I got my first job in this business because the photographer that hired me didn’t understand the concepts behind digital imaging. He knew f/stops and shutter speeds and watt/seconds like the back of his hand. He could estimate flash exposure (without a meter) within half a stop, and his client relation skills were out of this world. But he had just mortgaged his house to buy a digital camera (Kodak DCS460) and he needed help.

That was 15 years ago. Digital imaging was just beginning to become an acceptable alternative to film for some uses. Royalty free stock photography had just entered the market and pulled the rug out from under a lot of photographers. The global economy was finally starting to come out of a recession. Fifteen years later – we’re (hopefully) coming out of recession, microstock has showed up, pulling the rug out from a lot of photographers, and integrated video is once again, to use a phrase from the ’90’s, shifting the paradigm.

Looking at the past few years, newspapers and magazines have struggled horribly as advertisers have cut back ad budgets and shifted to digital marketing. It’s pretty likely that advertising supported print publications are not long for this world. Second, recent product prototypes by publishers like Conde Nast© and Time/Warner show that e-readers are coming fast. And if Apple launches the iSlate (or whatever they decide to call it,) later this month as predicted, and it’s the game changer it’s expected to be, it’s entirely possible that the newsstand and bookstore as we know it are headed the way of Betamax and CD’s. Right now publishers are simply converting their print publications to electronic versions. But that’s soon to change. Audio and video embedded into magazine, book and newspaper articles are only a software upgrade away.

Those photographers outside of the commercial field are by no means exempt. Moving pictures embedded into family snapshots (a la Harry Potter) are currently technologically possible, but economically unfeasible – and we all know how that curve works. Wedding and event photographers are already combining their stills into slide show movies with transitions and background music. Making the jump to embedded video is a logical next step.

As with any monumental change, there will be those who resist, those who adopt early, and those who go with the flow. It’s probably too late to be in on the early adopter phase, but it’s certainly never too late to be a resistor. After all, there are those of us who still shoot film, and are sought out because of it. There are those who make images using oils and watercolors and etchings, and make livings doing so. I expect that there will always be those who make a living exclusively doing still images with a camera, but they’ll be a minority. What’s left is the middle ground of going with the flow. Usually, it’s said, that standing in the middle of the road is a good way to get run over, and it’s true. But what may be worse is not crossing the road in the first place.

A lot of the skills that we’ve learned as still photographers translate to video very well. Composition, lighting and attention to detail are still important. New skills like capturing quality audio, maintaining continuity and compression codecs steepen the learning curve – so get on it and learn. As with still photography, specialized help is needed in some instances. We hire food, makeup and prop stylists all the time in the still world. It’s no different in the motion world, other than you need more people. Freelance editors, script supervisors, line producers and audio technicians may come into play.

ASMP has just published the results of their research here. It’s well worth reading.

Fifteen years ago I got my start because an industry veteran realized that he knew a lot, but didn’t know enough. So he hired some help. That’s a lesson worth taking to heart. We know a lot, but we need to know more. Either learn, hire some help, or get run over.

It’s important to say at the outset that none of the things I discuss here take the place of a well executed backup and archiving strategy for your business. What we’re talking about is helping your clients keep track of the images you deliver to them. If they’re able to extend the lessons you impart to them for more, all the better.

Since each client has their own needs and abilities no cookie cutter solution will work for everything but a few basics apply.

1. Keep everything. Keep your raw files, keep your working layer psd files. Keep the emails they send you, and of course, the final deliverable files. You don’t have to have all of this stuff available to the client but if you’ve got the raw files somewhere, you can always re-deliver the job.
2. Keep your client informed. If you intend to keep image files on your server for 30 days, be sure to send them a reminder email a couple days before you take them down.
3. Use meta data. Embedding your copyright and usage license information in the file helps the client. In my experience unauthorized use by a client almost always comes from an error and not malice.
4. Remember your clients level of sophistication. Just because you know to right click on an image to save it off of the web doesn’t mean your client does.

