditional image libraries look to be surviving, but their market has decidedly shrunk. Some will say this is just natural selection, and in a strict sense they are right, but the implications of devaluing photography goes a lot further than getting a bargain stock shot.

And it’s not just the digital revolution that’s getting us in trouble. Sheer media overload is causing problems as well. Attention spans are getting smaller. Research tells us that at a photography exhibition, we can expect to hold people’s gaze on a single image for no more than 3 seconds. The images had better be good if you are going to hold them longer than that.

In educational institutions teaching photography there are also massive changes. Out with the traditional darkroom skills, in with Photoshop. Yet by its very nature, digital photography can be a poor teacher, with its wide latitude of error, instant feedback and cost efficiencies. Digital doesn’t help students learn to ‘get it right behind the lens’, because they know they can just ‘shoot the shit out of it’, and fix it in Photoshop if it’s ordinary. But of course many of these same things are the positive benefits of digital. Being able to rattle off hundreds of frames without thinking of cost is amazing, and Photoshop is just a fabulous new fangled digital darkroom. ( There is a big hint in this if we will listen. As is often the case, mixing the best of the old ways with the best of the new is a smart way to do things…)

Within the industry itself, just look at how difficult it is now to become a professional. Photographers are falling over each other in a shrinking market. Even at the top end of the professional market, where the status quo has largely been retained, the good old days are definitely gone, and the top end is getting thinner and thinner.

The reasons are pretty clear. These days cameras are ubiquitous. Point and shoots, mobile phone cams, and consumer digital slr’s, the list and numbers are staggering. Everyone has a camera and everyone takes photographs.

But there are huge differences in the way photography is created. Most people take their photos, trundle off to the photo kiosk to print them out, or email them off to friends or put them up on facebook or the like. The image as captured (in jpeg of course) is the image that is printed, shared etc.. This is how it has always been for consumers, even back in the days of film. It was similar for professionals in the past as well, but for them it was critical everything was done right in camera, as the film went off to the lab and the transparencies or prints came back and were handed over. It was completely different however for black and white film, and there the keen amateur and the professional had a whole world of post processing in which to impart his artistic vision on the image BEFORE it was printed (or to be more accurate, as it was being printed).

And this is where I want to leap forward to the present, as it is here, in the similarities between the old black and white printing and today’s’ modern digital photography that I want to explore. Because it is here where professionals today can make their biggest mark. One thing is to take a good picture. It’s actually a very big, and sometimes quite difficult thing. But a professional should be able to obtain a good exposure, light correctly, compose with interesting effect, and technically create a good image. The trouble is that many amateurs can also (with a bit of luck and aided by amazing new technologies) take the same image. Not all the time for sure, but the point is, today’s’ point and shoot cameras can produce some amazing results even in the hands of amateurs. More and more people don’t consider hiring a professional photographer for this very reason. They reason that their digital slr is the same as a photographer’s so why bother paying for a professional. I see this all the time lately with brochures and other advertising, their impact severely reduced by amateur photography.

Professionals are aware of the problem. The massive blurring of the line between amateur and pro is confusing everybody, consumers included. Suddenly they don’t even know what they are buying. They equate a professional looking digital slr with professional photography. The consumers themselves can see that technology itself is narrowing that gap. So called ‘shoot and burn’ cowboys have popped up everywhere and are ruining the wedding industry, charging ridiculously small amounts to shoot a wedding and burn the images to cd. It is left to professionals to focus on the things that make them professional to try and widen the gap again so that they and the larger industry will survive.

One thing they can do is ensure they are very competent photographers. And as many of us know, that’s a whole lot harder than it sounds. The technical aspects of photography and lighting are demanding and require a whole range of talents from technical to artistic. But is it in this artistic area I think we need to focus once our technical skills are in place. This is an area that can clearly define us from amateurs and cowboys! The problem here is also about education, delineation and re-valuing photography so that once again people are prepared to pay a decent dollar for a quality product.

Recently I came across a recently launched website that had packages designed for portraiture. The idea behind this website was well thought out. Consumers are, rightly so, sick of portrait studios and their unpalatable marketing campaigns where they offer very cheap or even free portrait sittings and then hard sell extremely expensive prints. Many portrait photographers still use this model, but I think it’s a dinosaur just waiting to die. Obviously so do the makers of the website in question. Their idea is to have a network of professional photographers with online portfolios, working at a fixed rate with a packaged product. For instance, for $399 you can get Photographer A (or whoever you best like in your area) to come and shoot your family reunion, and you know you will get 6 4×6 prints and 12 hi-res shots on cd, for you to print as you like. An interesting business model in many ways, but one that I think misses a very important mark.

