Join Greg and myself for a look at how to produce custom books without the custom price tag. We will show you how to take control of the design process in Photoshop and then generate print ready PDF’s or drop your designs into the free but limited A&I book software.

Keep an eye on our workshops page for more upcoming events at A&I as a result of our new role as resident digital experts.

Be sure to check out all the great speakers and programs at the expo - http://www.photoplusexpo.com/ppe/5300/conference/conference_list.jsp

I can’t speak highly enough of Swannie and I wrote about her in a previous post about the Chicago event:

“During the portfolio share, I arrived at a table the same time as Mary Virginia Swanson and had the opportunity to listen to her give a quick portfolio review. I have worked with Debra before and I could tell from her and Mary’s presentations that they knew what they were talking about but Wow! She made a comment to me after hearing me speak about being amazed at all the technical knowledge in my head and I felt the same about her after hearing her give a review. Off the top of her head she rattled off several out of print books and organizations that the photographer should research and contact. I was blown away by the depths of her knowledge. Photographer beware, you better be ready to take notes if you get a chance to speak with her about your work.”

Mary is offering a marketing workshop for photographers in Tucson, Arizona November 6-9:

MARKETING WORKSHOP
for PHOTOGRAPHERS

This workshop, led by Mary Virginia Swanson, will provide participants with an overview
of the fine art photography market and how one can effectively target galleries,
collections and publishers most likely to respond to their work. Participants will gain an
understanding of presenting work to industry professionals via competitions and portfolio
review events, as well as the value of attending Gallery Expos such as Photo LA and
AIPAD. Examples of successful promotional tools with be shared, as well as self-
published image catalogues and limited edition books. Ms. Swanson will share her
extensive library of reference materials with participants.

Guest Instructors: artists Lisa M. Robinson (.com) and Ken Rosenthal (.com)
Site visits: Center for Creative Photography and Etherton Gallery

The workshop begins at 6 p.m. on November 6th and concludes at 12:00 noon on
Sunday November 9th. Optional sessions include Rosenthal/Robinson Studio tour and
one-hour consultations with Ms. Swanson. Discounted hotel rates have been arranged.

Visit www.mvswanson.com for complete details.

An external hard drive (enclosure) is a container for a bare or internal hard drive that uses a “bridge chip” to allow conversion from the native drive format (currently SATA) to Firewire 400, 800 or USB. In addition to paying for the storage on the drive, you are also buying the design, marketing, packaging, shipping, metal or plastic shell, power supply and often an assortment of clutter cables.

A 1Tb LaCie external hard drive currently costs about $250 from online vendors. That comes out to .25¢ per gigabyte.

A bare 1tb server grade hard drive like Seagate Barracuda currently costs about $120 from online vendors. That comes out to 12¢ per gigabyte.

That works out to about half the storage cost going to the enclosure. If you don’t mind paying for all those extras an enclosure does provide easy portability and protection. They also look like something from Battlestar Galactica with their glowing eyes all stacked on top of each other - generating heat and consuming power.

The average commercial photo shoot that we service generates about 50 gigs of Raw data. That breaks down to each drive holding 20 average commercial photo shoots. Adding redundancy by creating a backup of each drive will double the storages cost. So after you back it up, you have safely stored your data for approximately $12 per shoot.

When you are buying bare hard drives, most major brands are good choices just be sure to choose drives with 3 or 5 year warranties instead of the consumer drives with 1 year warranties. Those drives are usually quality controlled better and made for demanding markets.

We have blogged about our archiving systems before and shown you how we store and access bare hard drives. In the next archiving article I will show you options for getting data onto your bare drives including tray-less enclosures and adapters.

Technorati Profile

“This workshop will focus on digital lighting and the dramatic portrait. Join renowned photographer Michael Grecco and digital imaging expert Michael Britt for this two day intensive workshop built around Grecco’s best selling book Lighting and the Dramatic Portrait“.