Depending on the type of work you do, your delivery methods will vary. Since most of my work is low volume, I’m able to use an online delivery system. My personal choice is photoshelter.com. I like Photoshelter because it allows me to easily create password protected galleries from any image type. I can upload tiffs, eps files, movie files as well as jpgs. The service will automatically generate thumbnails and convert to the proper format for web viewing, while keeping the original file format intact for download. I realize these probably are not earth shattering capabilities for many of you, and that there are several other services similar to Photoshelter, this is the direction I’ve found works for me, your mileage may vary.

When I deliver a job, I create a new Photoshelter gallery specific to that job, upload the files to it and send the client a link via email. In the email I make sure to tell the client they can download high resolution files directly from the gallery, no disk necessary. I tell them that the gallery will stay active for 30 days, and that they should immediately download the images from the gallery and archive them on their end. One nice feature about the online gallery is the ability for the client to easily share files with others. Many times I’ve been hired by the end client. The client is also working with a graphic designer or (eek) “Graphics person” who puts together their collateral materials. The client can simply forward the link to whomever needs the images.

For many of my clients I maintain a master gallery of all their work. Many clients come to me on a regular basis to shoot new products and I would regularly get calls that went something like, “Hey Steve, you remember that desk we shot last November, I can’t find my file, can you send it over again?” Of course being the service oriented guy I am, I’d get right on it and they’d be happy. Sure, I could start charging for these but my mantras is “Don’t be a dick.” Now that client has a master library on my Photoshelter account that only they can access. The library contains every image I’ve ever shot for them. I’ve already set them up with the password and link so they don’t even need to call me, they just go get the image.

I personally do this for free for my large clients. I chalk it up to customer service. It may be a revenue opportunity for some though, so think it through. My thinking is, storage is cheap and the goodwill it builds is priceless.

Something else I’ve done in the past is to help clients build a graphic library using commercially available software. There are several good programs for this purpose (Portfolio, Expression Media.) that I would install on site for the client on a consultant contract. Although I haven’t done this lately and if a client requested it, I’d probably refer it out since software changes so quickly, but if you’re up on the current systems this is a great way to solidify your relationship with a client.

Regardless of whether you use an online system or a local system to help your clients manage what you’ve delivered, you have to help them. After all, you’re the expert.

If you’re looking to learn all you ever wanted to know about DAM and then some – I highly recommend  The DAM Book by Peter Krogh.

What I said was “OMG, my old, clean, crisp drum scans of 50-speed film, remembered fondly, have more noise than ISO 1600 DSLR files. Progress!!!!”

Needless to say, I got called on it, so this morning I went back and looked to see if I had a few quick examples I could pull up. I grabbed a block from the scan I’d been working on, and found a comparable, recent image I’d taken at ISO 800, and grabbed roughly 500×500 pixels from each after downsampling the drumscan from an original resolution of about 7K pixels on the long side to the same resolution as the 1Ds3. While that downsampling will cost in terms of resolution, if anything, it’ll mitigate the noise in the drum scanned slide.

Now, I’m not saying these two samples prove anything by themselves. What I would say is that the general sense of noise and grain I get from using drum-scanned Velvia vs. ISO 800 on the Canon 1Ds Mark III is, subjectively speaking, well-conveyed by these two examples.

The 1Ds3 image was processed by Lightroom 2.3 and the image with sharpening and noise reduction turned completely off. With standard noise reduction and sharpening settings, the 1Ds III image is significantly cleaner than what’s shown here, and noise reduction seems a little harder to get working on the clumpier grain of the Velvia scans.

While the sky is more saturated in the Velvia image (and some of that is the nature of the scenes on those different days, but some of it is surely the extra Velvia contrast), in my experience this basic result, that modern DSLRs, even those with many, many tiny pixel elements are producing significantly better images on the whole at ISO 800 than I was getting at 1/16th the speed six years ago–particularly when the way the images respond to digital darkroom tools is taken into account.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m still nostalgic about Velvia. And I played Paul Simon along with the rest of you last month when Kodak announced the end of Kodachrome. But in terms of making cleaner images and better prints, I’m more and more grateful for the advent of digital SLRs.

Let’s start by saying that color is a science. It’s a big science. It’s so big that there are entire institutes full of people so smart it makes my head hurt, all studying color. So I think it’s safe to say we’ll not be comprehensive here. We will cover the basics of color balance and differential color temperatures, as they pertain to shooting. Color management on the back end, calibrations, color profiles are for another time.