For $399, (and the photographer’s cut of this is likely to be $200 or even less) they are expected to shoot for two hours, produce a one page pdf proof sheet of 25-30 of the best shots, and then process and burn and send 12 shots to the client on cd. Now I don’t know how ‘professional’ these photographers are, because from the sound of it, they would be working casually for about $50 an hour. It’s fine for the website owner, as they do basically nothing, but I’m not about to join.

So I’m waffling and waffling… I know. When am I going to get to the point?
Now. Well, I’ll try. I don’t think it’s always just about the point, sometimes it’s equally about the journey.

The thing that can clearly define us and separate us from the consumers and the cowboys is this: our artistic vision.

One thing is to have nice shots taken professionally. That’s a damn fine start. But is that enough? There’s clearly no time in the above business model for the photographer to spend more than a couple of minutes on any one photograph. And this is where the business model is forgetting something.

The most massive difference between film and digital photography is in the processing. Now it is done by the photographer! And the possibilities are now ENDLESS!

A photograph is no longer what just comes out of the camera. It is the final image that is created from the RAW data (pun fully intended) that a digital capture obtains. The taking of the photo is just gathering data. The real work comes in the processing, and the artistic vision employed therein. If we use all our professional skill to take a good photo, and then just process it as a photo kiosk would and hand it over, then we are missing a massive opportunity. With both technical skill AND creative vision, we can create images that stand clearly out from the masses. The trick will be getting people to pay for it. But think of it this way.

Do you want to pay $399 (with only half or so going to the photographer) for 12 shots, quickly processed and burned to cd, or would you rather pay, say, $499 to me for 6 shots that have been painstakingly hand processed and turned from a photo into a work of art? Let me know

In an earlier post, I spoke about back-up and the need to develop a system that does what it needs to do – save your data from all potential loss, and allow you to get back up and running in the quickest possible time.

Photographers have special requirements with regards backup. They generate huge [...]]]>

In an earlier post, I spoke about back-up and the need to develop a system that does what it needs to do – save your data from all potential loss, and allow you to get back up and running in the quickest possible time.

Photographers have special requirements with regards backup. They generate huge volumes of data in a very short time. It would be in no way unusual that in one photo shoot, I might generate from up to 4GB of data. And this is data, that if lost, is totally irreplaceable. The sheer size of it as well precludes online backup strategies for most, as upload speeds are too slow, and adsl account limits are often 20GB or less (this is of course only an issue if your ISP includes uploads as part of your allowance).

Peter Krogh, the DAM (Digital Asset Management) specialist, talks a whole lot about backup strategies in his book, The Dam Book. I’m not going into that much detail here, but there are a few things that are worthy of mention. There are many considerations when designing a backup system, including cost, scalability, and redundancy. With regards cost, he gives very good advice when he says to ‘buy the backup you need now, not in 18 months.’ I spent months looking into backup systems, including expensive raid arrays and JBoD boxes and home servers etc… That was because I was focussing on scalability more than cost. But all those solutions were too expensive, at least for me. I couldn’t justify the expense. So I thought about what I needed right now. And that was basically 1TB of storage. The quickest and cheapest solution would have been to just buy a cheap internal drive and an enclosure, and hey presto, a 1TB USB external drive. But the build quality of many cheap enclosures is suspect, and for a very similar price, you can get a entry level external drive. Then there is the question of interface. USB 2.0 is the basic requirement, but there’s also Firewire 400 and 800 and eSata (forget NAS devices for the moment).

In the end, I decided to take a small step up and get a WD My Book Home Edition. It has a triple interface (USB, Firewire 400 and eSata). I finally realised that there would be no instant implementation of a perfect system, and that it would be something I developed over time. My immediate requirement was to safely secure my data. I already have a 320GB external I built myself. That is now my secondary off-site backup, which is placed at a neighbours house. When I do a shoot, I backup to the 1TBdrive, and then go and collect the 320GB drive and backup to that, and then return it to the neighbours house. There’s my data in 3 places, one of them off-line. That is a secure backup.

But then there’s my system drive. At the moment I have my system drive ina  RAID array (Raid 1- mirroring). This is a great solution in the event of a total drive failure, as I have an exact copy ready to go. But what about OS problems? Recently I had a terrible security failure in Vista, which meant that the OS was basically kaput and needed to be re-installed, something I didn’t want to do. All those programs, all those settings… But I realised my mirrored drive now had exactly the same problems. Hmmm… So it seems to me, I need a complete mirror image of my drive to be backed up to an external drive whenever I make any major system changes or updates, and to have that stored offsite as well. So that means another external drive, and a program like Norton Ghost to make a mirror image. That has to come soon. Then, I should feel a little more confidant, that when (not if) a drive fails or the operating system decides to die, it will only be a new drive and a few hours, and all will be back as it was. That’s the idea anyway. Am I missing anything?