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.
Continue reading star ratings
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 [...]
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
 The DAM Book 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.
Continue reading The DAM Book (2nd Edition)
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…)
Continue reading After the shutter has fired, then what?
The DAM Book
I recently bought a book, which, even though I’m not even half way through it, I believe is an essential purchase for anyone serious about photography, whether amateur or professional. The book is called The DAM Book, and the topic is, naturally enough, Digital Asset Management. It’s basically about [...]
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