Editing

Started going through some of my boxes of transparencies. First cull is of the real rubbish. This has removed 75% of the images. Next will be a cross check against the images I have in hangers. It may be that I have master versions already saved. therefore this remains ng 25% may also be culled by 75%. No idea how many images I have looked at, but a box of mounted slides in boxes is 1000 images approximately, un mounted in sleeves possibly 2+ times that many.

Restart

Slightly left field story for today.

I had been considering that my life as a commercial photographer was in my past, and I told myself there was no unfinished business.

Well it is possible that I was wrong.

Sometimes what life throws at you strikes hard and sends you off in a direction that was not on your route map.

So it would seem I realised there is still some life in me and some unfinished business in photography.

Today I received a new set of business cards. chose ones with pictures on them. lets see where this goes.

February. Where did it go?

Well it looks as though February has gone missing from my life and as far as new images goes it is true, February has been a bit of a desert, but for what goes on behind the scenes with my photography I am coming to the end of a very productive spell.

I decided I needed to catch up with my Alamy submissions. First I needed to sort out my quality control. I was having far too many submissions rejected, A closer eye for detail and dust and not trying to push images that were taken at the limits of the capabilities of my cameras. Getting this sorted has meant that I have had no rejected submissions since last October. At that point I had about 3500 images uploaded, as of now I have 5000 images online with another 150 still to upload. 

I have worked my way back through all my collections until I got back to the point I had finished submitting in 2010. 

All the images are keywords and captioned and they have been examined at 100% in Photoshop and all dust removed. 

With the Key wording I have set up Lightroom so that it working the way I want with all my keywords sorted to make the process quick and easy. 

So although there is little in the way of new images lots of work has been accomplished.

Little Know Fact

It is a little know fact that I am a paid writer!

Surprised?

Well if your not, I am!

It goes back 20 years to when I wrote an article for a monthly magazine called 'Prepress World"

As you can guess this was a specialist magazine aimed at the prepress industry. In the mid 90's the industry was in the middle of the change from analog to digital. All the old skills and processes were dying and digital was the new kid in town, and I could see photography was going go through the same seismic changes in the near future, and the magazine wanted a working photographers view of the state of the photography industry and the changes that digital was starting to bring.

To put things in context. In 1995 the Apple QuickTake camera was launched as the first camera to be able to connect to a computer.  Kodak had the DCS460 a 6 megapixel camera based on a Nikon body costing then £25,250 which is about £34,000 today.
We were still 4 years away from the Nikon D1 which was my first digital camera and the first affordable pro spec digital camera.

Photoshop had been released in 1988 and by 1995 had reached version 3 and had been able to run on Windows for 3 years.

The article I wrote was very much on the limitations of the current digital cameras as they existed at the time but I did look forward to the future at the end of the article, and here I am pleased to see I managed to get a few predictions correct, or nearly correct.

First I predicted that the new technology  in photography would have little of the destructive effect on jobs and skills as was being seen by prepress.
Part right, but not in the way I thought and also very wrong in other ways.

The technology has put the ability to create professional images in the hands of almost anyone and there are many more people claiming to be photographers today, but, and its a big but, images are now treated as a commodity and any industry that has over supply has a price crash for stock images.

I  also predicted that there would not be a reduction in the number of photographers in the industry as the capturing of the image was only the very last step in the creative process, and everything up to that point would remain the same.  Wrong in that that there are many more photographers but right in that the number of full time professional photographers has not gone down greatly.

Second that I would no longer need to carry lots of equipment around.

Spot on!
If I was setting up my business now I would be buying very different equipment to what I bought in 1988. The cost would be the same but it would be different. lighter and more compact.

My final paragraph was :-

"The near future is going to be based on traditional technology, with digital cameras slowly becoming used where applicable, and into the mixture for the futures the tendency to keep alive , rediscover, and adapt processes from the past.  Silver halide has a life for years to come."

Well I got my first digital camera in 2001 just over 5 years after I wrote this article. The last roll of film I shot commercially was in 2004 9 years after the article. So that covered the near future.

As for the rediscovery of old processes, there has been a renaissance in old and almost forgotten processes. Only in the last week a first for wet plate collodion. The only process that seems to have died with no hope of resurrection is Kodachrome.

Silver halide is still around and the decline appears to have bottomed out. Lots of choice has been lost as have some of the big names. Prices have gone up, and the choice of places to process have greatly reduced, but for the moment we still have film in an increasingly digital world.

Data

Ever wondered what 534 CDs and DVDs looks like?

This is my 'office copy' of all my images. Originally I had done a second copy that I stored off site. The off site copies had gone a few years ago, but I had never got around to getting rid of the office copies. They were on a shelf units, on top of a filling cabinet and in the box in the picture. 

Starting from 2001 there were 329 CDs. Then I moved onto DVDs, all 205 of them. I stopped writing to DVD in February 2011, after that I have shot around another 400 GB of data which went straight to hard drive.

Over the next few weeks I will go through all the disks checking I got all the data from the offsite set when I wrote them back to hard drives. Then each disc will be cracked to render them unreadable and sent of to the dump. any plastic and paper that can be recycled, will be.

Should keep me busy for a while!

Data Data and more data.

I came across an interesting link today.  A Trillion Trilion megabytes. 

