Photoshelter Vignettes

I’m a photographer who does editorial and advertising work, as well as personal portraiture. I’m also a 3D or CG (Computer Generated) artist and Instructor. I was among the first to lead the charge from shooting film (using a Mamiya RZ67 Pro II) to digital (using a Kodak DCS-760) in editorial and advertising shoots as early as 2001, and remember (sometimes not so fondly) the challenge of managing 36mb 16-bit Tiff files when 256mb Compact Flash Cards were considered a reasonable size, when my single-core (multi-core was but a twinkle in many a geek’s eyes at the time) on-location Apple iBook had a total of 10gb Hard Drive space with 768mb of RAM, RAW work flow and Digital Asset Management were considered arcane arts, and having to tediously burn, back-up, and hand deliver sets of CDs to my clients after a shoot. Using Photoshelter’s Archive storage management and gallery/image delivery systems changes all that – not only making it easier to manage and secure thousands of image files online, but also providing a means to present and deliver work to clients professionally and conveniently.

This is a series of vignettes on how I use my Photoshelter Personal Archive today.

A Tale of Two Cities

Whenever I upload photos from a shoot with Canadian Immigrant magazine, the decisions on which images to use are made by editorial teams based both in Vancouver and Toronto. Using Photoshelter’s invite-only gallery feature, I can give private access to the images from the shoot, which not only facilitates the final shot selection by Editors across two cities, but also gives them instant access to the full resolution images that can be downloaded directly into lay-out.

Canadian Immigrant – Images by Tommy Zablan

Family Ties

Momoko’s sister and grandmother visited from Japan. On the last day of their visit, her sister surprised with a very special Kimono, for the purpose of shooting her Seijin-shiki (成人式) ceremony photos. They booked us for a shoot on a morning ferry from Victoria to Vancouver and we did the shoot on that very same afternoon. Since her sister and grandmother were to go home to Japan on the very next day, they were worried that they would not be able to see all the images from our photo session. We promised that we would show them all the images through an on-line gallery. We uploading the images and sent invites for the gallery shortly after, and the decisions on which prints to order where made both by family members in Japan and Vancouver.

Seijin-Shiki – Images by Tommy Zablan

Virtual Visualization

I’m also a 3D Artist and Instructor, specializing in texturing, lighting, and rendering. At times, I get asked to make a presentation on various aspects of 3D production, and the classes that I teach. Sometimes, the presentations can be impromptu and the workstation that happens to be hooked up to the projector may not have the right software installed, or I may not have my flash drive with presentation data on hand. By keeping many of my rendered images in my Photoshelter Archive, I can quickly pull the images into a Gallery, and using the built-in gallery tools to sequence the slides, turn it into a professional presentation – with just about any workstation that has an internet connection and a Flash enabled browser.

CG Work – Models And Textures – Images by Tommy Zablan

Vancouver’s Got Talent…

…a mix of local and international talent that gives this city it’s unique flavor, and I want to play a part in promoting it. Because of the way Photoshelter’s core Archive to Gallery system is built, I can easily create mini-portfolios like the one I created for Make-up Artist Ayumi Komiyama, without having to create folders with duplicated data (which would be the case when creating web galleries from a program like Lightroom or Photoshop). Because the galleries can be e-mailed and embedded into blogs and web sites (by clicking on the e-mail or embed code links on the bottom of the navigation bar) – they can be like mini, self-contained portfolios that can be sent to whoever wants to see them. The Photoshelter – Graph Paper Press integration makes it efficient for me to publish artist profiles and interviews such as this one.

Ayumi Komiyama, Make-up & Hair Artist – Images by Tommy Zablan

Gallery In A Flash

On one of the rare occasions that I could actually follow the updates on my Twitter stream in real-time, I read that one of the people I’m following, an Editor in a major Canadian Fashion magazine, wanted to have some sushi in Vancouver. The time it took me to pull some recent shots of Sushi (from one of my favorite Vancouver Restaurants) from my archive, organize them into a gallery, post it on my Photoshelter – WordPress integrated blog, and send her the link on Twitter? Around 3 minutes (and a lot of that was due to my Internet connection bandwidth more than anything else). She said the food shots made her drool. I’d say that’s a good thing.

Sushi – Images by Tommy Zablan