For those of you who are interested in private Lightroom tutoring but not interested in paying $125 per hour, check out the semi-private 4 day workshop that only costs $187.50 per day.

“These 6 hour sessions spread out over 4 consecutive Wednesdays will explore how to use the powerful editing and organization tools in Lightroom. Take control of your workflow, optimize your digital images and customize your post processing experience while discovering new tools in your digital arsenal.”

However, in that time we have also finessed certain aspects of the system, and figured that it has matured to the point where it would be a good idea to revisit and show exactly how we currently make it work.

One important aspect of the system that we didn’t cover in much detail last time around is the A/B archive set concept. This is the redundancy part of our system. Every archive disk has a B counterpart containing the exact same data. We make it simple by labeling each archive set, for example, “Archive Disk 30A” and “Archive Disk 30B”. Every time we dump a new shoot on to Archive 30A, we also put it on 30B. The B disk provides a safety net in case the A disk fails, and once that archive set is full, we move the B disk off-site for additional safety (we’ll get to that in a second).

The newest and most useful addition to our system is FirmTek’s recently released SeriTek 5PM five-bay SATA enclosure. Since we already use FirmTek’s two-bay models for backing up data while on set, it made perfect sense to invest in this five-bay monster. This way, we can have the two most recent archive sets live, along with an extra bay available which enables us to quickly slap in the set backup disk after a long day of shooting, start the files copying over, and leave. All without even unpacking the computer we shot to.

Also in our previous entry we mentioned using Extensis Portfolio to track which disk each image is on. This is a step we did away with because even though it was relatively simple, it still wasn’t worth the extra time (again, in our case. This step might prove invaluable to some people). What we now do instead is simply keep a plain text document accessible on a network shared drive containing a list of all the job folder names and which disk they are on. Looking up a job is a simple matter of hitting Cmd-F. And, our standard job folder naming scheme tells us the most important info about a shoot right away: date, photographer’s name, and client or subject.

For those that are curious, the “ImageServerNAS” share that you see in the background is the vestige of a failed archiving experiment. For a few months, we decided to try adding a NAS appliance in to the mix in order to keep the last 90 days worth of shoots live on a server. We quickly determined that the NAS was not suitable for our purposes. First of all, it was slow as molasses. It would take on average one to two hours to copy over the typical shoot. Second of all, and this was the big one for us, Lightroom can’t open a catalog if it’s stored on a network share. We would have to copy the entire shoot over to the machine we were working on if we wanted to browse through it, which just wasn’t practical given how long it would take. The beauty of our current system is how fast we can get to an image in order to process it and have it available for the client to download in mere minutes. We now use the NAS to hold printing and retouching jobs, a task it is much better suited for.

When it comes time to pull out an old job, all that one has to do is open the file list document, find which drive the shoot is residing on, then pull that drive from our customized antistatic pink foam storage drawer. Slap the drive in, and the shoot is live and looking just like it did the day it was shot.

Remember I mentioned taking the “B” disks offsite? We came up with a convenient process for that as well. Pink foam inserts custom cut to fit in a Pelican 1520 case. This case gets stored in a safe place miles away.

   

We also slip in a printed copy of the Archive Disk File List text document so we have a hard reference for what is on each disk in case of disaster.

Addendum- funnily enough, as I was writing this article, we got an image delivery request from a shoot we tech’d on over three years ago. The shoot resided on Archive Disk 1 (no kidding). But sure enough, the disk mounted without issue, the files (DNGs) opened exactly as they should, and we had the images processed and ready to be downloaded within 15 minutes.

No fooling around, the system works!