This got me thinking about the data I create.

I am currently sitting on about 2Tb of data this all the images I have created since the year 2000 it currently is backed up onto two desktop drives. these are about 3 years old and are due to be upgraded. Not having looked at the hardware in a few years I found this.

Brand	Samsung
Item Weight	168 g
Product Dimensions	11.2 x 8.2 x 1.8 cm
Item model number	HX-M201TCB/G
Series	HX-M201TCB/G M3
Color	Black
Hard Drive Size	2 TB

This means I my entire digital life will sit on a 168g drive. That is about the weight of a 5 pack of 120 roll film that I shot unto about 2003. 

So to put things in perspective. 

All my photography from my birth until 2003 consists of a shelf about 6' long full of negatives in folders plus 3 draws of a filing cabinet full of first choice transparencies plus 5 archive boxes of 2nd choice transparencies and this after shredding 2 large bin bags of reject transparencies a few years ago.

All my digital photographs from 2000 until now on a 168 gram hard drive!

Now that would have looked like magic when I started in the business in 1976.

As Arthur C Clarke said. 

Clarke's three laws

stopstealingphotos.com

Before the internet is was not easy to set up a fradulant photography business. Most serious enquires from prospective clients meant, that the print portfolio was dusted of, an appointment made and a face to face presentation given.
I have no doubt that some people showed clients some finished brochures or magazines that they had not shot but the prints in portfolios were hard to steal. To get good prints you needed to work from original negs or transparencies and it was almost impossible to get access to these if you were not the original shooter.

Now with the web, images can be stolen and offered as examples of a person work very easily. Also with the boom of digital cameras anyone can set themselves up as a photographer and have no real idea what they are doing.

It is obviously illegal to steal images as all images are copyright the moment they are created, but this fact will not stop some people from stealing images and claiming them as their own work to market their business.

Stopping this is not easy. Yes it is illegal but law enforcement is not going to get involved especially if the crime crosses borders. Employing a lawyer is expensive and the chances of reclaiming any costs are slim, as few of the fraudulent businesses have much in the way of assets, for the simple reason they are a fraudulent business.

A more effective way is name and shame and the power of SEO.

stopstealingphotos.com is the highest profile site outing photographic thieves today.

Originaly run as a blog but now with a URL and website it has been outing thieves for nearly two years.

The site and its owner have be successful in disrupting the businesses of fraudulent photographers by creating a web presence that becomes, by the powers of SEO, the number one listing on Google, if any potential client is searching for that company by name, the first result will be the first entry they find.

It would always be better if stealing did not happen, bit it will, and stopstealingphotos.com will be needed to out thieves.

Data, Data and more Data

For the past ten days I have been involved in a important,but very tedious task.
I started shooting digital in 2001 exactly ten years ago. At the beginning I used CDs to archive all my images. This was the most cost effective method as hard disks were small and expensive.
Cost of HD Via BoingBoing
For extra protection I wrote two discs. One was kept in my studio and one was stored off site (sounds better than in the shed!). This was OK as files were relatively small at around 4MB each.
In 2004 I changed camera and computer. Now most files were about 13MB and my computer could write DVD's. By early 2011 my archive had grown to 9 PhotoCDs 329 CDs and 220 DVDs  plus 6 internal and external HD's, where I stored files I needed on a regular basis.

The net result was rather chaotic, so rationalisation was needed.
The first thing was to purchase two 2TB drives and enclosures. Each disc would have enough space to store everything I had and the second disc was used as a mirror of the first. Then came the tedious bit, reading every CD and DVD back onto the computer crosschecking the files were on the Hard Drives  and recreating folders so I can find everything, then write these files back to the two 2TB drives.

This is now done The files need to be assessed and edited as a large proportion of clients from ten years ago are no longer in existence.
It has been lots of work. I also found that my early archive methods were not very efficient as several sets of files were archived in several places and some jobs seem never to have been saved at all, and a couple of discs had corrupted files.. The best thing for me is that I now have easy access to everything I have ever shot, I have space on the Hard Drives for another year or two of shooting and then I will be able to buy 4TB discs for the same price as the 2TB cost when I bought them. I also no longer have to worry about the long term stability of the DVD and CD discs I am free of the cost in time and money of creating DVDs and I space again when I get rid of the discs.

My Desk

An image of me working at my desk, again using boom arms to get the camera into position.

More Paid Work.

I have gone for weeks and weeks without any new paid work then suddenly two jobs in one week.

Tonight was a 'proof of concept' shot. Client has product that he wants to photograph, has an idea of what he might like but is not sure, so an image is made, discussed with the client and with any luck the idea is signed off so the rest of the shoot can progress.

The subject is small but it takes all the space I have to light it.

Kew Gallery

Had a shoot today at a refurbished gallery at Kew Gardens. A bit of a nightmare as the wall was all glass picture frames. 

Not what you want first thing on a Monday morning.

Tidy Up

Every year or so I like to give my desk a good clean up. With all the computer kit I have running, the desk becomes a dust magnet. It is not an easy job as I can only just lift the monitors. This time I have rerun all the cables so I can switch of all non essential bits of kit each night, so all that will stay on are the phones, broadband and the radio network.

The desk is now very much tidier than it was, honest!

After I have finished the desk I will have to tidy the rest f the studio!