As I touched on in part 1, our brains are incredibly nimble. Vision is perception and we can adjust our perception so quickly and subconsciously that we don’t even understand it’s happening unless we look for it. One way it adjusts our perception is with variable color. Remember from elementary school when the teacher took a crystal prism and showed us how sunlight can be spread out into a spectrum?   That spectrum represents daylight broken down into it’s constituent colors (ROYGBIV.) Equal amounts of those colors combine to form what we call white light, or daylight.  

However different sources of light put out varying amounts of lights at different frequencies. For example, ordinary incandescent lights put out much more light on the warmer side of the spectrum. When we view things under incandescent light we don’t usually see this orange cast since our brains compensate for it. But it’s there, and without smart cameras, or smart photographers we would have orange photos. Digital cameras have preset color balances as well as auto white balance. A few digital cameras allow the user to set a custom white balance based on either color temperature, a visual sample, or both.

Just like auto exposure, auto color balance is good enough for most people and works well in many situations. But it can get us into real trouble when shooting under mixed lighting conditions or when trying to capture a special affect or vision. Shooting under mixed lighting sources is problematic and is to be avoided whenever possible. We can only balance for type of light at a time so if we’re trying to shoot with incandescent, daylight and fluorescent all in the same image, we’re going to be disappointed.   The way to avoid this situation is to keep all light sources of the same type, and barring that, balance the sources all to the same standard.   In other words, if you’re shooting   in a large room primarily lit with fluorescent light, but you want to supplement that light with your flash, you’ll need to manually set your white balance to fluorescent, and gel your flash green to match.   If we hadn’t gelled that flash the area where the flash was used would appear magenta by comparison.

Likewise, if shooting inside under primarily incandescent light, any source of daylight, be it a window or your flash, should be gelled orange to match.

Keeping colors balanced and avoiding mixed lighting sources and differential color temperature is one of the most important skills to master when shooting color.   Practice.

Anyone who’s ever used Adobe Photoshop can tell you there are 20 different ways to save an image file. Each of these formats has a specific use and reason to exist – but for those of us in the still photography industry there are four major file formats.

Tiff – tagged image file format. One of the oldest and still most widely accepted image formats for high resolution images. Very versatile and flexible, can use varying bit depths and compression schemes.

EPS – encapsulated postscript file. EPS is actually a hybrid between a raster image (photo) and a vector image (think clipping path.)

JPEG – joint photographic experts group. A highly compressed format that is ubiquitous online and in most digital cameras. The compression scheme used in jpeg is lossy, meaning some file degradation will occur when the image is saved in this format.

RAW – Usually a proprietary format used by camera manufacturers that saves the full capture data in a lossless compression. CR2 by Canon and NEF by Nikon are the two most common but DNG (Adobe’s digital negative) is still in use.

Which format you use will vary depending on your purposes, your clients’ purposes and your personal preferences. Here’s a quick breakdown of how we do things at our studio.

Tiff is our standard format. Since most of the work we do is destined for the printed page tiff seems to work best. We deliver uncompressed, 8bit tiffs with an Adobe 1998 or a SWOP profile embedded (more on profiles later.)

EPS files are our goto file when we place clipping paths on an image. I know some designers who just use EPS for everything but personally I like keeping clipped files as eps and square finish files as tiff. When I have a large job in house I can look at the file list and easily know which files got clipped and which didn’t.

JPEG files are also usually requested as many of the people involved with a project are not visual professionals, and as such don’t usually have Photoshop on their computers. Also these images often get passed around to people outside of the marketing department who may try to place them into PowerPoint or MS Publisher docs (which require jpgs.)

Of course each client is different and as you work with each of them you’ll learn their preferences and how they need images delivered. I have some clients that I just send the high resolution tiffs to and they handle all of the conversions as needed. Others I send each image three times (high res tiff or eps, high res jpg, low res jpg.)

We archive all jobs in a couple of different formats. First we keep all of the RAW files from the shoot. Second, all selections are saved in 16bit RGB tiff or psd layer files that contain all of our working paths and channels.

Every different file format has it’s specific niche to fill and does it better than any other format out there. Deciding which to use when is as much about understanding your client’s needs as technical demands.