Register now at www.apa-la.org
Breakfast and Lunch will be provided

Early Registration: (on or before May 1, 2008)
Free for APA/LA Assistant ($125 Annual Fee)
Student Members ($55 Annual Fee)
$60 Non-members

Late Registration:
$10 APA/LA Assistant and Student Members
$70 Non-members

* Black Book Raffle
Details Below

Course Details:

With so many photographers seeking work, how can a photography student gain an edge? Until you can build a stellar portfolio and use it to market your photos, learn the business behind the business. Whether your goals include gaining more commercial experience or learning about being an assistant, this moderated panel of leading photography apprentices will provide the knowledge and confidence to send you in the right direction. We’ll cover career opportunities and the ins and outs of getting hired in the industry. A good resource for film assistants, prop work and film crews.

In this course, you can expect to learn:

Insight into industry expectations
Identifying potential markets
Effective communication and marketing strategies
Whom you should know and how to develop a professional relationship
Whom to contact to get hired
What is expected of you when you are hired, & how to get paid for your work
Managing self-income taxes
What not to do, and things to look out for
Demos of various lighting, camera and grip equipment

In addition each participant will receive a copy of the APA/LA Assistant Handbook

* The Black Book will be raffling off a FREE 10 Image Online Portfolio. Our
Blackbook.com website focuses on the work of the artist. This is your chance
to showcase your portfolio to the industry’s best.

APA - LOS ANGELES
5455 Wilshire Blvd. Suite 1709 Los Angeles, CA 90036
p 323-933-1631 f 323-933-9209 e office@apa- la.org

Being out in the middle of snowy nowhere meant a lot of downloading cards to laptop. Some tips for coping with the cold and snow:

- Bring a heavy duty laptop stand.
- You NEED a good laptop shade in order to see anything with the insane amount of snow-glare.
- Speaking of glare, give yourself a liberal coating of sunblock 20 minutes before going out in the snow. One of the PAs on the shoot didn’t heed this advice, and on the next day of shooting it looked like he’d spent all morning with his head stuck in a microwave. He complained that even his eyeballs were burned.
- Bring a portable hard drive that doesn’t require a power adapter to back up to.
- Have an extra fully-charged laptop battery or two.
- Snow boots are your friend.
- Sunglasses are as well!
- Gallon-sized plastic baggies are good for carrying around the camera(s) in if/when it’s snowing.
- The Canon Mark III can get a little wet without any issues.
- Camera batteries don’t last as long if they’re cold; keep the charged extras in your pockets.
- Bring plenty of CF cards in case the shooter goes somewhere you can’t bring the laptop.

One location required piling in to a Snowcat to make it.

On some of the shoot days, all of the locations were outside and it was impossible to bring along the full Magliner/Tower/Monitor rig. On those occasions, I left that set up in the hotel and just brought the laptop. When I’d get back at the end of the day, I’d import that day’s captures in to the main Lightroom catalog over a CAT5 cable. Then, if he wanted, I would just roll the capture cart over to the art director’s room so he could edit on a calibrated 30″ monitor in the comfort of his own hotel room.

The view from the hotel. Can all jobs be like this? Please?

On the third day we shot in Woody Creek, former hometown of Hunter S. Thompson. Every blog needs a little HST, don’t you think?

One notable occasion: the Canon Wireless File Transmitter accessory got a chance to shine. The opportunity arose when it became necessary to shoot several still-life shots. In this scenario, speed and versatility were not as important as layout and cropping. Matt, the art director, wanted to able to quickly get the shots straight in to the design template he’d created on his laptop in order to verify that the layout would work. Enter WFT.

Shooting with the Canon WFT beaming images right to the laptop.

I had the WFT transmitting the RAW files straight to a Lightroom watched folder on my laptop. Roughly 10-15 seconds after taking a shot, the image would pop up in LR. I would then export that frame to a separate folder as a JPEG which Matt would pull on to his laptop via an ad-hoc wireless network I created between our two Macbooks. So, there we were, able to make adjustments to the scene and see the finished result right in the layout in under a minute without any wires. Pretty cool.

Another successful shoot wrapped up! From left to right: Photographer Hugh Stewart, Charlotte (the stylist), Matt (AD), Annabel (the producer), Scotty (1st assistant), and yours truly.